—WHEN THE LINE’S BEEN SIGNED, YOU’RE SOMEONE ELSE

 

Scouts

 

A couple of uniformed girl scouts, nine or ten, are outside your door with bags of peppermint cookies, knocking relentlessly, like Father Time himself.

Neither one resembles your daughter, though it’s nevertheless heart-crushing because they are about the age your daughter was when she slid in the river and kept on sliding with the current.

At last, you answer, pull the door open slowly, as if it’s the lid of a coffin.

The girls have a prepared spiel and deliver it like newscasters. If they sell the most, there are all kinds of prizes, a sunlit future.

You buy every pack of cookies they have, forty-seven of them, and when they’ve skipped off your porch, you plunge each one down the garbage disposal, run the motor and watch the mush of crumbs disappear for good.