Everbrite, which manufactured corporate signs. During a strike, she left and found work as a machinist at R-W Enterprises on Sherman Avenue. Her father constantly worried about his young daughter working with sheet metal and operating punch press machines. Maybe that’s why, when a metal disk came down on her hand one day and pinched off the top half of her two middle fingers, all she remembered doing was crying out for her daddy.
At twenty-two, Larraine married a man named Jerry Lee. He asked that she leave R-W and stay home. So she did. When Larraine began studying for the driver’s test, Jerry Lee asked her why she needed a license. She put away the manual. They had a daughter three years later, and another two years after that. Megan and Jayme. But soon the marriage began to unwind. It got to the point where Jerry Lee began bringing women back to their home. They divorced after eight years, and Larraine began life as a single mother. Those years were filled with poverty and double shifts and freedom and laughter. If you asked Larraine, she would tell you they were some of the best years of her life. That’s when she began dancing on tables. She liked the money and feeling desired. She would bring the girls to her day job cleaning houses. They’d pitch in, and Larraine would split her paycheck.
One day, Larraine and the girls went to a Fourth of July barbecue. It was 1986. They had been invited because a friend wanted to set Larraine up with her brother, Glen. It worked. They fell for each other hard and fast. Glen was nothing like Jerry Lee. She didn’t feel stupid around him. She felt beautiful. And useful. Glen was on parole for robbing a pharmacy. He had done prison time for that job; in fact, he had spent much of his life in and out of prison. Larraine tried to keep him out of trouble. She would rub his neck after a day of failed job searches. Glen encouraged Larraine to get a driver’s license, and at thirty-eight, she did.
Glen was a romantic and a drinker. He and Larraine used to get into tumbling arguments. Sometimes, Glen would come after Larraine and she’d bloody his face with the phone. Once, their landlord evicted them for causing a racket. The morning after a fight, they would kiss softly and apologize. Theirs was a consuming, brutal kind of love.
Larraine still blamed herself for what happened next. Glen had come home from his sister’s house, drunk and high and roughed up. He had been in a fight and was in one of his darker moods. Glen could slip into trenches of depression. Sometimes, Larraine remembered, he even heard voices. Glen snatched a container of prescription pills, and Larraine, thinking he might swallow the whole lot, grabbed his arm. They wrestled for the pills and Glen slipped against the refrigerator and crashed to the floor. Blood spilled from a head gash. Panicked, Larraine dialed 911. After the paramedics bandaged his head, the police officers cuffed him. He was sent back to prison for violating his parole by taking narcotics.
The last time Larraine visited Glen in prison, he didn’t look right. He was jumpy, and his eyes had a yellowish hue. Uncharacteristically, he asked to cut the visit short because he wasn’t feeling well. The next morning, Larraine’s phone rang. She remembered a woman’s voice telling her: “There’s just no way to say it, but Glen died.” Overdose.
In the ensuing years, Larraine would come to believe that Glen had been poisoned by his cellmate. Whatever the case, after sixteen years together, Glen was gone. Larraine dropped the phone and screamed out his name. “I died right then and there,” she said. “My heart fell apart. My body fell apart, my whole being….When he died, it’s like my whole life fell into a hole, and I haven’t been able to get out ever since.”
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The Eagle Moving trucks stopped outside a North Side duplex with cream siding. An older child answered the door: a girl, maybe seventeen with shorn hair, dark-brown skin, and unflinching gray eyes.
Dave and the crew hung back, waiting for John to give the okay. The deputies always went first and absorbed tenants’ blowback if there was any. Things often got loud; they rarely got violent. Sheriffs used different diffusion strategies. John preferred meeting aggression with aggression. Once, he called the Sheriff’s Office in front of a woman in a bathrobe