The third story in the collection continues to develop the theme of The Ambiguity Between Justice and Vengeance, but it does so in a slightly different way than the previous two stories. Where Jasmin’s and Zazza’s murders were morally ambiguous because Maud seemed to be fighting for something she truly believed in—the protection of her home and the happiness of a man she once loved—this time, Maud’s motive is primarily her wish for a pleasant Christmas holiday. However, the attorney Maud murders in this story is a much clearer villain than Jasmin or Zazza. This contrast reverses the usual moral formula, asking readers to consider how justice might be enacted by someone with deeply skewed motivations.

As with Jasmin and Zazza, the attorney is characterized through alcohol use, arrogance, and disregard for the needs of other people—but unlike Maud’s two female victims, the attorney’s actions are unambiguously villainous. He is constantly drunk to a degree that makes him “[stink] like a distillery” (94), and he berates his wife with foul language and injures her so badly that she ends up needing an ambulance. He is an extreme example of The Impact of Self-Centered Thinking, and his murder is portrayed as comparatively more deserved. The lack of ambiguity surrounding the attorney’s behavior challenges readers to question whether Maud’s actions—however calculated—might serve a form of vigilante justice.

Maud’s motivation for killing him, however, is not that he is an abusive monster who causes great suffering to his wife. There are moments when the fact of the abuse seems to bother her because of the noise the abuse creates. To Maud, peace and quiet are the most valuable commodities in the world, and it is his threat to these commodities that she must eliminate. This is conveyed not only by Maud’s thoughts in the narrative present but by the parallel deaths of the attorney and Charlotte. The repetition of stairway violence also signals Maud’s belief that permanent removal is the only viable solution to persistent disruptions while also suggesting that Maud may have murdered her sister.

Maud’s fuzzy recollections of Charlotte’s dramatic fall down the apartment building’s staircase are phrased in a way that creates doubts about whether she tried to save Charlotte or impulsively murdered her burdensome sister. The use of a rhetorical question at the end of each statement casts doubt on its accuracy: “Maud had called out—or had she? She’d definitely tried to grab hold of her sister, hadn’t she?” (80). This use of uncertain language destabilizes the reader’s trust in Maud’s account and is especially striking because Maud’s memory elsewhere in the story is impressively precise—she recalls vivid, happy memories as well as detailed observations about Zazza, her former pupil. In this case, however, Maud only remembers the feeling of her sister’s nightgown against her hands—but whether she was pushing or pulling is something she cannot or will not recall. This ambiguity mirrors the narrative tone: clinical, distant, and devoid of overt judgment.

It is implied that Maud murdered Charlotte, reaching her breaking point after decades of obligation to her ill sister. Maud feels her peace was interrupted by the care she performed for her sister, believing it prevented her from controlling her own life. Now, the attorney’s abuse of his wife intrudes on Maud’s life and prevents her from maintaining the kind of peace and quiet she depends on. Like the earlier death of Charlotte, the attorney’s fall is staged to appear accidental, suggesting a pattern in Maud’s methods even if the truth about Charlotte’s fate remains ambiguous. The parallelism is grimly poetic, and Maud seems almost comforted by the symmetry—a sign that her identity is increasingly structured around retaliatory action.

The extended exploration of Maud’s relationship with Charlotte in this story creates both empathy and horror. Details like the lack of heat in the apartment and Maud’s inability to leave the apartment overnight demonstrate the extent to which Charlotte’s presence in her life curtained Maud’s ability to truly live. That she would be driven to murder illustrates how crushing the situation was for Maud and implies that the events of her early years may have broken something in her, resulting in her present isolation and utter lack of regard for human life. This story retroactively reframes the earlier murders as the fallout from years of repressed rage and emotional starvation.

The darkness of these revelations and of the attorney’s abuse of his wife are balanced against the story’s lighter elements, such as Maud’s bizarre and comical assault on the grocery clerk, as she continues to exploit people’s stereotypes about the elderly. When Maud stabs the pin into the young grocery clerk’s buttock, her motive is his supposed disrespect to her. Her evidence is thin, and both her conclusion and her resulting action demonstrate self-centered thinking. To Maud, her viewpoint is the only reality, and she feels perfectly justified in resorting to physical violence. She does not seem to recognize the irony that, while rightly condemning the attorney’s violence, she feels entitled to use violence herself in defense of her moral convictions, blurring the line between justice and personal retribution. The pin scene serves as a microcosm of Maud’s worldview: Disrespect, no matter how minor, demands punishment.

Though the story plays Maud’s interaction with the grocery clerk for dark humor, this moment also marks a narrative turning point. Her violent response to a mundane encounter—“Maud thought his grin had something of a sneer about it. With considerable self-control, she nodded to indicate that she would like some slices of the ham behind the glass of the chill counter” (83)—suggests that her perception is beginning to distort. The idea that a polite, neutral interaction might be read as a personal offense hints at Maud’s growing detachment from social norms and increasing paranoia. This isn’t simply a comic exaggeration of elderly misanthropy; it reflects how Maud’s internal logic has begun to misfire. Behind the humor is a creeping sense that something is deeply wrong, even if Maud herself doesn’t recognize it.

After her murder of the attorney with her walker—a darkly comic choice of murder weapon similar to her murder of Zazza with a cane—Maud feigns confusion and weakness again. A sympathetic neighbor puts an arm around her and gently leads her back into her apartment, never dreaming that this “helpless” elderly woman is a cold-blooded murderer. This reinforces the collection’s arguments about The Mistake of Stereotyping the Elderly. Tursten continues to wield satire with a sharp edge, inviting laughter even as she exposes how ageism can be manipulated for lethal ends.

Another important thread in this story is the idea that Maud’s violence emerges from a lifelong entrapment in domestic obligation. Her years of caretaking for Charlotte conditioned her to accept the erosion of her autonomy, and now, in her late life, she is unwilling to tolerate even the smallest threat to it. Her repeated use of stairs as a setting for liberation—first from Charlotte, now from the abusive attorney—suggests that she sees violence as a tool for reclaiming space and silence. Maud’s own perspective reveals this craving for detachment: “She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know about it, which was what she would have liked to do: avoid getting involved in The Problem. All she wanted was peace and quiet” (87). What Maud wants most is not justice for others, but total freedom from emotional and environmental interference. The implication is that the real damage was done long ago, and Maud’s present-day vengeance is a grotesque form of reparation.