"Don't let me startle you," Mr. Harvey said.

Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was startled. After I was
dead I thought about how there had been the light scent of cologne in
the air but that I had not been paying attention, or thought it was
coming from one of the houses up ahead

"Mr. Harvey, "I said.

"You're the older Salmon girl, right?"

"Yes."

"How are your folks?"

Although the eldest in my family and good at acing a science quiz, I
had never felt comfortable with adults.

"Fine," I said. I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and
the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about
fertilizer, rooted me to the spot.

"I've built something back here," he said. "Would you like to see?”

"I'm sort of cold, Mr. Harvey," I said, "and my mom likes me

home before dark."

"Its after dark, Susie," he said.

I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never told him my
name. I guess I thought my father had told him one of the embarrassing
anecdotes he saw merely as loving testaments to his children. My father
was the kind of dad who kept a nude photo of you when you were three in
the downstairs bathroom, the one that guests would use. He did this to
my little sister, Lindsey, thank God. At least I was spared that
indignity. But he liked to tell a story about how, once Lindsey was
born, I was so jealous that one day while he was on the phone in the
other room, I moved down the couch - he could see me from where he stood
- and tried to pee on top of Lindsey in her carrier. This story
humiliated me every time he told it, to the pastor of our church, to our
neighbor Mrs. Stead, who was a therapist and whose take on it he wanted
to hear, and to everyone who ever said "Susie has a lot of spunk!"
"Spunk!" my father would say. "Let me tell you about spunk," and he
would launch immediately into his Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.

But as it turned out, my father had not mentioned us to Mr. Harvey or
told him the Susie-peed-on-Lindsey story.

Mr. Harvey would later say these words to my mother when he ran into her
on the street: "I heard about the horrible, horrible tragedy. What was
your daughter's name, again?"

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