At dinner, Futterman learns that Ms Shanahan's father is a retired Chicago fireman. She is one of six children, two girls, four boys, brought up in Marquette Park, the neighbourhood that gave Martin Luther King Jr a rough awakening when he brought his Southern Christian Leadership Conference movement to Chicago back in the 1960s. Two of Ms Shanahan's brothers are now themselves firemen, one is a cop, and the other has a job at City Hall — a real Chicago Irish family. She had gone to Mother McAuley High School, and at one point, she tells Futterman, she considered becoming a nun. At Triton Community College she picked up what she needed to get a job as a paralegal. 

Stacy Shanahan is remarkably relaxed through dinner, or so Futterman thinks. Although she asks that he call her Stacy, she never refers to him as anything other than Mr Futterman. She orders and dispatches a full slab of ribs, a baked potato, a large side-order of coleslaw, washed down with a beer; food that suggests that she is not trying to beguile him with her feminine refinement.  

Futterman finds himself impressed with this young woman — with her independence, her taking control of her own life with, as far as he can tell, not much help from her parents. He is an old double-standards man, Futterman, at least insofar as he believes that life is harder for women than it is for men, that more traps and pitfalls await them. His own two daughters, by marrying young — one to a physician, the other to a man who has gone into his father's lucrative dress business — avoided those horrors, and he is grateful that they have. 

Stacy Shanahan tells Futterman that she lives on Sheridan Road, 6300 north, and when dinner is over, he puts her in a taxi and slips two twenties in her hand, more than enough to pay the fare. She thanks him and thanks him, too, for a good dinner. Futterman makes a mental note to charge off both the cab fare and Ms Shanahan's meal for her working overtime.