We didn’t speak. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. At Fulton Street she left, her hand brushing my own. It was exactly the same as when I imagined myself returning to my hometown—running into one of those old girlfriends from all those slumber parties, pretending to only halfway recognize each other. I could see her walking down the platform for a moment, as the train gained speed, and then I couldn’t see her anymore. I started to cry, abruptly, unexpectedly.

Part of the story she had me read upstate returned.

After she watched the girls board the bus from the window, Karen heated up the car, scraped the ice off the windows, and drove to the store. Hardly anyone was around. She pushed a cart down the wide aisles, past the waxed apples gleaming in the florescent lighting, to the milk. The dairy aisle was always so cold. Even in the summer it was uncomfortable. She skittered through on tiptoe, keeping her coat zipped up past her chin. When the cart was going fast enough she lifted her feet onto the bar below the handle, propelling it forward at a reckless rate as she had seen other women’s children do when their mothers were distracted.

Gliding down the long aisle like that, weightless, the cart shaking with speed, was a marvelous sensation. She closed her eyes, only for a moment, and opened them just in time to catch someone else, a woman peeking down the milk aisle as if she couldn’t remember what she needed, then turning and retreating back where she had come from. Karen’s heart pounded frantically. She abandoned her cart, and quickly followed the woman. She caught sight of her again examining jam jars a few aisles down. She was about the same height as Karen, the same weight, the same flat brown hair. She was even wearing the same coat. Her boots were the same brand, but a different style, one that Karen herself had tried on at the store and then decided against.

Karen stood back a little, twirled a jam jar around on the shelf as if she were trying to read the label, glancing at the woman from the corner of her eye. When the woman moved to the register Karen followed, hanging back a little until she had finished checking out, then Karen pursued her out the sliding glass doors to the parking lot.

It was snowing again outside. Karen’s boots crunched loudly in the snow behind the woman. She turned a little, looking back, and then kept walking. Karen knew that flash of face, she knew the high cheekbones and the shadow under that eye. When the woman reached her car, she turned again, all at once, catching Karen off-guard. “Can I help you?” she asked, annoyed.

Something happened. The woman’s face changed when she viewed it directly. It wasn’t her own face at all.