“That’s not my daddy.”
The little girl said it so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it over the beeping of the registers.
I was standing where I always stand, right inside the front doors of the ValuMart Supercenter on South General Bruce Drive in Temple, Texas. Blue vest. Name tag that says LORETTA. A roll of yellow smiley-face stickers in my apron pocket. I’m sixty-nine years old, and I’ve been a greeter at that store for nine years, ever since my husband Harold passed and the house got too quiet to stand.
It was a Friday. March 14th. A little after two in the afternoon. Raining that thin, cold spring rain that doesn’t know whether it wants to be winter or not.
The man was heading for the exit with a plastic bag in one hand and the little girl’s wrist in the other. Not her hand. Her wrist. He was walking fast, and her short legs couldn’t keep up, so she was half-running, half-dragging, her pink rain boots squeaking on the tile.
He was maybe thirty-five. Tall and thin. Ball cap pulled low. A gray hoodie with a stain on the front. He had the kind of face that looks like it hasn’t slept right in a long time.
And the little girl was looking straight at me.
I knew her. That was the first thing that went through my head. I knew that face. Round cheeks. Dark curls. A gap where she’d bumped her front tooth on something. I’d been giving that child stickers every Saturday morning for almost a year.
She came in with her mother at ten o’clock, regular as church. Her mother was young, wore pale blue scrubs, always looked tired and always smiled anyway. The little girl would run ahead of her and stop right in front of me and hold out her hand, palm up, like a tiny tax collector.
“Sticker lady!”
That’s what she called me. Never Loretta. Sticker lady.
But today she didn’t hold out her hand. She didn’t say sticker lady. She looked at me with her eyes all wide and wet, and she said it again, a little louder.
“That’s not my daddy. I want my mama.”
The man yanked her wrist. “Come on. We’re going.”
And something in my chest went cold and hard as a river stone.
I stepped in front of the door.
