Before she put the meat in the oven that afternoon, Pat had made herself a cup of tea and turned on the television. Channel 56 was showing Rebel without a Cause, and as the light slowly began to rise through the screen of their old Zenith, she saw James Dean on the steps of the planetarium, clutching at the mismatched socks of a dead Sal Mineo and crying. She put down her tea, slid her warm fingertips inside the V neck of her dress, and held her left breast. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her nipple hard and erect against the palm of her hand. It was like seeing an old lover, like remembering a piece of herself that no longer existed. She watched the credits roll and glanced outside to see her husband mowing their lawn. He had a worried expression on his face and his socks pulled up to his knees.

That evening before dinner, as she arranged the butter and margarine side by side on the table—one yellow airy and light, the other hard and dark like the yolk of an egg—she wondered how she could have forgotten the way James Dean’s eyebrows curved. Isn’t memory a strange thing, she thought. I could forget all of this, how everything feels, what all of these things mean to me. She was suddenly seized with the desire to grab the sticks of butter and margarine in her hands and squeeze them until her fingers went right through, to somehow imprint their textures and colors on her brain like a stamp, to make them something that she would never lose. And then she heard the bell.

When she opened the door, Pat noticed that it was still daylight. The sky was blue and bright and clear and she had a fleeting, guilty thought that she should not have spent so much time indoors. After that she crumpled backward into the hall as the bullet from a .38-caliber Saturday Night Special pierced her chest, exited below her shoulder blade, and jammed into the wood of the stairs, where it would later be dug out with a pen knife by Lieutenant Sales and dropped gingerly into a transparent plastic baggie.

Pat’s husband, Clyde, was found in the kitchen by the back door, a knife in his hand (first considered a defense against his attacker and later determined to be the carver of the roast). He had been shot twice—once in the stomach and once in the head—and then covered with cereal, the boxes lined up on the counter beside him and the crispy golden contents of Cap’n Crunch, cornflakes, and Special K emptied out over what remained of his face.

Nothing had been stolen.