I took the intake worker for a Jehovah’s Witness because I wasn’t expecting anyone. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and she came struggling down the path past the duck shed in sneakers and a long denim skirt, the hood of her sweatshirt hiding her face. The ducks ran before her, beating their wings, sounding the alarm. She swatted at snowflakes, dodged frozen lumps of duck shit. She tried hard not to touch the ground. About fifty feet from me, she waved, and I waved back. I figured I’d offer her some stew and then send her on her way, wait to burn up The Watchtower until after she’d gone. No need to hurt her feelings.

She made it to the campfire and she tilted her head back so I could see her face under that hood, and I saw how young she was. Nearly a kid. Then she raised up her feet, caked in icy mud, and she wiped her sneakers on my cinder block. The cinder block was my kitchen counter, my bottles and jars, my wooden spoon all lined up, but she was blind to it. She mistook it for a mud scraper. So I began to feel dread. She was not a Jehovah’s Witness. She had a face like a Twinkie, cover-up caking her acne scars, lips like petals pushed together, a baby’s mouth, her bad shoe scraping mud on my kitchen counter, and I won’t forget how she smelled, amazing. Slapped across the face by a spring day. She was like the overgrown kid on Halloween who doesn’t wear a costume. She brought me dread, and she was there to rob me.

“Are you Lily Marshall?” she asked. “The parent of Perley Marshall?”

“What’s this about?” I asked, but polite.

“I’m here from Children’s Services,” she said. “There was a report at school.” Was she nineteen, was she twenty? Was she from the college in town? There were students, I knew, eager to go into the community. They loved the community. I was the community. I’d heard of such things. I’d tried not to imagine them.

“A report at school,” I said. “A report at school about what?”

“Surely you can tell me what you think there might have been a report about,” she said. She was a straight-A student. She was the top of her class. She smelled amazing and I knew her voice. She was only a kid but her voice was the voice of my own mother, who would circle me with a sweet smile on her face, and then pounce. She would pounce and my grandma would have to hold her back.

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t know what you mean,” I said. And I didn’t.