“YOU’RE NOT GOING to take those children in there,” a woman was saying. She was as tall and as big-boned as Marya’s mother: but her face was neatly caked with powder, her eyebrows had been penciled in, her wide fleshy mouth was bright with red lipstick. “You’re not going to take those children in there,” she said, her voice rising in a way Marya would remember thirty years later, “you can leave them out here with me.”

Marya’s mother wiped her nose roughly with the side of her hand. She was facing the woman, standing with one shoulder slightly higher than the other, smiling a queer gloating smile Marya hadn’t seen before. “It’s my fucking business what I do,” she said.

IN THE END they talked her into leaving the baby behind; and Davy too—he started crying and couldn’t be quieted.

“What about the girl?” a man was asking Marya’s mother. He worked a burnt-out cigar around in his mouth, shifting it nervously from side to side. He wore soiled clothes, a kind of uniform—a short-sleeved white smock over dark trousers. “You could maybe leave your little girl outside, Mrs. Knauer,” he said.

“She goes with me,” Marya’s mother said in her flat hard satisfied voice.

Marya was sucking on another of the cherry cough drops. Her mouth flooded hungrily with saliva. She knew better than to try to twist away—her mother’s fingers were closed tight on her wrist.

The man with the cigar hesitated; he ran a hand through his thinning hair. He began to speak but Marya’s mother cut him off. “She goes with me,” she said. “Her name is Marya but she’s the same as me—she knows everything I know.”

“Mrs. Knauer—”

“Fuck Mrs. Knauer,” Marya’s mother said.

She wasn’t angry; she didn’t even raise her voice. Her words were short, flat, calm, hard with satisfaction.

“THEY REALLY WORKED him over, didn’t they?” Marya’s mother said afterward, to anyone who would listen: the woman with the bright lipstick, clerks in the sheriff’s office, people outside on the street who had never seen her before and didn’t know what she was talking about. “They really worked him over, didn’t they?” Marya’s mother said, marveling. “Shit, I wouldn’t even know who it was.”

She wiped at her nose, her eyes. When her big-knuckled hand came away from her face you could see she was smiling—one side of her mouth twisted up.