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powder and Uncle Ben’s. But there are advantages, too, she decides, to the rural truths of living out here. This store is amply stocked with mousetraps and poisons.
    Claire stacks her cart with enough groceries to get them through the week. She buys all the basics—spices and oils and vinegars, coffee and flour and sugar and tea bags—too tired to remember if she packed the contents of her kitchen cabinets into the U-Haul or left them behind for the moving truck. The cart becomes so laden it threatens to careen at any subtle slant in the floor. When there is little room left she goes to the far corner and studies the choices for ridding their home of the rodents who have run freely for the last decade or more. There are all sorts of contraptions and devices—a whole science of extermination. There are those that trap and kill through starvation and thirst, those that quickly electrocute, those that flavor poison as nourishment for mothers to take back to their babies; and the Havaharts, for the softhearted souls who want to believe that throwing them out in the snow is not equally fatal. She puts two Havaharts on top of the food and heads to the checkout stand, but thinks again about the distance to town and the knot on the back of her head. She asks the clerk to wait while she runs back to grab a box of d-CON.
    Hallum has folded up for the night. Other than the lone bar at the other end of town, the grocery store is the last business to close. Strings of tiny white Christmas lights are still draped around a few gift store windows, the single streetlight at the end of the block shines on empty parking spaces and deserted sidewalks—no theater, no neon, no cruising teenagers marking territory with booming music.
    A fine mist has crystallized into a stinging cold. Her gloves lie on the front seat; she can see them through the window. By the time she’s packed the groceries into the trunk her fingertips have gone so numb she can’t puzzle the key into the front door slot, and every passing locked-out second makes her hands stiffer, clumsier, winds her up in frustration until she wants to kick the door.
    “ Señora? ”
    Claire jumps when she hears the voice, sucks in a draft of freezing air so quick and deep it burns and her keys fall into the snow underneath the car. A woman is standing in the gutter only a few feet from the car, dark-haired and darkly clothed enough to be nearly invisible in the icy fog. Claire’s heart pounds so hard she is startled into confusion.The woman awkwardly backs up onto the sidewalk, nearly slipping on the icy lip of the curb, “Discúlpame. Sorry!”
    There is such a sincere apology in her tone Claire doesn’t need the translation. The voice is small—or rather, from a small person—and when Claire calms down enough to focus she can see the woman is compacting her slight body into a stanchion against the freezing night wind, her arms locked around herself. She is dressed in a buttoned-up cardigan and jeans. A knit cap, pulled low over her hair, and mittens are the only hint of seasonable clothing. Claire starts to ask her if she needs help, but the habits of the city rise up before logic and she looks down the block and behind her into the street, which is swallowed up by the night only a dozen yards from the store lights. A single set of taillights is just turning the corner. “Do you need something?” Claire asks. The woman shakes her head, seems almost embarrassed by the question. Claire glances another time over her shoulder and bends down to retrieve her keys. She unlocks her door and tosses her purse onto the seat beside her gloves, standing between the open door and the safe interior of her car. The store is closing—banks of fluorescent lights shut down in a series along the ceiling, from back to front, until only the glow of freezer cases and the green flickering of the registers show through the glass doors. The staff must have left through the back door. “They’re