Free Blizzard Ball by Dennis Kelly Page A

supervisor.”
    “So you’re a cop?” Lasiandra said as Kirchner squeezed into her partitioned cubicle. “Could tell straightaway from those scars on your noggin and lordy those shoes.” Her laugh shook her generous proportions. “Hey, can you fix a parking ticket? ’Cause, honey, I got a back seat full of ’em. Someone had the bright idea of creating permit parking in my neighborhood. I got two cars and one permit. My old man always gets to the permit spot first. I know you see the problem. Can you help a lady out?”
    “Depends. What can you tell me about Jamal Madhta from the Cash and Dash who’s been cashing big checks and walking out with boxes of money?”
    “I hear he’s dead.”
    “About his banking business,” Kirchner said patiently.
    “Suspect he was running a game like most fools in this neighborhood. What it was, I can’t say. I only approve the checks and make sure the cash count is correct. Alita’s the teller he did business with. They were always chatting it up.”
    “Which one’s Alita?” Kirchner looked toward the counter.
    “She’s not here, gone for a few days. Left, not feeling well, and hasn’t been back.”
    Kirchner made a note on a small spiral-bound pad. “Is this Alita in contact with you?”
    “If she wants to keep her job, she is.”
    “Call me when you hear from her.” Kirchner dropped his card on her desk.
    “Sounds like you’re asking me for a favor. Could that be worth some help with the parking tickets?”
     

First Step
     
    Alita stepped onto the wraparound porch of the Eastside AA Clubhouse and wiggled her way past the smokers huddled over Styrofoam coffee cups in subfreezing temperatures. She paid little attention to them as she headed towards the Spanish-speaking meeting. Inside the tired old mansion, she stomped her feet and held her hands over a hissing radiator. Volunteers were busy staging folding chairs in loose circles throughout the house, as if the attendees would be swapping stories around a campfire. Meetings went on from early morning until late evening. Sessions were open to anyone and tended to fill in by natural selection— first-step, substance addiction, Spanish-speaking, old drunks, young drunks, friends and victims of drunks.
    Alita had stopped drinking three years earlier in the wake of her failed college experience. After graduating from high school, she had received a partial scholarship from the Centro Campesino Agency and attended Southwest Minnesota State College in Marshall. Hoping to fit in and prove she belonged, she drank hard and partied hearty, as they say. She got pregnant the beginning of her sophomore year and kept it a secret until she couldn’t. The shame of squandering precious resources and the disgrace of failing sank her ship in an abyss of alcohol and drugs.
    Growing up in the migrant community, Alita had experienced the zeal of religious missionaries who were as ever-present as horse flies. Church buses with painted slogans—“Christians are square with God.” “If your life is rusty, your Bible’s dusty”— rolled into the fields prowling for converts. Wide-eyed poverty voyeurs brought gifts of date-expired hygiene products and used clothes. Alita remembered receiving a pink T-shirt that read, “Buy ’em a shot, they’re tying the knot, Hammer & Katie, June 13, 2008.” The trade-off for their largesse was an opportunity to claim your soul. The migrant families sat their haunches dutifully on wooden orchard crates, swatting fruit flies with the fresh Bibles and catechisms as the do-gooders pitched their exclusive road to glory. The Catholics were particularly adept at defining guilt-ridden sin—the pathway to eternal damnation. The only escape was sacramental absolution.
    The Catholics no longer held sway over Alita, but the need to confess and be forgiven, or at least not judged, was indelibly ingrained. The convenience store robbery, the death of the Irishman, and her cousins’ plight as rudderless