And that’s when she notices the man breaking into her car.

“Hey!” she screams, before she can stop herself. She looks up and down the street. No one to hear her. Or help.

The man looks up, around, but not at her. He is fortyish, white, dressed shabbily in a hooded green sweatshirt and stained chinos. He has something that looks like a crowbar in his right hand. He looks a little too old to be doing what he was doing, but there he was, trying to jimmy the passenger door of her not-even-close-to-being-paid-off lemon-yellow Honda.

Her fear folds into anger. “Hey! Are you deaf? Get the fuck away from my car!”

At this, the man staggers back a few feet, finds her in the twisted landscape of his vision. He is clearly drunk. The f-word seemed to register something with him. As did her volume. “Wuss your prollem, bitch?” he says.

Bitch? She is incredulous. “That’s my car, bitch. You’re my problem.” What the hell had come over her? What was she doing? She should be keeping as low a profile as possible, and here she was threatening a car thief. On the other hand, she isn’t all that anxious to call a cop. She shoves her right hand into her coat pocket and takes a nervous step forward. “Now take a friggin’ hike. We’ll pretend this never happened.”

The man glares at her, obviously weighing the possibility that she might be some kind of militant career woman feminist type with a Mauser .380 in her pocket, just waiting for some fuckup to cross her path.

The ploy works. Without a word, the man slowly drops his hands to his sides and begins to back his way up the sidewalk, not taking his eyes from her. When he nears the corner, he shakes the crowbar at her in a final, pathetic attempt at caveman bravado, before disappearing down an alley.

That is it, she thinks. One hundred percent friggin’ it. Doesn’t matter what it takes, how it happens. Even if she does it with less than fifty thousand dollars. Even if she has to disobey a court order and live with Isabella on the run for the rest of their lives. She was outta here.

Fuck this place.

She walks over to the passenger door. No damage. Well, no damage that wasn’t already there. All she can think about now is sinking into a hot bubble bath, a glass of herbal tea at her side, Andre Previn on the stereo, something in the oven on slow. Nearly heaven. Only Isabella frolicking amid the bubbles, her laughter echoing off the old fixtures, would make it so.

She brushes the snow off the door key, inserts it into the lock, turns it, and—

The first thing she smells, as the man’s hand closes around her mouth, is DL Hand Cleaner. Her father had been a tinkerer when she was very small, fixing the family cars himself, rebuilding lawn mower engines, and when he would hoist her upon his lap before dinner she would smell the rich, petroleum-based cleaner mixed in with his cigar smoke.

But this time, the smell does not make her feel warm and protected.

This time it is making her sick.

“Who the fuck you think you’re talking to, bitch?”

It is her car thief, back to assert himself for real.

She tries to scream but the sound is muffled by his grimy half-glove. She struggles, and, for her trouble, she is clubbed to the ground with a heavy forearm. The earth reaches up to her—icy and hard and unforgiving. She lands on her left shoulder, rolls to her right; dazed and disbelieving, thoroughly demeaned.

Then, she hears shouting.

Hey, someone yells.

HEY!

Footsteps approaching. She sees a pair of brown hiking boots, the cuffs of denim jeans. She hears more shouting, but the words are unintelligible, considering the steam shovel that had just begun work inside her brain.

Then, footsteps crunching the snow, staggering away.

Then, silence. God her head hurt. Am I alone? she wonders.

No.

Strong hands grab her by the arms; strong arms lift her to her feet.

A moment of vertigo, then everything comes swimming back. Center Street, in front of her. Her car, roughly where she’d left it before her quick trip to the ground. A total stranger beside her, holding her up.

“Are you okay?” the owner of the strong hands asks.

The words echo in her head for a few moments before registering. She takes a deep breath, and looks. It is a man. A nice-looking young man.

A very nice-looking young man.

And, it appears, he has just saved her life.

18

LAKEWOOD, OHIO

TWENTY-SIX YEARS EARLIER . . .

Lydia del Blanco sits on a thirdhand rattan love seat, by the front window of her small apartment on Lake Avenue, a glass of warming lemonade in her hand. It is just after noon on the Fourth of July and the sheers are blowing in the windows on gentle waves of sweet alyssum, followed by a lush duet of just-mowed grass and smoldering briquettes.

Fina is on the living room floor, teaching her little brother how to fold paper napkins for the picnic they will have later. A car cruises slowly up Lake Avenue and Lydia can hear the strains of a Def Leppard song float up from the car’s stereo. She begins to cry, softly, a strange habit of hers of late.

She cries because she has survived a brutal marriage.

She cries because her two children are healthy and bright and curious and beautiful.

She cries because they are safe here. It has been three years since she has seen her ex-husband. Two years since she’s had to hang up on him in the middle of the night and park herself by the front door, dozing off with a baseball bat in her lap.

She cries because, at long last, she and her children have a real life. Sure, the clothes are from Value City, not Higbee’s, and, true, she herded her little brood into McDonald’s more often than she liked, but they were making ends meet.

Plus, for the first time in her life, she has four hundred dollars saved. Four hundred. A miracle. It is stashed in the living room inside her favorite book of all time: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The dream house with a yard? Now that is a still a few years away, she thinks.

She senses a presence, looks around to see that Fina is standing in front of her. A very concerned Fina.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, honey?”

“You okay, Mom?”

Am I okay? Lydia thinks. What does she mean? Lydia looks behind her daughter. Her son is standing there, grave apprehension narrowing his small face. Then it hits her. The tears. They think she is crying because she hurts.

“Come here.”

The children crowd around. She wraps her arms around them, holds them close. Her daughter, the tall, slender tomboy. Her son, the solid little man.

“Hey,” she says, breaking the huddle, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. “Who wants ice cream?”

The boy and the girl both raise their hands. She finds her purse in the dining room, hands them two dollars.

“Come right back,” Lydia says. “We’re leaving in an hour.”

“Okay, Mom,” her daughter says.

As the back door closes, Lydia walks to the front window. She looks out, watching her children walk down the steps, hand in hand, then down the sidewalk toward Dinardo’s Superette, two blocks away. In an hour, the three of them will head to Edgewater Park to stake their place on the beach in order to watch the big fireworks display later.

Lydia busies herself, retrieving the basket from the hall closet, counting out napkins, plastic forks, paper cups. They will have hot dogs, potato salad, and root beer, her children’s favorites. Hers too, if she had to confess. Of all her talents, the culinary arts were screamingly absent. Maybe one day.

Let’s see, she thinks, is that everything? No. They’d need mosquito spray, of course. On the windowsill over the sink. She closes the wicker picnic basket, lugs it to the kitchen. When she turns the corner, her heart leaps into her throat.