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relieved that it had come to this.
    She yanked the screen door open, then pushed on the other door, the wooden one, and walked into her kitchen.
    But it was not a man sitting there at the green metal table with the glass top.
    It was a girl, a teenager.
    She sat at the table, drinking a glass of water. Perspiration glistened on her face, which was pink and blotchy. Her hair was not quite red and not quite brown, but somewhere in between; long and thin, it hung in a sweaty tangle around her face, strands sticking to her neck. She had too many freckles, the kind that make a face look cluttered. She wore a nose ring, a small silver hoop in one nostril.
    And, Olivia realized, she was pregnant.
    Her T-shirt stretched ridiculously across her belly. Olivia could see her belly button pressing against the shirt. Her belly, round and big, made Olivia think of melons and bounty. Of life. The girl could be Sheryl Lamont herself. Or a figment of Olivia’s imagination. So Olivia spoke in a loud, booming voice.
    “What the hell is going on here?” she asked.
    The girl’s head jerked in Olivia’s direction. Something flashed across her face—not panic, exactly, but something like it. Awkwardly, she got to her feet, in that way that pregnant women have. She was all belly. The rest of her was slender; her legs, poking out from cut-off dungarees, were a young girl’s legs. She waddled, off balance, straight to Olivia, like one of the baby ducklings in that children’s story.
    “Stop right there,” Olivia ordered, putting an arm up like a traffic cop. Her eyes scanned the kitchen counter for something she could use as a weapon, but there were only crumpled bags of junk food from her ride up here in the middle of the night. And the jar of paste she’d used when she arrived, to paste the things she’d found here to the wall: David’s cracked Wayfarer sunglasses and unopened mail and the newspaper still unread from the day he died and Arthur’s tiny straw hat that he hated to wear and dead flowers she’d found in a vase by the bed. Before her run, she’d pasted all of that to the wall. Oh, Olivia groaned inwardly now, how can you defend yourself with paper and paste? She remembered that childhood game: paper, scissors, rock. Rock always won, she thought.
    “Look at me,” the girl said with a nervous laugh. “I’m harmless.” Taking a step closer, she added, “I’m desperate.”
    The smell of her own sweat slapped Olivia in the face. “Don’t you come any closer, you little trespasser,” Olivia said, sounding foolish rather than threatening. The Lord’s Prayer ran through her mind for the first time since her childhood. “Forgive us our trespasses.” Or was it “trespassers”? Olivia picked up the ruler she’d stuck in the jar of glue and held it up.
    “Don’t call the police or anything,” the girl said.
    “You bet your ass I’m calling the police,” Olivia told her. “Breaking and entering and who knows what else.” She tried to make a plan, to figure out how to call the police and keep the girl from running away.
    “I didn’t take anything except, like, eight ounces of water,” the girl said, indignant. “Jeez.”
    Her voice was a teenager’s, a voice that was capable of uncontrollable giggles and passionate sobs over small things like dead animals by the roadside or a Top Ten love song. Olivia knew this because she’d been that type of teenager herself. She saw something familiar in the girl’s eyes. It was what Olivia had felt sitting in her room with the canopy bed and pink dotted-swiss bedspread and matching curtains and silver monogrammed hairbrush and hand mirror. Get me out of here, she used to think, begging the stars, the gods, whoever might be “out there” listening to a teenager’s cry for help.
    Olivia looked at the girl and remembered all this, but she thought, Still.
    Still, she was a stranger. A stranger who had broken into Olivia’s house.
    “What the hell are you doing in my