On the day Dinah lost her hat, I was sitting on the top step of my just-right Scamp trailer doing a crossword. I was puzzling over nine-across, “Thai tidbits.” Seven letters. I had A-blank-blank-E-blank-G-S. I was debating whether or not to get my phone and look it up when Morris came out of his cute little Airstream with Dinah’s pushchair in his arms.From the far end of Hallelujah Avenue, which ends in a boat landing and a lick of beach, I could hear Bob Seger’s “Heavy Music,” an earworm if ever an earworm there was. Adding insult to injury, it seemed to be on terminal repeat.My name is Sherry Winfield. That’s Sherry with a y instead of an i at the end, which makes it old-school. I’m in my 70s now, and at plus-200, I’m sort of a truck. These days I’d look mighty silly in a mini, but there was a time, my friend, when I could knock your eyes out. I had moves.That was then. Now I’m a widow living in the Happy Haven Trailer Park. I knit sweaters, play bridge, and attend the Mystery-Book Club every week, but—like you, reading this—I have a past. In my closet is a T-shirt that says a true thing: I MAY BE OLD BUT I SAW ALL THE GOOD BANDS. That would include Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, by the way, although “Heavy Music” was never one of my favorites. I was more of a “Nutbush City Limits” gal (yes, I know Tina Turner wrote it).Morris carried Dinah’s chair down his three concrete-block steps and went back inside for the girl. I don’t remember what date that was, only that it was overcast and humid and close enough to Halloween that I had bought a bunch of mini candy bars at the Publix up the Tamiami for the little ghosts and goblins.Down the way, a bunch of young fellas were hooting and hollering. You know how they do when Friday afternoon is the launching ramp for Friday night. Back then I would have been right there with them, wearing my red bikini. Back then I had a tanned midriff you could have bounced a quarter off.I went back to my crossword. Ten-down crossed “Thai tidbits.” That one was “Connecticut river,” and let me tell you what all veteran crossword puzzlers know: The places where tough clues cross are total pissers. I could name the state capitals, I knew most of the countries in Africa, ditto “The younger Guthrie” (Arlo) and “Old English before” (ere), but “Connecticut river”? Come on. There must be a ton of rivers in the Nutmeg State.Except I didn’t need to get off my fat ass and go look at my phone. Not when I had Morris.He came out with his kippah perched slightly askew on his head and Dinah in his arms. If she grew a lot more, the girl would be too much for him, but the answer to both how long and how big she might grow was not very. How old was she on that overcast pre-Halloween day? I don’t know. She might have been 6; she might have been 10 or 12. Her stomach bulged beneath her I ❤ FLORIDA boatneck and her face was round and waxy-pale. The swelling came courtesy of steroids, the steroids courtesy of everything that was wrong with her. Her eyes, a brilliant green, shone like bits of costume jewelry poked into an uncooked loaf of bread. Her legs and arms were white sticks.[From the May 2011 issue: Stephen King’s short story “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive”]Morris plopped her into her chair with a grunt of relief and pulled out the sunshade. Even with clouds, that UV is still a mother. From the stroller’s back pocket he took a bright-red hat with a wide, floppy brim. On the front it said RIOT GRRRL. That kiddo was the furthest thing from a punk rocker, but I loved the sentiment and I loved the hat and I liked Morris for taking good care of her. He wasn’t her father. I don’t know what their relationship was, just that there were no suspicious cuts or bruises on her. He kept her clean. That was good enough for me.“Sher-REE !” he shouted in falsetto, like Frankie Valli. He’d finished adjusting Dinah’s hat. Between it and the sunshade, her face was in deep shadow. “How goes your life in our Happy Haven?”“Not bad,” I said, “but I wish those kids down there would move on to a different song. Even KC and the Sunshine Band would do.”He lifted Dinah’s feet to display her plastic sandals. “Boogie shoes,” he said. “Come with us. We’ll urge them to change their tunes.”I had a doubt even then about whether or not that was a good idea, but I joined them. More fool me. “I don’t suppose you know a seven-letter word for a Thai tidbit? Or a river in Connecticut, last two letters I-C ?”Dinah looked up at me from beneath her red hat. “Shah-ree.” She smiled, showing her three remaining molars. They were leaning like old gravestones. I thought the tooth fairy had gotten the best and would soon have the rest.I took a knee—not easy when you’re a heavyweight, but I wanted to get down to her level. “How are you, pretty one?”