If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

little girl into the future—trying to picture her as a young woman already at the edge of that vastness, tossing a tiny stone into the water, a little speck of gravity which had vanished—and suddenly he realized that the grown woman she would be did not have, could not have, the flaxen hair of his little girl.
    Would he love her, then, without that, as much as he loved her with it?
    Well, of course he would! He’d loved her bloody and squirmingwith a head shaped like a banana screaming her lungs out, jaundiced and hairless and toothless, just delivered like some kind of terrifying package sloppily addressed to him and Melody when she was born. Loved her completely. Monstrously. An annihilation of utter love. How could ever he stop?
    “Daddy, daddy, daddy,” she said now in her phony little-girl voice.
    “Hi there, silly,” he said. “Happy birthday.”
    “Hi, Mr. Harmon,” the girl with the triangular face said, and it surprised him, his name on the lips of this tiny stranger. For one thing, almost none of his daughter’s friends actually called him Mr. Anything—not even Mr. H, which had been what his friends (the most familiar ones, the ones who hung out at his house every day for years) had dared to call his father so informally. His daughter’s friends had called him Tony from the start. He’d never encouraged that, feeling that children ought to at least sound respectful of the adults they addressed, but these girls seemed to have been born on a first-name basis with the world.
    “Hello there,” he said, wishing he could remember the girl’s name. He knew she’d spent the night in his house more than once, and had a vague memory of his daughter lying on the floor beside this girl, the two of them propped up on pillows watching The Wizard of Oz, and Tony suspected that this girl’s mother was one of those two women who’d been standing in his driveway when he walked up. But that was all. After that, he drew a blank.
    “Time for lunch!” Melody called from the dining room, out of which the smell of something flowery and chemical drifted—something canned, sprayed around, feminine. Cake. His daughter let go of him and called for her friends to follow. An elbow, a shoulder, a sharp small skeletal something bumped into him as they hurried past and disappeared, after which Tony stood for a few minutes in the entrance to the family room and looked.
    Not a thing had been changed, and not a thing was the same. The wedding photos were gone, but they’d been gone a long time. Gone since that first bad fight. What had she done with them after that night? Tossed them in the garbage? Burned them? Crushedthem under the heel of her boot? Tony had never asked. He’d just come home after work that evening and noted without surprise that they were gone.
    The videos had slid out of the neat tower he’d forever been struggling to build with them, and they sprawled between the TV and the bookcase, an avalanche of Pooh and Sesame Street and Kid Songs USA. Not one of those movies had his daughter actually watched, to his knowledge, in over two years, but she and her mother had refused to let him toss them out, building a firewall together around them whenever he mentioned the unnecessary mess. Shaking their heads.
    The curtains that opened onto the sliding glass doors to the backyard were open, and the sun streamed in and lit up a fine scrim of dust between him and the world out there. A chewed-up cat toy lay in one corner of the couch, but Tony didn’t see the cat anywhere. No surprise there. The cat had always run when she smelled him coming.
    Why? he’d wanted to know. What had he ever done to the cat? Tony actually liked the cat. Melody was constantly letting its water dish run dry and those pebbles it ate run out, and he had always been perfectly happy to resupply the cat. Never once had he sworn at, hissed at, spoken harshly to that fucking cat. So why did it sleep at the foot of his daughter’s bed, rub the