There was a time when this contact would have been way too loaded with subtext. Cate and Neale have been friends since ninth grade, through Cate’s straight years, then her fake straight years, then her coming out after holding on to the secret a little too long. She was already sleeping with women by the time she told Neale she thought she might be interested in sleeping with women. Their friendship for a time became tentative, folded around confusion, hovering over its former version. They had to not talk about whether Cate had been in love with Neale, which of course she had. And whether Neale aided and abetted that, which she probably did. Now all that is far behind them. While she can remember particular events, Cate can’t call up the emotional content anymore, even though there was so much of it. This, she supposes, is the drape that closes off pain so everyone can get on with the rest of life.

“Do you think this is the worst house on the block?” Neale says.

“No. The green house is the worst.”

“Because they keep chickens in the back.”

Neale’s neighborhood is changing, bettering itself, but slowly. Tonight they get a few upmarket kids, like Frida Kahlo in a body cast with a chubby Diego Rivera. But there’s still a steady traffic of dispiriting visitors. Earlier, a homeless sort of couple showed up—a large, lumbering guy with a childlike face and a cartoon—Cate couldn’t make out the character—tattooed on the side of his neck. With him was a small, wiry woman, eerily tan and smelling of washable parts that hadn’t been exposed to daylight or water in a while. “Trick or treat,” they said, in tandem, with absolutely no human inflection. Candy-seeking cyborgs. Sailor growled. Cate distracted him. It’s embarrassing when your dog growls at people because they are poor. Or in wheelchairs. Or fat, which sometimes happens, and who knows what that’s about.

And there are still more to come—whole families, children and adults, none of them in costume. One has just arrived, each member holding out a thin plastic grocery bag.

Trick or treat, hahahahaha!!!! the witch’s hand screams at them.

None of them squeals or laughs or smiles or even seems to take notice of the writhing hand or its crazy talk. They appear beleaguered. All of them have combed but extremely dirty hair. They are wearing super-cheap sneakers that appear to be made from cheesecloth and Styrofoam. Maybe this family has just arrived from someplace where they have already been seriously scared, not just by a crappy rubber hand. Each of them, including the mother and father, takes two Snickers, and then they all turn around to trudge off to the next house.