Brett moves to Pilsen

Brett Bohlinger’s move to Pilsen converts a housing crisis into a tentative new beginning: pressed by her brother’s interpretation of Elizabeth Bohlinger’s thirty-day rule and unable to afford the neighborhoods she knows, she chooses a small apartment in a South Side home she had once expected to reject. The relocation is both practical and emotional. It gives Brett a place of her own, while requiring her to loosen her attachment to the safety and familiarity of the Astor Street house and reconsider the assumptions she brings to Pilsen.

The deadline and the search

The move begins with a confrontation in the Astor Street house. After the family has gathered there, Joad Bohlinger waits until Catherine Humphries-Bohlinger has gone to the car before asking Brett how much longer she intends to stay. Brett admits that she has nowhere else to go. Joad invokes Elizabeth Bohlinger’s thirty-day maximum, pointing out that Brett has been living there since Thanksgiving. Brett counters that the limit concerns thirty consecutive days and that she spends every Monday at Joshua House. Joad challenges her assumption that each Monday resets the count. His question turns her temporary refuge into an urgent housing problem.

Brett tries to make the search fit her first-year teacher’s income. Online listings make clear that her modest salary and Rudy, her dog, narrow the available choices. Even one-bedroom apartments cost too much. She concludes that she must look south of the Eisenhower Expressway, beyond the desirable northeastern neighborhoods where she has spent her life and where the people she knows still live. The prospect unsettles her: affordable housing is not enough to make an unfamiliar place feel like home.

An early effort to investigate the South Side reinforces her reluctance. After dropping Sanquita Bell at Joshua House, Brett finds the printed pages from her late-night apartment search scattered across the back seat and considers driving past a brick house in Pilsen. Instead, she inspects listings in Little Italy and University Village. The homes she finds do not resemble their online pictures: one is a cement-block building with a boarded front window; another has a rental sign in a yard strewn with tires and a rusted ironing board. She leaves feeling hurt, offended, and angry at what she takes to be the meaning of her mother’s plan.

Returning to Pilsen

By February, Brett has spent thirteen consecutive days at the Astor Street house according to her own system of counting, but Joad’s objection continues to trouble her. She wonders whether Elizabeth Bohlinger would really want her to leave, especially after so much loss. Rather than settle the question by argument, she drives to Pilsen to make another pass through the neighborhood, intending to report back to Joad and Brad Midar that her search has failed.

The district does not match the simple picture Brett has formed of a dangerous and alien South Side. Its commercial streets are busy, with a Mexican bakery, a grocery store, and Mexican artwork visible along the way. Brett notices the neighborhood’s Hispanic character and its signs of people seeking a better life, a description that unexpectedly includes herself. Yet her first impression is not wholly transformed: on West 17th Place she passes potholes, worn prewar houses, and an empty lot littered with cans and bottles, and decides she has seen enough.

Then a rental sign brings the red-brick house she saw online back into view. Brett recognizes it as the same property, still available six weeks later, and assumes that its attractive exterior must conceal a serious problem. The details nevertheless draw her in: five windows topped with buttery-yellow decorative cornices, an iron fence, and a dozen concrete steps leading to two front doors. Plastic poinsettias in urns make her smile, while the care evident in the house gives her reason to pause. The choice now sets the comfort of the Astor Street house against the possibility of making a home somewhere new.

An apartment and its owners

When Brett asks about the rental, she quickly adds that she has a dog. Selina clasps her hands and explains that dogs are welcome if they are not aggressive; her family has a Yorkie. She invites Brett inside, where Selina’s mother, Blanca, is at home. Brett meets them and sees the apartment. Her response is enthusiastic enough to be embellished, but Blanca’s approval becomes clear when Selina relays that her mother would like Brett to live there. Brett accepts, affirming that she would like to.

Selina explains how she and Blanca came to own the house. Blanca works as a cook at El Tapatio, a restaurant down the block, and had long told her daughter that they would someday have a house of their own. When the property went into foreclosure, Blanca had saved enough for the down payment. Mother and daughter spent seven months repairing the apartment. Their story prompts Brett to think of Elizabeth Bohlinger, but she stops herself from equating the two families’ experiences; the difference leaves her newly aware of how fortunate she has been. The encounter makes the apartment more than an affordable listing: it belongs to a home created through Blanca and Selina’s labor and hope.

Making a home

Brett spends the weekend packing clothes and carrying boxes to Pilsen. On Monday afternoon, movers who had previously emptied Andrew’s loft bring a few of her belongings from the Astor Street house. She considers taking Elizabeth Bohlinger’s iron bed, but it is too large for the small apartment and, more importantly, belongs at Astor. Brett leaves it there so it will be waiting when she visits, as she imagines her mother always was. The move is therefore not a clean break with the old home; Brett takes what she needs while preserving a place for return.

The furnishings she does bring make the apartment distinctly hers without making it grand. The old double bed and cherry dresser go upstairs. Brett places the love seat from Arthur Street before the fireplace, with mismatched end tables, and sets a scratched coffee table from her mother’s attic in front of it. A seventies terra-cotta lamp, once found at a thrift shop, now looks almost fashionable. Four borrowed bowls and plates, spare utensils, pots and pans, cosmetics, and three sets of towels fill the cupboards and bathroom cabinet. These modest objects turn the move from a change of address into the work of arranging everyday life.

After the movers leave and the last box is unpacked, Brett lights half a dozen candles and opens a bottle of wine. Their glow joins the terra-cotta lamp’s amber light; music plays from her laptop as Rudy settles at her feet and Brett curls up with a book. She falls asleep in the snug apartment. That first night supplies no promise that her larger difficulties are resolved, but it gives the practical choice an immediate consequence: in a neighborhood she had approached with fear and suspicion, Brett has made a small, lived-in home.