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garment, pitied it the way she would an unhappy child or whining animal. She folded it, replaced it carefully in the suitcase, and then noticed a fabric pocket under the lid that bulged with something. She slid her hand inside and took out a pair of white shoes. These had held up better than the clothes. Only slightly scuffed, they looked like shoes their owner had saved for church and going to parties. Lily guessed they would fit her. Her mother had always said she had Cinderella feet: size five. Lily pulled off her sneakers, slid one bare foot into a shoe, then the other. The shoes had no tongue, only laces. She tied them quickly and stretched out her legs, examining her feet in the old-fashioned shoes. She liked the curve of their stacked heels and the softness of the leather. They fit snugly. In fact, they pinched, but the tightness around her feet gave her pleasure, a sensation that was almost erotic—tense and warm.
    As Lily sat on the dirt floor of the garage, looking at her feet in somebody else’s shoes and pondering that satisfying pressure on her toes, she thought she heard a step outside the garage, then a person breathing. She stopped breathing herself to listen. A car with a broken muffler passed on the road, and she listened as its loud rumbling faded away. Was there someone in the grass outside? Did she hear footsteps again? Lily shook her head. No, she thought. She reached forward to untie the shoes, and when her fingers touched the laces, she was struck by the thought that these were Helen Bodler’s shoes, that she had packed her suitcase all those years ago to run away from her husband. With a shiver of excitement Lily removed the shoes and in that same instant decided to take them. After closing the suitcase and returning it to its original place, she found an old paper bag, dumped the nails out of it and dropped in the shoes. Then she dug in her pockets and came up with two dollar bills, a quarter and a dime. I’ll leave this as payment, she thought.
    The heavy inner door to the house stood open. Lily looked through the screen door and into the kitchen. She could hear flies, a low uneven buzz, and inches inside the dim room she made out long rolls of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, crusted black with insects. The room smelled strongly of mold, and when she looked down at the floor, she thought the cracked linoleum squares were oozing liquid. It’s just wet, she thought, from yesterday’s rain. The house probably leaks like a sieve. A couple of feet inside the dark room, Lily could see a table. To run in, slap down the money on the table and rush back would take seconds. Still, Lily hesitated. She listened. The house was silent. Her eyes had adjusted to the murky room within, and she could see a rifle resting against the wall. I’ll count to fifteen, she said to herself, and then run. This method had never failed, because Lily had never cheated on herself. The numbers changed according to the degree of the challenge, but they always worked. The silent count had been responsible for her eating that worm on a dare when she was eight during recess at Longfellow School, for prompting her over the cliff into the ice water of the quarry in May when she was thirteen, and for her greatest triumph—that night only four years ago when she lay down on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train, and then, only seconds before it hit her, rolled out of the way. Bert had been furious, but the boys had all shaken her hand and beat her on the back. The count helped her face more mundane trials, too: like getting out of bed at four o’clock in the morning to go to work. Lily counted, pushed on the screen door, took a step, heard the noise of a car in the driveway, turned her head and slipped. She fell half in and half out of the door, her left arm flat in a pool of cold slime. Coins rolled across the kitchen floor, and she sat up as fast as she could to look at the driveway. With relief she saw that it