“Goo!” Dinah smiled more widely than ever. “I goo!”I raised one of her swollen hands and kissed it. “Great. I goo too.”“We … two … goo!” Dinah said, then laughed. She had a good one.“Your Connecticut river is ‘Niantic,’ ” Morris said. “Which makes Thai tidbits ‘ant eggs.’ ”Dinah made a face. It’s hard to know how much she understood, but she clearly found the idea of eating ant eggs disgusting.“Thanks! You’re a wonder, Morris.”He shrugged. “I’ve done beaucoup crosswords in my day. I’m wise to their tricks. Walk with us?”“All right.” I filled in the missing letters of the head-scratchers and put the magazine on my cinder-block step. The few remaining clues looked easy. “Let’s go. The beach, I suppose?”“Yeah,” Morris said. “She likes to look at the water. And the birds.”“Wah-wah burts!” Dinah said.“Water and birds, that is correct, mademoiselle. Off we go.”The few street names in Happy Haven were determinedly upbeat, with Christian undertones. Hallelujah was the main thoroughfare. Crossing it were Redemption Street, Cheery Close, and Joyful Boulevard. Mostly we were cheerful (if not always joyful), but there were apt to be raised voices after drunk o’clock, when the Dead River Bar closed and the local bikers roared back down Highway 41. Sometimes it was the Harrigans arguing in their Aliner. Sometimes the Sanchezes in their fancy-schmancy Forest River. Once or twice there were gunshots, but that’s not unusual in Florida, and nobody has ever been killed, at least to my knowledge, although Mitch Yellin shot himself in the leg two years ago practicing his quick-draw move in his backyard. Mostly we’re all right. When there’s trouble, it has a tendency to come from the water.I actually thought this as we strolled down Hallelujah Avenue toward the music. I should have listened.Dinah suffered from some kind of cancer, complicated by a stroke, liver damage, and erythropoietic protoporphyria. That rare malady results in an accumulation of the pigment found in red blood cells. It causes acute sensitivity to sunlight, which was why she was so pale and Morris took her out only on cloudy days. Those days aren’t all that common in Florida, which isn’t nicknamed the Sunshine State for nothing. It’s true that UV can mean a sunburn on cloudy days, but in bright sunshine, even with the shade over her stroller and her floppy RIOT GRRRL hat, Dinah would have cooked like a cheese sandwich in a microwave.She could have lived a normal life with EPP if not for the cancer. That occasioned the steroids and probably caused the stroke. The liver damage might well have been caused by EPP, or maybe it came with the original equipment and was just waiting for the moment to jump out of its box and play its part in scrambling Dinah’s brains.Morris was closemouthed about her origins, but enumerated her various conditions with a kind of doleful enjoyment. He told me, after one of her frequent visits to Sarasota Memorial, that her condition was “on the border line.” I didn’t ask him what that meant, because I was pretty sure I knew. All I cared about was that, though Dinah bruised easily, Morris wasn’t the cause. He and I were neighbors and friends, but not what I’d call besties, and I didn’t want to get any closer to him and Dinah than I already was. I’d lost a few besties along the way, and I was not eager to lose another one. Or two.The trailer park’s main drag was paved, but at the stake fence that marked its end, the asphalt turned to hardpan dirt. The music became louder. Still “Heavy Music.” The long version that’s on Seger’s ‘Live’ Bullet double album. The road went down a shallow grade to the beach. The brochure for our trailer park proclaims FULL BEACH ACCESS, and it doesn’t lie, but the beach is little more than a hundred-yard swatch of white sand with the boat landing on one side and the Sunset City condos on the other. It’s a nice beach for what it is … but it ain’t much. And right away my bad feeling doubled. No, tripled.See, half a dozen guys were down there, throwing around a big, old yellow Nerf football, kicking up sand, weaving around a couple of Styrofoam coolers, and tackling one another. A guy with a goatee yanked down another guy’s salmon-pink board shorts, and I got a better look at his lily-white butt than I wanted before he yanked them back up. These were not preppy tourist kids but townies with townie buzz cuts. No girls; it was strictly a stag party. Sometimes girls have a way of mellowing guys out. Not always, but sometimes.That wasn’t the worst part, though. Drunk young studs are common as dirt on the