The kitten had been gone the next morning, carried off in the jaws of whatever carries things off in the night. The sounds they would hear sometimes in that farmhouse, in the darkness, insane snarling fights, agonized cries deep inside the corn. From outside came the sound of Pilgrim’s growling attack, a sickening thump. Joan pulled herself up to the window and looked out. The stranger was kicking her dog. Once, twice, off the flagstone stoop and into the shrubbery, yelping.

Then only Spock was visible in the early-evening light, a white dog with a stick in his mouth, keeping just out of reach.

The stranger swept his boot sideways, knocking her geraniums off the stoop, homely Martha Washingtons with neat scalloped leaves and lavender fringed petals. It was like kicking someone’s grandmother.

Her neck, her dog, her flowers.

When she was a little girl, her grandma Bess had hung bed linens on the line down at Joan’s height, letting them rest wetly on the clean grass as she set the pins, then lifting the line high with a notched pole until the sheets were off the ground, snapping feebly around in the breeze. Joan would walk in a kid trance through the damp white rows, a clothespin pinching each of her fingers, feeling the thin cloth against her face.

In the gloomy confines of that grandmother’s living room was a mirrored coffee table made of cobalt glass that reflected Joan’s face in a mesmerizing way, blue and desolate. She had loved that grandma, a silent, opinionless woman from the unpopular side of the family. At Grandma Bess’s house, there were no frightened farm animals, no knife-wielding butchers; she had her own gentle version of hens and chicks: cunning little succulent plants that spread in a low green flock across the cracked dirt by her back door, kept alive with periodic drenchings of dishwater. She used a rusted enamel dishpan with a rock in the center for a birdbath, and she did her business out back in a shed. Once, eating dinner at someone’s house with her parents and sister, Joan had piped up to remark that her grandma Bess had the same kind of soup pot underneath her bed. That was one of Joan’s famous childhood jokes, although she herself didn’t get it at the time.

She peered down at her spilled geraniums, the curtain like a shroud against her face. The clay pots were broken into large pieces. She had spectral visions of herself on the front lawn—there was young Joan at her grandma’s house, whirling through the laundered sheets as the sparrows landed on the rock and sipped at their bathwater; there was Joan crouching to look at the hens and chicks; there was Joan kneeling, gazing down through the blue-coffee-table atmosphere at her image floating below, disembodied and deprived. She had to touch her own mashed nose just to see if she was still alive.