The stranger was standing with his back to her, staring into the refrigerator. In the split second when he knew she was standing behind him but hadn’t begun to turn yet, Joan heard the mechanical whir of a hummingbird sipping angrily at the feeder. The hummingbirds had bad personalities, always trying to spear each other away from the trumpet vines and the feeders, their thumb-size shimmering bodies aglow with bad intentions. She couldn’t think how hard to hit him—it seemed first of all terrible to hit him but also wonderful. Inevitable. She had to do it or he would realize she hadn’t died when he strangled her and would come after her again. Or one of the dogs. He seemed to hate the dogs, and the big one, Pilgrim, had attacked him and been kicked a number of times for it. It was brutal and routine, as though he were dispatching a duty that he neither agreed nor disagreed with. The dog had retired with a prolonged yelp to some dark area inside the honeysuckle. The little one, Spock, right now was whining and raking his toenails on the side door, making long feverish gouges in the wood. Joan could see the gouges in her mind’s eye, some tiny part of her brain still attuned to home maintenance.

She decided in that split second between the man’s hackles rising almost visibly and his beginning the turn away from the refrigerator and toward her that she was going to hit him in the head with the shovel using every bit of force she could summon. She was a slight woman…or, no, she wasn’t; she had been a slight woman, but now, depending on how you defined it, she was middle-aged. Her arms and legs were still decently coltish, but her torso had all the nuance of a toilet-paper tube. She had lost her beauty before she even knew she had it; looking at old photographs, Joan saw that she had been willowy, soulful, glossy-haired the entire time that she was thinking of herself as stark, bug-faced, lank.

She couldn’t imagine using all her force; it went against who she was—a female, for starters—but there was no choice. Having never before hit someone with a shovel, or even with her fist, she didn’t know what to expect with less than a full effort or, for that matter, with a full effort, so it stood to reason that she had to let fly completely and utterly, otherwise she might only stun him or piss him off. She took a step forward, grabbing the very end of the shaft, the physics of it returning to her from something she had learned working at an art gallery many years ago.