Suncoast. The worst was the party boat they’d arrived in. I recognized from the blue and red pinstripes that it was one of the rentals from Cool Water Mama, in Nokomis. This boat’s party days were over. The kid piloting it, no doubt drunk as a skunk, hadn’t bothered anchoring, just drove it up onto the beach, where it now leaned askew, one of its pontoons dented and the other torn off and bobbing four feet out.The kids didn’t seem to know or care that when they got back—on foot—they’d be looking at a $2,000 deductible. If, that was, they’d taken the insurance, and I guessed they’d been too high to bother. You could blame Skip Kilgallon for renting to them in the first place, but I had to give him a break on that. Until the season gets going after the year-end holidays, everyone on the Gulf is scraping by.The speakers on the cabin of the gravely wounded pontoon boat were momentarily silent, then once more began to blast “Heavy Music.” There were yells of bro and dude.“You know what,” I said, catching Morris’s arm, “this might not be such a good idea.”“Burts!” Dinah said, and pointed toward the water. Under the thinning clouds, the Gulf was like a fogged mirror. “Burts!”“No, it’ll be fine,” Morris said. “They are just having a good time.”“Such a good time that they wrecked one of Skip Kilgallon’s pontoon boats,” I said.It was like he hadn’t heard me. “And everybody likes Dinah. What’s not to like?” That was true, most people did like Dinah, and made much of her. Coochie-coo and all that. She wasn’t pretty, and of course she was mentally disabled—had the mind and vocabulary of a toddler—but even so, she had a certain charm. Joie de vivre? Maybe. Morris liked to show her off. He also enjoyed the kudos he got for taking good care of her. So down the hill we went, into that throbbing, repetitive bass line and into trouble.A blond kid, shirtless, tall, built like a brick outhouse, was the first to see the stroller and the oversize girl in it. He grabbed a beer from one of the coolers and kangaroo-leaped over to us, kicking up sand and shouting, “Hey, baby! Hey, baby!”Dinah gave her charming (mostly toothless) grin and pointed past him. “Burts! See burts!”A tubby boy ran up, catching the Nerf football over his shoulder and falling on his knees, spraying sand onto Dinah’s lap. He stared at her as if at an exhibit. “ ‘Burts’ is right! ‘Burts’ and Ernies! We’re goin’ to Sesame Street!”The others clustered around, circling the stroller and throwing shade. The smell of beer and pot was strong.“What’s wrong with her?” one of them asked. He had a cat tattoo on one bicep. “Is she sick, or what?”“She is quite sick,” Morris said in a lecturely voice. “She has erythropoietic proto—”“She’s a alien!” another shouted. This one had a mohawk. He bent over, hands on sandy knees. Studied her and said: “A retarded alien. Are you a retarded alien, honey? Need to phone home?”“That’s not a word we use,” Morris said, but Dinah smiled uncertainly.The boys were crowding me out, so I elbowed back in. “Morris, I think we should—”One of the kids, the boy with the trying-too-hard goatee, snatched off Morris’s kippah. “Yid lid, Yid lid!” He spun it in the air. Morris lunged for it and missed. Goatee tossed it to Blondie and the boys spread out, throwing it around in a circle. They all started to chant “Yid lid.” Dinah didn’t like all the yelling. She started to cry.I was pissed. Mostly at them, but also at Morris. He had wanted to come among this pride of young and drunk lions to show off his darling Dinah. He’d been expecting a lot of cooing and positive strokes, like when he pushed Dinah’s chair into the circle of ladies who formed the Mystery-Book Club. He had ignored the warning signs, most especially the ruined party boat.“Give it back!” I shouted. “Give it back, you fuckheads!”The boy in the pink board shorts asked me if I kissed my mother with that mouth. The rest of them laughed.The afternoon was brightening, the sun preparing to come through. If it did, it was going to be tough on Dinah. Just one more delight in what was turning out to be a delightful fucking day. The six of them weren’t out of control, but dancing on the edge of it. The boat, I thought. They either don’t realize what they did to it, or don’t care. Morris, what other warning did you need?One of the boys spun the kippah to the blond boy. Morris leaped for it, his face a mask of outrage.“Look out, Morrie!” I shouted, but too late. His sandal-clad foot came down on the stroller and knocked it on its side. Dinah spilled out, at first too startled to cry. Morris fell on top of her, knees spread to keep from squashing Dinah’s chest and maybe killing her.