His hands abruptly stopped trembling.

Heidi was standing on the porch again, watching him. He crossed back to her and put the pie into her hands. He was still smiling. I'm delivering the goods, he thought. And delivering the goods was yet another of the many things it was all about: His smile widened.

'Voila,' he said.

'Wow!' She bent down close to the pie and sniffed. 'Strawberry pie … my favorite!'

'I know,' Billy said, smiling.

'And still warm! Thank you!'

'I pulled off the turnpike in Stratford to get gas and the Ladies' Aid or something was having a bake sale on the lawn of the church that was right there,' he said. 'And I thought … you know … if you came to the door with a rolling pin or something, I'd have a peace offering.'

'Oh, Billy . . .' She was starting to cry again. She gave him an impulsive one-armed hug, holding the pie balanced on the tented fingers of her other hand the way a waiter balances a tray. As she kissed him the pie tilted. Billy felt his heart tilt in his chest and fall crazily out of rhythm.

'Careful!' he gasped, and grabbed the pie just as it started to slide.

'God, I'm so clumsy,' she said, laughing and wiping her eyes with the corner of the apron she had put on. 'You bring me my favorite kind of pie and I almost drop it all over your sh-sh . . .' She broke down completely, leaning against his chest, sobbing. He stroked her new short hair with one hand, holding the pie on the palm of the other, prudently away from her body should she make any sudden moves.

'Billy, I'm so glad you're home,' she wept. 'And you promise you don't hate me for what I did? You promise?'

'I promise,' he said gently, stroking her hair. She's right, he thought. It's still warm. 'Let's go inside, huh?'

In the kitchen she put the pie on the counter and went back to the sink.

'Aren't you going to have a piece?' Billy asked.

'Maybe when I finish these,' she said. 'You have one if you like.'

'After the dinner I put away?' he asked, and laughed.

'You're going to need all the calories you can pack in for a while.'

'This is just a case of no room in the inn,' he said. 'Do you want me to dry those for you?'

'I want you to go up and get into bed,' she told him. 'I'll be up right behind you.'

'All right.'

He went up without looking back, knowing she would be more likely to cut herself a slice of the pie if he wasn't there. But she probably wouldn't, not tonight. Tonight she would want to go to bed with him – might even want to make love with him. But he thought he knew how to discourage that. He would just go to bed naked. When she saw him …

And as far as the pie went …

“'Fiddle-de-dee,” said Scarlett, “I'll eat my pie tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”' He laughed at the sound of his own dismal voice. He was in the bathroom by then, standing on the scales. He looked up into the mirror and in it he saw Ginelli's eyes.

The scales said he was now all the way up to 131 again, but he felt no happiness. He felt nothing at all – except tired. He was incredibly tired. He went down the hallway that now seemed so queer and unfamiliar and into the bedroom. He tripped over something in the dark and almost fell. She had changed some of the furniture around. Cut her hair, got a new blouse, rearranged the positions of the chair and the smaller of the two bedroom bureaus – but that was only the beginning of the strangeness that was now here. It had grown somehow while he was away, as if Heidi had been cursed after all, but in a much more subtle way. Was that really such a foolish idea? Billy didn't think so. Linda had sensed the strangeness and had fled from it.

Slowly he began to undress.

He lay in bed waiting for her to come up, and instead he heard noises which, although faint, were familiar enough to tell him a story. Squeak of an upper cupboard door – the one on the left, the one where they kept the dessert plates – opening. Rattle of a drawer; subtle clink of kitchen implements as she selected a knife.

Billy stared into the darkness, heart thumping.

Sound of her footsteps crossing the kitchen again – she was going to the counter where she had set the pie down. He heard the board in the middle of the kitchen floor creak when she passed over it, as it had been doing for years.

What will it do to her? Made me thin. Turned Cary into something like an animal that after it was dead you'd make a pair of shoes out of it. Turned Hopley into a human pizza. What will it do to her?

The board in the middle of the floor creaked again as

she went back across the kitchen – he could see her, the plate held in her right hand, her cigarettes and matches in her left. He could see the wedge of pie. The strawberries, the pool of dark red juice.

He listened for the faint squeak of the hinges on the dining-room door, but it didn't come. That did not really surprise him. She was standing by the counter, looking out into the side yard and eating her pie in quick, economical Heidi-bites. An old habit. He could almost hear the fork scraping the plate.

He realized he was floating away.

Going to sleep? No – impossible. Impossible for anyone to fall asleep during the commission of murder.

But he was. He was listening for the floorboard in the middle of the kitchen floor again – he would hear it when she crossed to the sink. Running water as she rinsed her plate. The sound of her circling through all the rooms, setting thermostats and turning off lights and checking the burglar-alarm lights beside the doors – all the rituals of white folks from town.

He was lying in bed listening for the floorboard, and then he was sitting at his desk in his study in the town of Big Jubilee, Arizona, where he had been practicing law for the last six years. It was as simple as that. He was living there with his daughter, and practicing enough of the sort of law he called 'corporation shit' to keep food on the table, the rest of it was Legal Aid Society stuff. They lived simple lives. The old days – two-car garage, a groundsman three days a week, property taxes of twenty-five thousand dollars a year -were long gone. He didn't miss them, and he didn't believe Lin did either. He practiced what law he did practice in town., or sometimes in Yuma or Phoenix, but that was seldom enough and they lived far enough out of Jube to get a sense of the land around them. Linda would be going to college next year, and then he might move back in -but not, he had told her, unless the emptiness started getting to him, and he didn't think it would.

They had made a good life for themselves, and that was fine, that was just as fine as paint, because making a good life for you and yours was what it was all about.

There was a knock on his study door. He pushed back from his desk and turned around and Linda was standing there and Linda's nose was gone. No; not gone. It was in her right hand instead of on her face. Blood poured from the dark hole over her mouth.

'I don't understand, Daddy,' she said in a nasal, foghorning voice. 'It just fell off.'

He awoke with a start, beating at the air with his arms, trying to beat this vision away. Beside him, Heidi grunted in her sleep, turned over on her left side, and pulled the covers up over her head.

Little by little reality flowed back into him. He was back in Fairview. Bright early-morning sunshine fell through the windows. He looked across the room and saw by the digital clock on the dresser that it was 6:25. There were six red roses in a vase beside the clock.

He got out of bed, crossed the room, pulled his robe off its hook, and went down to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and hung his robe up on the back of the door, noticing that Heidi had gotten a new robe as well as a new blouse and haircut – a pretty blue one.

He stepped on the scales. He had gained another pound. He got into the shower and washed off with a thoroughness that was almost compulsive, soaping every part of his body, rinsing, and then soaping again. I'm going to watch my weight, he promised himself. After she's gone I'm really going to watch my weight. I'm never going to get fat the way I was again.