The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman

was sure she had in the pantry. Inventories were tighter, more closely monitored, in the other households. Sean, though, sometimes bought a few things out of his allowance, and he had added a can of deviled ham and ready-to-eat baked beans to the sack that Gwen carried. Now he took them out and placed them on Chicken George’s shelves.
    “They’ll just get stolen,” Tim said.
    But everyone understood what Sean was doing. He was acting as if Chicken George was okay, as if he would return. And soon, much sooner than we expected, he did. It was a raw February day, with plenty of winter left to go, when Mickey saw, or said she saw, a plume of smoke rising from his house. We trooped over there, our feet sticking in the muddy paths, which had been snow-covered only a week or so earlier.
    When we arrived, Chicken George was inside his cabin. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was tolerable, a wispy heat emanating from the old woodstove. He wore multiple layers of clothes and fingerless gloves.
    “Where you been?” he asked, as if we were the ones who disappeared. “What did you bring me?”

Chapter Eleven
    W hen the man in 17F rings his call button and announces he is pretty sure he has thrown his dentures into one of the trash bags by accident, McKey need only to glance at her less-senior colleague.
    “I don’t see why—” Wendy begins.
    “Seniority has its privileges,” she says. McKey has no idea if seniority applies in this situation, but she isn’t about to go scrabbling through the trash because some geezer can’t keep track of his own teeth. It isn’t her problem. She has a full set of teeth.
    “Seniority is a terrible way to determine who does what,” Wendy grumbles.
    “Yeah, that’s what everybody says when they don’t have it.”
    McKey has been with the same airline fifteen years now and has lineholder status, which means she usually knows her schedule a month in advance. Wendy is still a reserve, being plugged into the schedule where she fits. Maybe she’d be a better sport about working her way up if she weren’t also McKey’s age, possbily older. She looks older, that’s for sure. The airlines hire lots of over-forty attendants these days, women reentering the workforce as nests empty or husbands decamp. The airlines probably think that mothers and wives are well suited to waiting on a group of people who regress to childhood—and a surly, drunken childhood at that—the minute they board an airplane. McKey isn’t so sure. She’s neither wife nor mother, yet she is good at this, has been from the start.
    Oh, she was briefly married in her twenties. But it was hard to count that as a marriage, even a starter marriage. They married out of inertia. Inertia and the desire to have a party. They were twenty-eight, long enough out of college and close enough to thirty to feel a little desperate about the numbing sameness of day-to-day life. In the back of McKey’s mind, she entertained the idea, even as she was planning the wedding, that it was better to marry before thirty and later divorce than to hit thirty without ever having been married.
    But, mainly, she wanted a party, something to break up the tedium. The marriage worked for a while and then it didn’t, like a cheap car. They parted with relative ease, given that they didn’t own their house and their possessions had never really mingled. It was shocking to realize how few things they had acquired jointly. A mattress, some of the kitchen goods. If it hadn’t been for the wedding, complete with registry, there would have been almost nothing to split. They pretended generosity toward each other, when the fact was that neither one wanted to pack up all that shit. A waffle maker that made heart-shaped waffles. A George Foreman grill. A rice maker! A goddamn rice maker. McKey realized she had made a very human error, filling out those registries. She thought she was going to change, that in acquiring a rice maker and a waffle iron, she might