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one that you can see . “Does he?” she pointed to a photograph of Hank on the shelf. He was young then, bare chested and leaning up against that old blue Ford he had when she first met him —smooth, flat stomach —no trace of the emergency appendectomy he had the summer before they got married. She liked to trace her finger over the slick shiny skin, stretched tight and hardened. It reminded her of the silver trail of a slug, like the one the child had delighted in a week ago when a neighbor kid from across the street, a ten-year-old who dressed like she might be seventeen, tried to talk the child into pouring salt on the creature so they could watch it shrivel up. The child was intrigued right up to the moment the salt shaker was raised, and then she fell all to pieces, throwing her body over the slug like a shield and screaming, “He’s mine, he’s mine.”
    The child’s mother did something very similar at the funeral. She crumpled there in front of half the town and squatted by the grave, the box of ashes in her arms. Rose had to look away then. Some part deep within said she should move forward, to touch and comfort. The girl had no family to speak of —an old father in a veteran’s home somewhere and a sister who left early duringthe graveside service to catch her flight to Texas. Drew had told them that he wanted her to feel like she had a real family. He called her his “little orphan girl,” “my waifish wife, my little discard.” Hank had moved close and knelt there beside her, his arm around her shoulders, but Rose was frozen. Instead she looked out at the pines, at the bright cloudless sky; she focused on the sound of cars on the interstate, the rise and fall, near and then far, as rhythmic as the ocean. Now there was a jet stream across the sky, the child there beside her as she stared out the kitchen window, waiting for Hank.
    “Surrender Dorothy,” the child said and cackled. “Surrender, surrender, surrender, you . . .” she hesitated before calling Rose the Wicked Witch of the West, which she had done once before, something the child’s mother actually reprimanded her for. “Give me my ruby slippers or this house will fall and kill you,” she shrieked, and for a split second, the child did look like Drew. It was the mouth, the tilt of her head. She looked like Drew, who looked like Hank, who looked like his father before him.
    “You will die!” The child pointed her finger at Rose and then ran back to her pile of papers and began scribbling furiously. Witches’ hats and brooms and then breasts. Rose’s breasts. Rose’s mouth and nose were more distorted than ever in these new drawings. She drew little speech balloons and then scratched marks back and forth while saying, “I’ll get you. I’ll get you, your dog, too.”
    “Quit goddamnit.” Rose knelt and leaned down to make eye contact. She wanted to grab the child but was afraid if she did, if she ever gripped those little arms and began shaking, she might not be able to stop. “Do you hear? Do you? Leave me alone.” Her words came in jerks, loud harsh syllables.
    The child’s gaze never broke, her hand grasping a black marker. She drew two big circles, dotted the centers like fried eggs. Circle dot. Circle dot. Then the child started laughing hysterically. She threw herself on her back, legs cycling the air to show the filthy marker-stained bottom of her worn-out shorts. Mucous and tears smeared her face, and the more she laughed, the more tightly her eyes closed, mouth twisted, the more she looked like Drew all those times he got out of control at church or a ceremony of some sort, all those places he should’ve been behaving and couldn’t help himself. She thought of him then in a way she hadn’t in years, there at a high school awards banquet when they served what he had always called “fanny rolls” for obvious reasons, twin mounds of golden bread. Drew raised and held up his roll, there at the head table, where he