Free If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke

arm around her waist, but Melody had been moving fast and the force of his intercepting her caused her to stumble over his arm to her knees. When she tried to get to her feet again he had to throw his weight into it to keep her down.
    “Let me up!” she yelled, too loud. They were only yards from the front door, and some girl’s mother was standing just on the other side of it, so Tony Harmon put his hand over his wife’s mouth and pushed her into the carpet. They lay like that for quite a while. The doorbell rang one more time, and then he heard voices. Musthave been the fat one again. “The girls are around back,” someone said, and then there was the sound of another car pulling into the driveway.
    Melody was panting, furious, but if she’d really wanted to she could have bitten his hand, the one covering her mouth, and she didn’t. He felt grateful and a little sad, somehow, that she didn’t. He stood up then and pulled her to her feet, and when he said, “Get upstairs and stay there or I’m going to make a scene nobody around here will ever forget,” it almost made him weep, the way she did it, the little slumping resignation of her thin shoulders, as if he’d said it in such a way she wouldn’t dream of refusing.
    Had he?
    One of the earrings had fallen off and it lay near the toe of his shoe on the carpet. He picked it up and handed it to her and said, “I’ll be right up.”
    Tony stepped outside, where the attractive one and the fat one were standing in exactly the same attitude in which he’d first encountered them, though now they were in the backyard instead of the driveway. The girls were still running around in some kind of choreographed chaos that must have been a game, the rules of which they’d internalized. “Oh, hi there,” the attractive one said. “Must have been a good party, I guess.”
    “Yeah,” Tony said, nodding and finding himself better able to smile casually than he had been a few hours before. He put his hands in his pockets in what he thought would appear to be a fatherly and ordinary manner. “I think the girls burned off some energy. Ate a lot of cake.”
    “Oh, that’s great,” the fat one said. “Thanks for having them.”
    “Hey,” he said, “thanks for bringing them. My daughter made out like a bandit.” Tony nodded in the direction of the laundry basket full of presents she’d ripped into before they’d lit the candles on her cake. “Oh,” he said as if he’d just remembered something. “You know, I wanted to ask you if it might be possible to send my daughter off for a sleepover with one of yours tonight. Melody and I have some, well—stuff to iron out, and. …” Both women began tonod gravely and pleasantly at the same time, confirming what he’d known all along, that they were privy to every detail of his marital troubles.
    “Oh, she’s welcome to come with us,” the attractive one said.
    “Well,” the fat one said, “as a matter of fact, we were going to invite any of the girls who wanted—”
    “That would be great,” Tony said, shaking his head and sighing. “That would help so much.”
    “Well, why doesn’t she just come home with us now. The girls can take a swim in our pool, and then—”
    “If I picked her up about, say, ten o’clock tomorrow morning, would that—?”
    “She can just spend the day, too, if she wants to!”
    Tony Harmon called his daughter over and told her the plan, and her reaction was simply to hop up and down on one foot cheering.
    “I’ll go inside and ask Melody to get a few things for her,” Tony said. “You know, jammies, toothpaste.”
    The matrons were all smiles. A few more just like them found their ways into the backyard (“Oh, here you are. I rang the doorbell—”) and each shook his hand heartily and then stood uneasily in his backyard, watching the girls dash around shouting unintelligible words at one another. Beetleblood. Askmedoodle. Everyone commented on the heat, but no one