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IN THE AUTUMN OF MARIA'S EIGHTEENTH YEAR, the year that her beloved father-amateur coin collector, retired autoworker, lapsed Catholic-died silently of liver cancer three weeks after his diagnosis, and the autumn her favorite dog killed her favorite cat on the brown, crisped grass of their front lawn, and the cold came so early that the apples on the trees froze and fell like stones dropped from heaven, and the fifth local Dominican teenager in as many months disappeared while walking home from her minimum-wage, dead-end job, leaving behind a kid sister and an unfinished journal and a bedroom in her mother's house she'd never made enough to leave-deepening the community's collective paroxysm of anxiety, which made them yell at their daughters and give out abstruse and nonsensical advice about how to avoid being a victim and boosted the sales of pepper spray and Saint Anthony pendants, and also prompted no action from the police, who said that the girls were likely runaways-the same autumn she finally figured out how to give herself an orgasm, right after the summer when she broke up with her boyfriend of two years, Ira, who had for their entire relationship been attempting to make her come with the grim resolve of a pioneer woman churning butter and failing 100 percent of the time, and she got herself one of those minimum-wage, dead-end jobs because she was saving for a bus ticket to Chicago, and she was finally hired at Phil's Outlet, where she folded cheap T-shirts and shelved overstock home goods and learned quickly to evade Phil's hands (which always seemed to brush against her body when the two of them passed each other in the bowels of the store), which is also the same autumn that Maria had started taking a shortcut home at night-in spite of her mother's warnings-through the...