But this wasn’t about Eve, was it?

No. This was about fuckin’ Adam.

But even invisible she had dressed with great care for this night’s work.

The thick, wraparound praying mantis sunglasses distorted her face, and she intentionally overapplied the lipstick and the makeup. She wore her cheap woolly wig, not her good wig. The cheap wig was the color of dust and complemented her baggy oatmeal-colored sweatsuit and her scuffed tennies.

But the genius touch was under the sweatsuit. A custom-made padding suit called a body pod by the costume designers who’d sewn it together at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, who then had rented it to the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin.

Which was where Angel had stolen it from a prop wardrobe, along with a pair of black tennis shoes with two-inch-lifts.

The tight-fitting body stocking was made of Lycra with generous foam pads expertly sculpted to add the appearance of thirty pounds to her hips, rear end, and stomach.

The rig was light but bulky and made walking feel like being swaddled in inflated balloons.

She’d topped off her outfit with a flimsy navy blue nylon jacket stamped on the left chest and across the back with the scripted name of St. Paul’s minor league baseball team: Saints.

So Angel rolled when she walked with the round-shouldered gait of a person who’d accepted the extra pounds of cottage cheese slung on her butt and hips and thighs. A full green cloth shopping bag dangled from one hand and bumped behind her on the concrete.

Layered in cheap cloth like a bag lady, she appeared odd moving along main street on the blazing late afternoon. The pedestrian traffic was smartly turned out sleeveless, in shorts, showing bare arms, expensive orthodontics, and tanned legs. Shoppers cruising the boutiques and antique stores did not look twice at Angel. She suggested the animated contents of an overstuffed trash closet that had burst out onto the street. People saw throwaway clothes on a throwaway person whose bottom-heavy body had veered out of control.