If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories
Read If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories Online
Authors: Laura Kasischke
If a Stranger Approaches You
If
a
Stranger
Approaches
You
Stories
Laura Kasischke
© 2013 by Laura Kasischke
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:
Managing Editor
Sarabande Books, Inc.
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kasischke, Laura, 1961–
If a stranger approaches you : stories / Laura Kasischke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-936747-51-1
1. Short stories. I. Title.
PS3561.A6993I34 2013
813'.54—dc23
2012029742
Cover art: “Oh, happy day!” by Maggie Taylor. © Maggie Taylor, 2009.
Cover and text design by Kirkby Gann Tittle.
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
 | This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. |
 | The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. |
For Antonya Nelson~
best storyteller and friend in the world
How can I explain our reaction. We all recognized Toby. But it couldn’t be Toby. Still, it was!
from “The Boy Who Didn’t Know He Died”
Fate Magazine,
June 1966
Where I awoke I stayed not;
yet where I tarried, that I can never tell thee …
Wagner’s Tristan
Somebody’s Mistress, Somebody’s Wife
Search Continues for Elderly Man
“If a Stranger Approaches You about Carrying a Foreign Object with You onto the Plane”
If a Stranger Approaches You
T
hey’d all warned her not to snoop. Why bother to read a teenage daughter’s diary or rifle her dresser drawers since you’ll have no idea what to do with the knowledge you’ll gain if you gain it? Aren’t you better off not knowing if there’s something you don’t want to know?
And, in truth, there’d been no real reason to snoop. No changes in behavior. No failing grades. No friends who seemed to be bad influences.
But Mona was a mother who needed reassurance, and Abigail was a sixteen-year-old girl. Dear Old Dad had flown the coop, out of the picture now—living out a whole new life with a whole new family in another state—and it was a different world from the one Mona had grown up in. She’d read about huffing, about cutting, about meth. And of course all that sex, oral and otherwise. If there was something she should know, Mona was Abigail’s mother, and she should know it.
And so much the better if there was nothing.
That was the best case scenario, Mona thought as she opened the bottom drawer after the other three drawers, which had held nothing but the usual underwear and leggings, junk jewelry, nail polish, striped socks. She’d been a bit annoyed to find a half-eaten
Hershey’s bar, unwrapped—and this after all the noise Mona had made about the ants last summer and how nothing,
nothing,
was to be eaten upstairs. But she just put it back where she’d found it, so as not to have to confess she’d found it.
The bottom drawer seemed to be just more socks and bras and panties. (How had the girl managed to accumulate so much?) Simple things. Modest. No black bras. No thongs. Mona rarely saw her daughter’s underwear now that Abigail did her own laundry, folded it herself, put it away. She’d been so good about such things since Mona’s hours had been upped at work and some nights she couldn’t even get home until after eight o’clock.
Abigail was a good daughter, an A student, had never been in any trouble. …
But Mona also knew how wrong things could go when they went wrong. She’d been a teenager. She’d come dangerously close to the edge of something, herself, at that age. An older boy. Scott. That car of his. And the booze. And the pot. This had been 1977, and they were all getting stoned and drunk back then. Even the really good kids. Maybe even especially the good kids. It had been five years before Nancy Reagan’s
Just Say No,
and they were all saying yes, yes, yes.
And her own parents had been oblivious. She and Scott would come home right on time on a Saturday night, looking like all-Americans. Scott would shake her father’s hand, make small talk for a few minutes with her mother, and then he and Mona would head to the basement, already stoned out of their minds, and proceed to polish off the bottle of Jack Daniels Mona had in her purse, and then have sex on the vinyl couch down there in the light of some innocent TV show, sound turned way up.
Mona had gotten all A’s, too. President of the choir. Active member of her church youth group. Apparently they’d never bothered to look in her dresser drawers, where they’d have found the empties, the little pot pipe whittled into a hummingbird, maybe a baggie with a few buds, the box of condoms.
It was because of this that Mona was now on her knees, sorting
through the bras and panties in her daughter’s bottom drawer. Now, she was really feeling around, not expecting to find anything, but also not surprised when she found it.
Later, Mona would wonder why this thing she’d felt had seemed strange to her at all. At first, it was just another silky handful of something among the other silky handfuls.
But with a lump in it.
Still, it wasn’t that solid.
No larger than an acorn. Without even the weight of an acorn. How easily Mona might have passed over it, taken it for a scrunchie, or a dried rose saved from the Track & Field banquet, some Pep Club carnation, some other of the ten million floral keepsakes a girl that age will get.