Andrea considered her options. She could come clean, but as clever as Ruth was, she wasn’t sure her daughter could handle the complete truth. By the time she was Ruth’s age, Andrea had already learned how to pick locks, worked as a roper for three different con men in the neighborhood, worked the competition by planting evidence the cops could use, worked the cops to eliminate her competition, run fifteen different restaurant scams to score free food, and lost a brother to violence. Last year, for the fourth-grade science fair, Ruth had made a volcano.
