Chapter 5 — MY MOTHER'S VERSION

I went to Sheridan on a Sunday.

My mother made coffee she does not drink and put out cookies neither of us eats and we did the twenty minutes of my daughter and her knee and the building's new management company that we do.

Then I put my hand on the table with the ring up.

I said, "Where did this come from."

She said, "You know where it came from."

I said, "Tell me anyway."

And she told me the story, the same story, in almost the same words, which after four decades of watching witnesses is itself a piece of evidence: real memories come out differently every time, and rehearsed ones do not.

Her mother.

The Rosewoods of Kenwood.

The name going out of use.

I said, "What was your mother's first name?"

She said, "Adele. You're named for her."

I said, "What year was she born?"

She said, "Nineteen twenty-two."

I said, "And she was a Rosewood before she married."

She said, "Yes."

I said, "Mom, I pulled her death certificate on Thursday."

The room got very quiet.

I said, "Adele Novacek. Born 1922 in Cicero. Married Stanislaw Keane in 1943. Her mother was Ludmila. Her father was Josef. There is no Rosewood anywhere in it, and I went back three more generations on your side and there is no Rosewood in any of them, and there has never been a Rosewood in Kenwood in the entire history of the Cook County recorder's office."

My mother looked at the ring on my hand for a while.

Then she said, "It suits you better than it ever suited anybody."

That is not a denial.

I have taken about nine hundred depositions and I know exactly what that is.

She would not say another word about it that day.

She said she was tired, and she is eighty-one, and I left, and I sat in my car outside her building for a long time watching the four feet of lake go from grey to a different grey.