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looked at her and closed his eyes for a few moments; she did not know what he was thinking. Then he opened them and agreed. Anna kissed the girl’s hair. The girl stared at them, her eyes dark and burning.
    The girl screamed for twenty-three minutes and then fell asleep.
    The next morning, the girl stood up in her crib. “I awake,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. She stood in the fresh light, gazing at Anna eagerly. Anna stumbled toward her and lifted her out. The girl kicked softly in the air.
    â€œYou did it,” she whispered to the girl. The girl was bored; she wriggled in her arms, looking for her toys. The morning spread out,glazed and damp and blue, outside the windows. Anna clutched the girl’s soft, living weight against her chest.
    The boy abandoned all cards to focus his attentions on soccer. The girl decided to eschew princesses to become a witch. She sat at the dinner table wearing a pointy black hat.
    Anna and her husband lay in their bed. Her husband’s arm came over her body at night, and she held it. One night, she whispered to him the intimacy she had spoken to Warren Vance, so softly she did not know if he heard it. He said the word back softly and pressed his face against hers. They huddled in this island of time together before they would all separate again.

Theft
    G inger Klein held all the cash she owned, which came to $934.27, in an envelope in her red velvet purse. As she waited in line for the first dinner seating on this cruise to Alaska, she fingered the muscular weight of the bills. The ship’s ballroom was a large, drab room, tricked into elegance with real silver set out on the linen, sprightly gold foil bows on the walls, white roses blooming briefly in stale water. The room was filled with couples, friends, tour groups, glittering in their sequins, intent on having a good time. The guests greeted each other, their faces gilded by the chandeliers’ silver haze. Gripping her purse, Ginger watched them and tried to decide where to sit.
    Until a few months before, Ginger had been living in a worn pink studio apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard, storing her cash in margarine containers in her refrigerator. She was eighty-two years old, and for the last sixty years, she had sometimes lived in better accommodations, sometimes worse; this was what she hadultimately earned. On good days she sat with a cup of coffee and the Los Angeles phone book, calling up strangers for contributions to the Fireman’s Ball, the Christian Children’s Fund, the United Veteran’s Relief. Her British accent was the best one; with it, she could keep confused strangers in Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, Calabasas on the phone. “Congratulations for being the sort of person who will help our cause,” she told them, and she heard their pleasure in their own generosity. She cashed the checks at different fast-cash stores around the San Fernando Valley, presenting them with one of the false IDs from her bountiful collection.
    One day, she took the wrong bus home. She looked out the window and was staring at a beach that she had never seen before. The water was bright and wrinkled as a piece of blue foil. Surfers scrambled over the dark, glassy waves. Ginger felt her heart grow cold. She had succeeded for over sixty-five years as a swindler because she always knew which bus to take.
    She had actually intended to pay the doctor if the news had been good. He asked her a few questions. He held up a pair of pliers, and she had no idea what they were. She returned to the office twice and saw more doctors who wore pert, grim expressions. The diagnosis was a surprise. When he told her, it was one of the few times in her life she reacted as other people did: she covered her face and wept.
    â€œYou need to plan,” her doctor said. “You have relatives who can take care of you?”
    â€œNo,” she said.
    â€œChildren?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œFriends?”
    His