Lieberman's Folly Read Free

other girls beyond Heaven’s Portal might put together about what had happened.
    It was agreed that they should part and not see each other again. They should part and go as far from Texas as they could get and they should not tell each other where they were going.
    And so it was that Guadalupe took a bus to San Diego where she invested her money in an all-night diner. The diner didn’t flop but it didn’t flourish either. It just ate up the profits a nickel at a time. When the money ran out, she sold the diner and moved north to St. Louis where she went back into the business and met a man on vacation who said he loved her. He took her back to Chicago with him and she was happy to go.
    Meanwhile, Estralda went to Miami, where she had no trouble finding work when her money was spent. From Miami she went to Phoenix and from there to Las Vegas and from there to Chicago, where she prospered and planned and dreamed of a new future in which she would someday own a business rather like Babe O’Brien’s. And for almost ten years it seemed as if her dream would come true.
    But the gods had very different plans.

1
August 1990
    â€œL IEBERMAN?” THE WOMAN SAID over the sound of the Cubs game from a radio.
    When she had entered the T & L Delicatessen a few seconds earlier, the customers, six old men known to each other as the Alter Cockers, looked up and stopped talking.
    Women of any kind were rare inside Maish’s T & L Deli between the hours of ten and five, and it wasn’t even two in the afternoon. And women like this just didn’t happen into the place. They didn’t even happen into this neighborhood. Oh yes, there were a few women who came before nine in the morning. Melody Rosen, Herschel’s daughter, who clerked at Bass’s Children’s Shop down the street, often stopped for a toasted bagel and coffee. And Gert Bloombach, a sack of a woman who worked in a law office downtown, came by every Tuesday and Thursday at eight for a cup of tea and a lox omelette. And there was Howie Chen’s granddaughter, Sylvie, a nice-looking girl with thick glasses, who came in once in a while, never ordering the same thing twice. They stopped on their way to work for coffee and a “What’s new?” along with the neighborhood storekeepers, cab drivers, and an occasional cop.
    The first of the Alter Cockers didn’t really start coming in till around ten. The Alter Cockers were a clatch of old Jews and one old Chinese, Howie Chen. They had been given their informal club name by Maish and they bore it with pride, letting in a new member with reluctance and a long initiation.
    â€œLieberman?” the woman repeated to the overweight man, a somber-faced bulldog in a white apron behind the counter of the T & L Deli. Though the old men had stopped talking, the woman still had to raise her voice over the sound of an unseen radio.
    Maish was too polite to stare at the woman. Besides, he had a reputation to uphold.
    â€œNothing bothers Maish,” Syd Levan said whenever the mood struck him. “We should call him Nothing-Bothers Maish. A guy could come in here with three heads asking for lobster bisque to go and Maish wouldn’t bat an eye. Nothing-Bothers Maish.”
    So, with the Alter Cockers looking at him, Maish had to honor his own reputation, but, the truth be told, he was bothered by this creature who belonged in a television ad for some make-up or bathing suit or diet cola.
    The radio from nowhere blasted the sound of a crowd and the voice of Harry Caray as the woman waited for an answer from Maish, who seemed to have forgotten where he was. She looked around at the two old men at the counter, who smiled up at her more with memory than hope. One old man wearing a cap, none other than Herschel Rosen, nudged the other old man and said, “Which one?”
    â€œWhich one?” asked the woman.
    â€œWhich Lieberman?” said Herschel, the gnome, looking around for