“Ma’am? Is correct address? You are — lady of the house?”

She laughed, nervously. She supposed she was meant to laugh.

With grating mock-gravity the voice persevered: “You are — resident here, ma’am? I am — welcome here? Yes?”

It was a joke. One of Anton Kruppe’s awkward jokes. He’d succeeded in frightening Hadley though probably that hadn’t been his intention, probably he’d just meant to make her laugh. It was embarrassing that she’d been genuinely frightened for she had known perfectly well that Anton was coming of course. And who else but Anton Kruppe would show up like this, with a Halloween pumpkin for a head?

Hadley scarcely knew the man. She felt a stab of dismay, that she’d invited him to drop by. Impulsively she’d invited him and of course he’d said yes.

At the co-op, Anton was the most eager and courteous of workers. He was the one to joke with customers, and to laugh at his own jokes; he was boyish, vulnerable and touching; his awkward speech was itself a kind of laughter, not fully intelligible yet contagious. For all his clumsiness you could tell that he was an exceptionally intelligent man. Hadley could see that he’d gone to painstaking trouble carving the Halloween pumpkin-head: it was large, bulbous, weirdly veined and striated, twice the size of a normal man’s head, with triangular eyes, triangular nose, grinning mouth studded with fang-teeth. Somehow, he’d managed to force the thing over his head — Hadley couldn’t quite see how.

“How ingenious, Anton! Did you — carve it yourself?”

This was the sort of inane question you asked Anton Kruppe. For you had to say something, to alleviate the strain of the man’s aggressive-doggy eagerness to please, to impress, to make you laugh.