I'll Take Everything You Have


 
 
 
 I’ll Take Everything You Have
 James Klise
 Algonquin 2023
 
 
 About the Author
 James Klise is the author of The Art of Secrets, winner of the Edgar® Award for Best YA Mystery, the Nevada Young Readers Award, and a Booklist Editors’ Choice, among other honors. His first novel, Love Drugged, was an ALA Stonewall Honor Book and Lambda Literary Award finalist. James earned an MFA from Bennington College. He leads a popular Novel-in-a-Year workshop at StoryStudio in Chicago, and for the past two decades, he has overseen a busy high school library. Please visit him online at jamesklise.com.
 Also by James Klise
 
 
 
 
 The Art of Secrets
 Love Drugged
 
 
 For Mike, otherwise known as Walter. Also answers to “Wally,” “Wallace,” “Uncle Walt,” and “Uncle Mike,” among numerous aliases. Known around town as my husband.
 
 Contents
 Cover
 Dedication
 One
 Two
 Three
 Four
 Five
 Six
 Seven
 Eight
 Nine
 Ten
 Eleven
 Twelve
 Thirteen
 Fourteen
 Fifteen
 Sixteen
 Seventeen
 Eighteen
 Nineteen
 Twenty
 Twenty-one
 Twenty-two
 Twenty-three
 Twenty-four
 Twenty-five
 Twenty-six
 Twenty-seven
 Twenty-eight
 Twenty-nine
 Thirty
 Thirty-one
 Thirty-two
 Thirty-three
 Thirty-four
 Author’s Note
 About the Author
 Copyright
 
 
 one
 At LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, the first thing I did when I stepped off the train was count the tracks, nearly a dozen total, all pointing the same direction: back toward home. Loudspeakers blared platform numbers and destination cities, the fuzzy stream of words passing like clouds overhead. A mob jammed the waiting room.
 Before I felt licked, my cousin’s cap shot up, waving above the sea of black fedoras and brown trilbies. 
 “Bernie!”
 “Hurry up, kid. Let’s bust out of this circus and find some fresh air.”
 Everything around us looked swell, marble walls and brass ticket counters, nothing like the dumpy brick station we got stuck with downstate. Bernie led me toward the exit, and we passed vendors selling magazines, Lucky Strikes, PayDays. One stand displayed the most colorful flowers I’d ever seen, except on postcards. The long waiting-room benches reminded me of the pews at St. Mark’s, and the idea struck me that the station was like a church, people saying their prayers at each arrival and departure. Even though I was flat broke, the train station made me feel hopeful—first I’d felt that way in a long time.
 I guess I was still running my mouth about it later, after we dropped off my suitcase where Bernie was staying. He snapped, “Enough about the station already! You sound like a goddamned hick when you squawk about it.” 
 More gently, he added, “LaSalle Street isn’t even one of the fancy ones, Joe. You gotta see Union Station, or Grand Central over there on Harrison. I’ll take you sometime, if you’re so bananas about locomotive travel all of a sudden.”
 We snaked our way on foot down Clark Street in Towertown. The afternoon sun blazed hot. At this hour, there was no shady side of the street. The entire city seemed to be made of brick and concrete, the apartment blocks and office buildings rising higher and higher toward the cluster of skyscrapers called the Loop. 
 “Golly,” I exclaimed.
 “You’ll get used to it,” Bernie said, but I hoped I wouldn’t. 
 My father never lived to see such sights. He died in 1918, when a team of horses ran off, dragging a hayrack and my father behind them. He missed seeing everything—not just skyscrapers, but modern automobiles and traffic lights, living room radios and air travel and penicillin. He’d missed Cole Porter and Charlie Chaplin and bubble gum. He’d almost missed seeing me. When they put him in the ground, I was only eight months old. 
 “Shake a leg, champ!” Bernie hollered. “You want to be late for your very first shift?”
 It was the end of June, with 1934 predicted to be the hottest year in American history. After too much sun and no rain, crops had shriveled across the state. That was before swarms of chinch bugs flattened what was left. We all wanted to work, but Mother Nature wouldn’t meet us halfway. The previous winter, we’d heated the house with corn rather than coal. This year we wouldn’t even have corn. My mother had sold my father’s gold watch and his cuff links; she’d hocked half the furniture. By the time I boarded the train to Chicago, she couldn’t afford tears in her eyes.
 Bernie had set me up with a job in the hotel kitchen where he worked. He was nineteen, three years older than me. He’d only been in Chicago a year, but already he seemed to belong. He boasted, “I go anywhere I want. Don’t even glance at street names anymore.”
 The area where he stayed was dingy as hell. Trash filled the gutters; every block had broken windows. Grown men in rags lingered everywhere, hands stuffed deep in their pockets, like they’d been waiting years for luck to change. When a breadline jammed the sidewalk, we crossed traffic to the other side. 
 At Walton Street, we came to a park, a square block of uncut grass and weeds enclosed by a picket fence. The park was surrounded by two churches, a stately old library, a picture house, and an assortment of mansions. The houses had gone to seed, with torn awnings and peeling iron fence posts. In dirty windows, cardboard signs offered rooms for rent. 
 “Take my advice,” Bernie muttered, “and steer clear of this park.”
 “What for?”
 “It’s no good, Joe. Not for us. Filled with radicals. Not to mention the place is crawling with pansies.”
 My ears perked up. “Repeat that?” 
 “I mean, this neighborhood. It may be the best we can afford for now, but it’s a pansy paradise or something. Near that fountain over there, you can’t look at a fellow without getting a smile you don’t need.”
 The sign on the picket fence read washington square park. My shirt collar felt wet against my neck, the