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hieroglyph that will reveal its value. It’s when she lifts a bottle that you recognize as being from Cypress’ newest line of fruit-flavored water—which tastes mostly like sugared sewage—that something else nags at her attention. She gazes back at the house she just passed, where she didn’t stop her junk-lab because whoever ferries the trash out—probably an overworked new father who’ll wake up at four to schlep it to the curb—hasn’t done the job yet.
    For a moment she rolls the revolting Cypress bottle in her hands as if she’s considering something novel that just occurred to her, then she dumps it into her cart and finishes sifting through the rest of the bin. Before she shuffles on, she leaves her plunder-bus at the curb and creeps across the front lawn toward the porch of the house she studied moments earlier.
    Daniel grabs your sleeve. “Dude,” he whispers, “we gotta stop her. She’s trespassing.”
    “So?’
    “She’s crossed the threshold from curb to yard. Anything can happen now. What if she breaks into the house and stabs someone?”
    You consider this, but don’t move. The woman steps quietly onto the porch.
    “Stop her,” Daniel hisses, but he doesn’t yell, and neither do you. She appears to move a few things around the porch, then grabs the handle of a jogging stroller, wheels it around, and pushes it down the stairs.
    “Yo, she’s stealing that,” Daniel says.
    “You don’t know that,” you say.
    “She just crept up to that porch and snatched it. Are you blind? That’s her, right there, pushing it down the walkway.”
    “Maybe she has a kid at home and she’s thinking of buying a new stroller, did you ever think of that? Maybe she just wants to test this one on the street, see if she likes the feel of it. A woman like her who pushes stuff around all the time, she’s probably a discerning consumer.”
    “A discerning consumer? Are you fucking kidding me? She stole your Pop Tarts. Now she’s stealing the stroller. She’s a thief.”
    Daniel’s right. There’s no third way here. The woman’s affixing the stroller to the front cart, weaving the yellow twine around the handle to secure it. It’s an expensive model, a status-stroller, sleek and triangular with a lightweight aluminum frame that’s collapsible for easy stowage when traveling. No way you could have afforded it when your kids were of stroller age. The family with the front porch will wake tomorrow and want to take their kid to the park, probably a wailing infant who needs to get outside, needs some time away from the house, and from Mommy who’s been nursing him for seven hours straight, and Daddy will volunteer for the job in order to keep his marriage afloat and he’ll pack the diaper bag, fill the sippy cup, get ready to earn some serious sensitive-male points with his wife and when he goes to garner the vanished stroller—whoops, oh boy—the recriminations will be loud and enduring because Mommy has told Daddy repeatedly not to leave the stroller on the porch, to store it in the garage because hasn’t he noticed stuff disappearing from their yard every once in a while? Little stuff like the snow shovel that one time in the winter, and whatever happened to the Frisbee?
    Yeah, he’ll say, but who’s cruel enough to steal a stroller? And who’s bold enough to venture all the way onto their porch?
    Once again, you minimized my concerns, she’ll say, you never take me seriously, and he’ll shout, Don’t make this a bigger deal than it is, you always blow everything out of proportion, and the baby will be wailing and the whole weekend will be ruined, and maybe their marriage too.
    “Do something,” Daniel says, because even though he’s the genius, you’re the muscle. That’s what makes your team work. He does his let-me-appeal-to-your-inner-weasel thing, and then you step forward with the papers, holding them with your meat-hook hand, your lead-pipe arm and GQ smile, and the subtle undertone