Publisher's Synopsis
"Seventeen-year-old Jenia Cabresi stomped out of the Corner Cafi into a late gray afternoon in downtown Los Angeles that slick November day in 1947; a day when billowy dark cumulus clouds hovered above the city, bringing an eerie dampness into every crevice of the metropolis. Drifting westward toward the blurred, thirsty Santa Monica mountains, the pending storm promised relief for the withering plants and fading foliage. The unusual appearance of the Los Angeles winter season begged for the moisture that was about to embrace every living thing in its path. A row of bright headlights splashed cautiously down Broadway in the approaching dusk, accompanied by honking horns emitting different pitch tones, transit buses puffing out black exhaust fumes, delivery trucks and merchant hand carts pushed by men scurrying in and out of side alleys running for shelter. "I'll show him. I'll show him. That sonuvabitch Jew Swartz." Jenia cried." He's got it coming. Yelling at me again in front of all my customers in the middle of lunch hour. Who the hell does he think he is, anyway?" Slivers of rain rushed down her face beside her tears of despair, "Mama, where are you when I need you?" she silently implored. Then her thoughts switched abruptly to the slums of the East Bronx, New York, in the late 1930's and 1940's where her mother, Tina, lived with her boyfriend, Sal, who tormented, beat, and abused Jenia and her sister, Dorothy, for more than 12 years. Rarely a day went by in their young lives that he didn't find a reason to whip them with his belt or punish them in one sadistic way or another. She remembered how she and her East Bronx girl's gang would snuggle up in the corner of the junkyard, light a cigarette, and pass it around for each to inhale profusely. The street kids made solemn oaths to keep shared secrets to themselves. Jenia once told them about Sal catching the mouse in his wire box trap, holding two live electric wires to the metal box