“Check it out!” Goatee yelled. “Yid boy’s dry-humpin’ his idjit daughter! Somebody call ICE!”Dinah’s floppy RIOT GRRRL hat had come off. One of the boys picked it up and threw it like a Frisbee. Tattoo Boy caught it, then spun it to Mohawk Boy. They were drifting down toward the water, the kippah forgotten in the sand.“We have to get her out of the sun,” Morris said.It was still only a white disk above the thinning clouds, but the skin on her cheeks was red and a blister was forming over her right eye. The sunshade on her stroller had gotten twisted around its thin chrome bars, reminding me of the pontoon that had been torn off.“Sherry, little help here!”He picked Dinah up and settled her into the stroller. One wheel sank in the sand and she fell out again. She stopped crying, and that scared me more than anything.“Stand back,” I said, and picked Dinah up. “Get the stroller out of the sand. Hurry up.”The girl was surprisingly heavy. Sand had stuck to the mucus from her nose, giving her a mustache. The first blister had been joined by another.Except for Blondie, the boys were now ignoring us. Which was fine with me. The one with the mohawk curled his arm and scaled Dinah’s hat high into the air. The wind caught it and it sailed over the water, landing beside the half-submerged pontoon, which would never float again. Incredibly, everyone except the blond kid was laughing. He at least had the good grace to look worried. The maddening bass signature of “Heavy Music” played over and over.Morris yanked the stroller out of the sand and I put Dinah in it. I will never forget her bulging eyes, so green, like sea glass. She knew something bad was happening but not what it was. Her scant hair was full of sand. I carried the stroller to the edge of the hardpan road that boaters used to back their small craft down to the edge of the water. Later that night I would have trouble bending over and taking off my sneakers, but right then, muscle memory—and panic, that too—had me feeling 19 again. Once her stroller was clear of the sand, I stripped off my shirt and billowed it over the stroller like a tent.“Holy shit, look at them jahoobies!” Goatee Boy called. He was handsome. He could have been a model in a catalog. “Are those 44s or 48s?”“Forty-eight D’s!” yelled the short, tubby one. He had a PBR in one sandy fist. “Those ain’t tits, they’re cannons! Anti-aircraft shells! Where’d you get a bra to hold ’em? Boobs R Us?”Morris was looking dazedly at his kippah. He put it on his head. Sand fell out and ran down the sides of his face. The boys howled. I suppose it was funny, in a slapstick sort of way. Even Blondie was smiling, although he seemed to have some idea that the fun had gone too far.“Morris!” I yelled. “Morris, come on!” He looked around at me as if startled out of a dream.The blond boy came toward me, bumping Morris with one shoulder and almost knocking him over again.“Listen,” Blondie said.I held up my hand like a traffic cop. “Don’t fucking touch me.”“I’m sor—”“Fuck off!” I yelled, and he backed away.Tattoo Boy was wading out to get Dinah’s hat. He grabbed it, waved it over his head, and whooped. The sun came out. Water droplets flew off the brim. I remember that. It’s clear, like a photograph.Under my shirt, Dinah was crying again.“Morris! Morris, help me!”“Her hat—”“I don’t give a flying fuck about her hat!”We pushed her back up the hill, leaving the boys on the beach. The music cut out, creating a hole, one that was somehow as loud as the Silver Bullet Band in full flight. Pushing was hard because one of the stroller’s wheels was now crooked. Dinah had gone silent under the makeshift tent. That quiet felt ominous to me. Like the sudden lack of “Heavy Music.”We were back where Hallelujah Avenue began. Except for Blondie, the boys were facing away from us, looking at the listing pontoon boat as if they were just realizing they were going to be in a world of shit when they reported back to Skip.The blond boy raised his hand tentatively. I gave him the finger, and there was nothing tentative about it.Illustration by Hokyoung KimMorris and I had been neighbors for eight months or more, but I’d been in his Airstream only a few times—very few. (Not besties, remember?) It was small and dark and cramped. There were two chairs facing the TV, one big and plump, the other small and plump. They looked like garage-sale specials. I had carried Dinah in because Morris wasn’t up to it. He sat in the big chair. Collapsed in it, more like, gasping for breath. I put Dinah in the small one and leaned on the tiny counter in the kitchenette, catching my own breath. Dinah was making a sound somewhere between a sob and a grizzle. “Bat boys,” she said, and I assumed she wasn’t talking about boys who were also superheroes.