“Yes,” I said. “Would she be in?”

“I’m gonna invite you in,” the woman said. “But when I open the door, you have to come in real fast. Y’understand?”

Hesitantly, I said, “Sure.”

And then the door swung open wide, the woman grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me inside, then closed the door forcefully. I was going to have to be fitted with a whiplash collar.

“I don’t want Quincy to get out,” she said. I glanced around the floor, looking for a little dog or cat, but saw nothing.

This woman might have been fifty, but it had been a hard fifty. Her hair was gray and pinned back, and she wore a white short-sleeved blouse with enough grease stains to qualify it as a Jackson Pollock. Her short sleeves revealed meaty shoulders and upper arms.

“So you want Stef?” The woman cocked her head just a little, looked me up and down, and her eyes danced darkly.

From upstairs: “Is it for me, Mom?”

“No!” Not taking her eyes off me. “Just keep looking!” She sighed. “She don’t live here,” she said coolly, glancing down at the plastic bag that hung from my wrist.

“Oh. Okay. See, I had this address for her, but if I’ve got the wrong house …”

“You got the right house. But she don’t live here no more. She hant lived here for a couple years at least. What’s your business with her?”

I wasn’t sure whether to say. So instead I asked, “Would you happen to be Stefanie’s mother?”

“Yeah.”

“I had something I had to return to her, and was going to drop it off here, but if she doesn’t live here, maybe you could tell me where I might find her.”

“Is it whatever you got in the bag there?”

“Maybe if you had an address?”

The woman jerked her head to motion me further inside. I followed her into a narrow kitchen where the sink was stacked with dishes and a cigarette sat burning in an ashtray on a table that was part of an aging aluminum and formica set that couldn’t have been original to this house. The table surface, what you could see of it, given the number of empty beer and wine bottles, was pockmarked with cigarette burns. “Just follow me,” she said.

There were more burns on the cracked linoleum floor and several places where it had been gouged, revealing plywood underneath. The counter next to the overloaded sink was littered with more dishes and more empty beer bottles and crumpled Big Mac cartons flecked with shreds of lettuce and smears of Special Sauce.

“Like I said, she hasn’t lived here for, I don’t know, a couple years now.”