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reckon. I heard of two more girls pull something similar this year, just took off from their parents without word one. No one seen them since. Pretty awful, if you ask me.”
    The Watson lady wouldn’t talk no more after that, and after a while Miss Perkins put on her invisible sales cap again and tried to sell her something. She had her back turned a little, picking up individual pieces and pointing out the detail. Sadie could feel her contentment, the quiet music playing in her head.
    Again Sadie had this feeling that she was doing something she shouldn’t be doing. But she still ignored it. Miss Perkins wasn’t watching so close now. The woman thought pure poetry when she handled her own stuff, not noticing another thing in this world in the meantime.
    Sadie inched closer to the celluloid grooming set. She’d never had nothing so pretty as that; she didn’t even know what she could do with it.
    Her left hand was touching it, and then suddenly her right hand was just sweeping it all up into the loose folds in the front of her dress. She bunched the cloth together and ran for the door.
    “Thief!” Miss Perkins shouted. “I knew I’d catch you at it someday!” She had Sadie’s shoulder in her big old crow-claws, fingernails digging painful little holes into her skin. “No good thief!”
    Alice Watkins was bustling over to help, her big body swaying like it was going to fall on Sadie, her face determined.
    Sadie twisted away and hit the front door on the run, the screen slamming against somebody on their way in. She didn’t know if the screech was the door or a person, but she felt the sudden flash of the other person’s pain. It sickened her, and raised her fear sky high. She bit off a scream.
    She stopped abruptly when she was out on the front porch, so full of panic she could hardly think. She’d never been caught at it before, and now everybody was looking. All the men down at Levitt’s General were staring up her way, Mickey-Gene gaping, Petey Carter moving his mouth so fast he looked like a scrawny rat chomping away at empty air.
    George Mackey was grinning like he was about to eat something all up. That slapped her awake, and made her mad, too. She started running just as Miss Perkins again grabbed the shoulder of her dress, tearing it a little as Sadie pulled away. She almost dropped the grooming set. She grabbed what she could and stuffed it all into her one good pocket so that she could run better. That pretty little soap box dropped to the ground but she couldn’t stop to pick it up.
    Sadie held on to her tears, but it was hard — this was her only dress that didn’t have any rips in it. What was she going to tell Momma? And that pretty little soap box!
    She jumped over the legs of the elderly fellow — Willie Philips, she thought — sitting out in front of the hardware, turned the corner up the alley past the Barber Shop. Here she almost knocked Elsa Peters down, her school teacher last year. Sadie’s face went hot with shame, to have her teacher, who’d always liked her, know that she’d been thieving.
    She was climbing the dirt road above the livery when a black, wool-wrapped arm reached out and grabbed at her. She shrieked and turned, and found herself looking up into the face of the preacher.
    There were harsher things in this world than the preacher’s face, but Sadie had never met up with any of them. He had a face like a stone left out in the woods long enough for the damp and moss and the tree roots and the ice to crack it in the worst way, not enough to make it look so old but surely enough to make it look wounded, deformed, messed up. Like the damage had scarred over bad and those scars were bound to ache nights when the weather was changing. Not an ache you could put your finger on exactly, what made it worse. And down in his neck right below the ends of his mouth he had these big fatty pouches, like gunny sacks full of his extra meanness. They made her think of the snakes he