“Give me your phone,” I said. “I’ll call 911.”“No,” Morris said. “She’s better. Aren’t you, precious?”“Bet,” Dinah agreed. “Bat boys.”“They were,” Morris said, and tried a smile. One thing I could say for Morris: He always tried to look on life’s sunny side. “Probably they’re sorry now.”“Sorry,” Dinah said, then pointed at me. “Sherry!”“You got it, cabbage,” I said. “You got the head on ya.” Then, to Morris: “We should take her to urgent care, at least. There’s one on Bee Ridge.”“No need. She’ll bounce back. She’s gotten sun before and she always gets better.”Sun was the least of her problems, I thought, but she did look a little better. “At least let me clean her up.”His bathroom was the size of a telephone booth. It contained a sink, a toilet, and a shelf crammed with Dinah’s prescriptions. There was no shower; he probably took care of his daily ablutions in Happy Haven’s Courtesy Center. A damp washcloth was in the tiny sink, but it didn’t smell mildewy. Morris wasn’t the worst male housekeeper I’ve ever seen, but like most of them, Mama will take care of it was probably always somewhere in the back of his mind. I wrung out the washcloth and wiped sand and snot off Dinah’s cheeks and chin.“Does that feel good?”“Goo!”“Yes, I bet it does. Give me a smile, can you?”She did, showing her nearly toothless gums. She couldn’t chew. When Morris fed her, it was mostly yogurt, soup, and Gerber dinners. Despite the nubs under her long-sleeved shirt that would one day be breasts (assuming she lived long enough), she was little more than a baby; childhood strokes are the gift that keeps on giving.“You still should get her checked out,” I said. “I’ll drive you, if you feel like you can’t—”“No,” he said again. Then, as if it were a great realization: “We should never have gone down there.”With a mighty effort, I restrained myself from saying, “I told you so.”Give him credit: He said it for me. “You told me that. I didn’t listen.”Dinah’s eyes closed. Her head slipped against her shoulder as she sat in her chair, reminding me of the pontoon boat, sitting beached and askew.“She’s going to sleep,” I said.“Already gone. Best thing for her. Knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” He smiled. “I think I saw that in a Sominex ad.”“When you get around to taking her to the Courtesy Center, be sure to wash her hair.”“Roger that.”I realized I didn’t know if he showered with her. She could stand and walk a little (although it was more like lurching), but I had never seen her run like a normal child. Because—duh—she wasn’t normal. Could she wash herself? What would he do when she got her period? Could she get her period? What were they to each other, anyway? Did I want to know the backstory, or was that too far down the road to besties?“I could go to Frankie’s,” I said. “Could you eat something, Morris?”“Sure,” he said. “A tuna-fish sandwich would be great. Mushrooms and lots of black olives. What do you want?”“Pizza.”“Pizza gives me the runs,” Morris said. “I think it’s the oregano.”“TMI, Morris. Isn’t that what the kids say?”“If I ever was one, it’s too far back to remember. Happy to buy. There’s money under the book on my night table.”I thought of saying we’d go dutch, but I felt the first warning twinges in my back and decided that since he was the besotted fool who’d wanted to take Dinah down to the beach and show her off, he could pay for our dinner.There was well over $200 in 20s under a book called Raising Children Right. Thumbing through his stash, I realized I also had no idea where Morris got his dough. The Suncoast is pretty and its climate is temperate, but it’s not cheap. Lot rental alone at Happy Haven is almost $900 a month.“Going,” I said. “Back soon.”I called in the take-out order in my perfect-for-one Scamp trailer and had a wash. I picked the food up at Frankie’s in my Neon. Dinah looked better when I got back. She was wearing a bib (I’M A BIG GIRL NOW) and feeding herself some kind of beige baby goo. She was also wearing a good deal of it. She raised one hand in a cheery wave when I came in. “Sherry! Foo!”“Sherry with the foo, that’s correct,” I said. I got a couple of plates and a chair that went with the little fold-up table in the kitchenette. Morris and Dinah were watching the news. Shannon Behnken, in a pretty green dress, was talking about an air-conditioning scam in Tampa. The scammer wouldn’t talk to her. No surprise there.As I was cutting Morris’s sandwich in two, there was a knock at the door. Because I was up, I opened it. Blondie stood there holding Dinah’s red RIOT GRRRL hat. It was damp and looking bedraggled. Blondie looked rather bedraggled himself, but more or less sober.