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

you’ve lost, even the emptiness, the one last thing you could call your own, would be snatched by the world from your hands.
    He continued to stare into his family room, as if he were a detective in search of some clue, when, from the dining room he heard Melody asking the girls what they wanted on their hotdogs, and the shouted answers. A grating chorus. Nonsensical. Devilish. Ketchmustnothingup. He closed his eyes as if that might block the sound, and when he opened them again, he saw it on the bookshelf. A new spine among the more familiar spines— Best One-Dish Meals, The Herbal Doctor, Your Child’s Health, Dictionary of Quotations, Guitar Basics, The Amicable Divorce. …
    The Amicable Divorce.
    The Amicable.
    Fucking.
    Divorce.
    Tony strode over to it, smirking as if it were a person he was about to get the better of, took it off the bookshelf, and walked straight to the door and out of the house with it.
    Outside, the streetlights were no longer blazing, but the telephone lines were still humming, and there was no breeze at all, the leaves of the trees were motionless, hanging limply from the branches. He walked back the way he’d come, with that book tucked under his arm, following his own ridiculous shadow (longer than seven men set end to end, but emerging from his feet as if it were an organic part of him) around the block.
    The cracks in the sidewalk were full of dry grass. He felt weakly victorious, marching over those. They wouldn’t trip him now. If the neighbors saw him headed back to his car already, so be it. Now, he was on a mission, although he had no idea what mission it was. But he had this book. A kind of trophy. Proof that he wouldn’t be anybody’s dupe. A man who grabbed such a book off his own bookshelf and walked straight out of his daughter’s birthday party with it was not a man to be messed with. He wished someone would come out of a house and ask him what the hell he was doing. He would tell that person where to go. He was breathing now. No spittle on the sidewalk this time around.
    But most of the picture windows he passed had their curtains drawn. Only here and there, a flat blackness. Here and there, beyond that blackness, where a curtain was left open, Tony could see the back of a couch, or a doorway between what must have been the den and the kitchen offering some intriguing hint at the mystery of the people who lived there. A little promise. We exist. He kept walking, but there was less forward momentum in it, as if his legs had their own agenda, or were questioning his. He realized he probably would have looked, to anyone watching, like a potential peeper. In truth he’d stopped marching, was actually, now, strolling, and what he wanted to do was to stand and stare. He wanted to go up to the window, press his face to it, see whatever there was to see. Anything. Everything. At that moment Tony Harmon would have given anything to be able to walk into one of those houses and ask a few questions of anyone he could find. What’s your life like? What are your regrets? Have you ever spanked your child? How much cash do you have in the bank? Annual income? Greatest fear? How often do you have sex with your wife? Do you feel like a failure? Are you the man (or woman) you thought you’d be?
    What an incredible relief it would be to know the answers to those questions from just a handful of strangers—a handful of answers to a handful of questions put to the residents of these tidy houses.
    It all looked so perfect. So made of hope and exclusion come to fruition. Only here and there, Tony spied a problem—an eavestrough that had fallen and no one had bothered to hammer back up, a mailbox stuffed full of junk no one had bothered to bring in—a hint that something was not entirely right, that something different was going on behind that front door than was going on behind the others.
    But, really, you couldn’t tell a thing about most people. All you could do was walk by and assume