I’m going to take that for a no, the cop said.

Keith is a good guy, she said.

He seemed like it, the cop said. But tell him—you know. No more baseball.

No more baseball, she said.

And if I could suggest something? he said.

Okay, she said.

Maybe we let it drop, he said. The, uh, pushing allegation. Might simplify things. The family’s been talking among themselves. The idea is, you drop it about the pushing, they drop it about the bat attack. And Babe Ruth over there can, you know, sleep. Easy. Easier. And you, too.

In that instant, she saw it: God, she loved her life so much. The family of ducks that sometimes came waddling across the yard like they owned the place. The way Derek had recently started eating dinner with his winter hat on, elbows on the table, like a little trucker. Last week, Keith had arranged the plastic mini-animals on the windowsill (giraffe, cow, stork, penguin, elk) in a circle around a corn kernel and, in the elk’s antlers, had stuck a Post-it note: “Worshipping some mysterious object.”

How do we do that? she said. Drop it?

You just tell me to drop it, he said.

Now? she said.

Now works, he said.

After she hung up, she went down to the basement. Keith was sitting in an old lawn chair. There was a big pile of clean laundry on the deck of the treadmill.

So, asshole just walks, he said.

Unless you buy a new bat and find him and hit him with it, she said.

It was supposed to be funny, but she could see he wasn’t ready.

She reached for his hand. He took it, gave it a squeeze.

Give me a minute, he said.

Sure, she said.

In a way, they were lucky. Derek’s face would heal. It would. The scratches were light. That guy could have taken the bat away from Keith and nailed him with it. Keith could have swung at the guy’s head and killed him. Now, with this one concession, everything could go back to normal.

And it did.

A week passed, another week, a month.

Then, just before Christmas, she found herself stopped at a light downtown.

Over on the sidewalk, near the war monument, was the guy. One of the guys. She couldn’t tell which.

Those two fuckers really were pretty much identical.

Then the other one came out from behind a maintenance shed, yapping away, dragging, on a leash of Christmas lights, a plastic reindeer he’d likely nabbed off somebody’s lawn.

That was—wow. That was quite a limp. Quite a limp he had. Quite a limp he had somehow gotten.

The two of them went off into the woods, having a good old time, arms around each other’s shoulders, the two-person unit itself now seeming to have a limp, reindeer bouncing along in pursuit.