“I’m sor—” he began again. I snatched the hat out of his hand and swatted his arm with it.“You fucking should be.” I started to close the door.“No, let him come in,” Morris said. “If he wants to apologize, he should apologize to Dinah.”I looked around, because Morris didn’t sound like his dithery, good-natured self. He was using the same damp washcloth to clean Beef ’N Peas off Dinah’s cheeks and mouth. Her green eyes were alight in a way I’d never seen before. She pointed at the kid and said, “Bat boy!”“That’s right, a bad boy,” Morris said. “A bad boy who has something he wants to say to you.”“Where’s your chums?” I asked him as he came in. Low ceiling; he had to duck his head to keep from bumping it.“What’s a chum?” He looked honestly puzzled. “Like, fish food?”“Pals. Your pals.”“Oh! They went with Harley. It was Harley who rented the boat and it was Harley who beached it, driving like a mad motherf …” He glanced at Dinah. “Like a mad mother. I’m Colin Jensen.”“Was Harley the one who swiped Dinah’s hat or the one who called her a retard or possibly the one who threw it in the water?”He didn’t reply to that. He still smelled like a brewery, but at least he knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. “Harley will have to call his dad to pay the damages. Which he will. Harley is doing sh … stuff like that all the time.”Morris bowed his head, making sure Blondie saw the kippah, which was still sandy. The sides of his face were flushed high up on his cheekbones, and were his eyes blazing? I know that’s an overused phrase, total melodrama, but I have to say, they were. He was nothing like the ditzy Morris on the beach, but of course there was only one boy here instead of half a dozen.“I take my Yid lid off to you, boychick.”It was Blondie’s turn to flush, and I sort of liked him for that. I also liked him for having enough spine to come here. He must have asked which trailer the little retarded girl lived in … although he might not have put it just like that.“I’m sorry about that, sir. We were drunk.”“ ‘Sir’! Now it’s ‘sir’! Such a gentleman!”“Morrie, take it easy,” I said, but he didn’t seem to notice. Now I know that wasn’t Morris’s fury. He wasn’t Dinah’s father, but they were connected, all right. Oh boy, were they.“Apologize to her,” Morris said. “Me, I don’t need it. I’ve been called a Yid before. And worse.”Colin was everything Dinah was not: handsome and healthy, tanned and smoothly muscled, in his prime. Dinah had never had a prime, never would. Fish-belly white, face and belly plump with steroids, hair a thin no-color that showed her scalp. Still, he went to her and knelt before her chair. On the TV, Juliana Mejia was saying the fire danger was lower following the rain, I remember that as clearly as I remember Tattoo Boy fishing Dinah’s hat out of the drink. How those drops flew!Colin handed her the hat. “I’m sorry we scared you.”She clasped it to her chest. The TV burped static and the picture was obliterated by snow. Dinah’s brilliant-green eyes turned red. I saw it. A tiny pearl of blood bloomed at the corner of each and ran down her fat white cheeks like tears. I tell you, I saw this. Her entire lower face bulged. Her lips were forced back by a cram of crooked fangs. One of her remaining teeth—her real ones—fell out and tumbled into her lap. Her head darted forward. For a moment she looked like some kind of small but dangerous animal. Maybe a mink.“Bite him!” Morris screamed. “Go on and bite him! Schlemiel! Kuckuh!”Dinah’s head snapped from one side to the other. Just once. Colin cried out in surprise and pain. All at once the skin of his forearm, from wrist to elbow, was in bloody stripes.Dinah drew back, wiping a mixture of blood and baby food from her mouth. The cuts in Colin’s flesh—actually rips—were shallow. She could have done worse if she had wanted to, and I believe part of her wanted to. The animal part of her wanted to, but she fed Morris that part of her rage. If not, it might have been worse.Blondie had entered Morris’s trailer sobered-up enough to realize that they had done wrong, and Dinah now realized—in the dim room of her mind—that Colin had tried to make it right. Or as right as he could.Blood was pattering down onto the carpet from Colin’s wounded arm. The TV came back on, some final feel-good item about a bear cub caught in a culvert. The disfiguring bulge in Dinah’s lower face went away.“Oy!” Morris said, obviously distressed. “Look at this now, would you? Dinah, what did you do?”I wasn’t going to take off my shirt a second time. I got a dish towel from the kitchenette and wrapped it around the blond boy’s tattered arm. He didn’t even ask what she had done to him. He looked stunned. Which was how I felt.