They were asleep already. My mother, sweaty from a pill, was out cold on her back with the baby crooked in her arm.

Except when I looked at the baby, and the length of her four-year-old body alongside my mother, I thought, she’s not a baby anymore, and realized, looking at the muscle tone of her arms and legs, naked on the sheet, that this baby, this sweet little pudge of a girl with fire-red hair and the temperament to match, might someday rise up against us.

The following day was payday, and I gave Junior Savage money back from the cash he paid me to go across the street and buy me a small bottle of whiskey.

I could buy my own cigarettes, but at nineteen, I had to finagle liquor.

He did it without hassle. He brought back a flat plastic bottle of Canadian Club, and I left the restaurant at three thirty and headed straight to the car.

I had an old paperback with me. My mother would grab them from the library trash and bring them home. Sometimes they were too moldy, but lots of them were fine. Old dime-store pulp titles that had once sold for sixty cents. I had a copy of Giovanni’s Room with yellowed pages and tiny print. The spine turned to dust where it cracked open. It was hard to see in the dim light inside the woods, inside the car, but I loved just the smell of it, the feel of the brittle paper in my hands. I drank, and smoked, and read while I could, stuck in the dream of the story until a stranger appeared alongside the car, looking in at me.

I was too scared to scream.

His face appeared in the passenger’s side window, watching me smoking and drinking with the book propped open in one hand. My mouth went dry and my heart took up all the sound in my own head, pounding. It sounded like the ocean.

I thought, I’m going to die.

He waved. One hand raised, moving slowly.

I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.

I was a kid who was used to getting in trouble. Getting yelled at for cutting through people’s yards, getting suspended from school, having the cops called on him. There wasn’t anything in me that believed this wasn’t something that would get me arrested, beat up, or killed.

The stranger was wearing a soft button-down white shirt and gray pants, and his outfit was trim to his body like it had been tailored for him. His hair was blue black, cut like an old-fashioned movie star’s, and swept up off his forehead.

“I’m sorry” was the first thing I said when he opened the door and stood there looking in at me.

“For what?” he asked. He slid in but left the door open, one foot still outside in the leaves. His shoes, even, were shiny black leather.

I couldn’t look at him. “Am I on your property?” I asked.