“Let the hammer work for you,” Roy had said, showing Joan how to hold the hammer near the end, allowing the weight of the head to add momentum to the swing. Roy had been pretty far out there for an Iowan—he had kinky hair that rose straight up from his scalp like blond flames, wore sharkskin shirts and baggy cuffed pants, and made sculptures out of found materials, big, complicated, beautifully crafted assemblages with baseball themes. He was the director of the gallery, and when he was excited he would take off and run straight up the wall, leaving sneaker tracks that she had to paint over. When they were finished hanging the shows, he would climb up onto the tallest stepladder they had and jump it like a big pogo stick down the rows of track lighting, stopping and adjusting each lamp in turn so that the paintings were perfectly illuminated. After she had worked with him for five years, Joan was forced to make a rule that he couldn’t ride his bike inside her house.

So instead of choking up on the shovel handle the way she might have automatically done, considering all the times her first husband had shown her how to choke up in order to really smack the Wiffle ball down the back sidewalk into the pitcher’s face (their friend Kurt, stoned and graceful), she remembered Roy’s advice and the destructive, comforting weight of that old art-gallery hammer as she swung it toward a nail. Joan lifted the shovel end as high as her ear and put all her weight behind the swing.

Unbelievable, the small details you notice. He had a piece of individually wrapped cheese in his hand when he whirled around. She was actually embarrassed about that cheese, had put it in her shopping cart with the idle thought that she’d better not run into anyone she knew or it would be revealed that she sometimes broke down and bought cheese food instead of cheese, just for the sheer laziness of peeling the cellophane away and slapping the orange tile directly onto the bread. Her husband couldn’t believe she ate that crap—just yesterday, when she was making a sandwich with it, he had looked over her shoulder and said, “We can do better than that, can’t we?”

So the man was holding her secret cheese and swiftly turning around, and the refrigerator door bounced against the wall and the shovel made a clanging sound, that’s how hard she hit him.

It rang, titanium on bone, like a clapper on a bell. She might have thought that the worst sound a shovel hitting a head could make was a melon-like sound, but it wasn’t. This was the worst sound a shovel hitting a person’s head could make—a muffled bell-like gonging, like a gravedigger hitting rock.