“My gosh,” Morris said. “Such a mess. What should we do, Sherry?”That seemed clear to me. I was going to urgent care after all, just not with Dinah as my passenger.It was after six on a weeknight, and there were only a few cars in the parking lot of the doc-in-the-box on Bee Ridge Road. Colin turned to me, his face as pale as Dinah’s. “What happened, lady? Did you see her?”“I did,” I said, “but I advise you not to tell whoever treats you what we saw.”“Did you know—”I shook my head. I was holding myself together, but just barely. I thought, In time I’ll be able to convince myself that never happened. But as you can see, I never forgot. Everything is as clear to me as the droplets of water that flew from Dinah’s hat when Tattoo Boy picked it up and shook it. As clear as Juliana Mejia saying the fire danger was low.“Why don’t you tell them you got those cuts when your friend Harley beached the party boat? They’ll believe that. You may be sober now, but you still smell like Milwaukee’s finest. If you tell them anything else, you’ll have to tell them how a bunch of drunks harassed a little girl and stole her hat.”“What is that girl, ma’am? Do you know?”“I don’t.”I went in with him. When the doctor saw him, Colin told him about beaching the party boat.“They look almost like animal bites,” the doctor said. “You’re going to need some liquid stitches.”Colin said, “The side of the door where I was standing was all splintered.”“That must have been it,” the doctor said. We left with a prescription for antibiotics.Outside, I told Colin he had done a good job, coming up with that story about the splintery doorway.“I just want to forget the whole thing,” he said. “You can drop me off at the Dead River. I need a real drink. Beer won’t cut it.”I went in and had one with him, paying out of Morris’s change.That night, after moonrise, Morris and I sat out in front of his Airstream on lawn chairs. Dinah was asleep inside, snoring on her cot next to Morris’s bed. We sat in silence at first, but then I asked Colin’s question.Morris shook his head. “I don’t know what she is. Or where she came from. She knocked on the door one day, dirty and wearing kid-size OshKosh overalls with one busted strap. There was a pocket in front. Inside it was a scrap of paper with her name printed on it. Just that one word. Scratched knees, black eyes, blood on her face. That was in Indiana. She asked—in her way—if she could have something to eat. My wife fed her soup and a sandwich. I was never a very good Jew. Marta was a little better. But we tried our best. Deuteronomy tells us to love the stranger, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt. Does that answer your question?”“No.”“Me either. Mostly I don’t think about it. Dinah could eat the sandwich because back then, she still had teeth.”“Wait,” I said. “Wait a darn old minute. Your wife?”“Marta died five years ago,” Morris said. “Kidney failure, God rest her.”“How long has Dinah been with you?”“It’s almost 15 years now. She was sick then, but she’s gotten sicker since then. It’s a slow process, but I can’t wait for it to be over. To be free.”“She has … what, a power over you?”“When she needs to use it, yes. I’m her safety valve. I love her, which makes it better. She loves me. I think. I’m never sure.”“She goes to a doctor?” I was thinking of all the prescriptions crowding the shelf.“Yes. I’ll move in six months or a year so her local physician doesn’t get suspicious. We’re rolling stones, Dinah and me. We’ve lived all over the country.”“Where do you get your money, Morris?” It was a question I hadn’t meant to ask.He shook his head slowly. “You don’t want to know, and you wouldn’t believe it.”“Does Dinah have something to do with it?”“Yes. That’s all I’m going to say. I tell people she’s 12 these days. I used to tell them she was 9.”I had other questions. What did she live on, really? It sure wasn’t baby food. What was the extent of the power she had over him? What happened to his wife? Was it really kidney failure? Did those green eyes of hers glow in the dark, like a cat’s? Would she die, or molt like a spider?I could have asked these questions, but decided not to. If he answered them, that might make us besties.“I should check on her,” he said, getting up. “Make sure she’s still breathing.” He climbed the cinder-block steps to his door.“Have you ever thought of putting a pillow over her face?” I asked. “Whatever she really is, I bet it wouldn’t take long. Sick as she is.”He looked at me for a few seconds, then went inside without answering. I sat and looked at the moon and thought about her big red hat with the floppy brim.Riot Grrrl.This short story appears in the June 2026 print edition.