That was when I heard someone say, “My, my, my. Look at what I’ve found here.”
When I opened my eyes, there she was, standing right in front of me, a lady holding a closed black umbrella with a silver handle. I didn’t know from where she had come. No train had pulled in. She was suddenly there, as if she had taken shape from a shadow.
“Are you waiting for a train, missy?” she asked.
There were little brown dots over the crests of the Umbrella Lady’s cheeks and on both sides of her chin. They weren’t freckles. They looked like someone with a sharply pointed brown Magic Marker had dabbed her face when she was asleep and she couldn’t wash it off. There was even a very small one at the tip of her nose.
Her eyes reminded me of large purple-blue marbles like the ones in a flowerpot Mama had kept on a shelf by the dining-room window. The marbles went around the inside rim. There hadn’t been a flower in it for a long time. Daddy had called it “a potted gravesite” and said, “It’s just dirt, not very attractive, even with those silly marbles you’ve placed in it so carefully. What’s the point of a pot of decorated dirt, Lindsey?”
Mama had seemed not to notice or care. Maybe she was always expecting a new flower would just appear, because she would often pause to look at it. She did that so often that I grew into the habit of looking at it first thing in the morning, too, hoping the flower would be there.
“Yes, I am waiting for a train,” I said now. “Thank you for asking. I’m waiting for my father to return first, and then we’ll board.”
I did that quite perfectly, I thought. I’m a little lady. Mama would flash one of her recently infrequent smiles if she had heard me. Part of homeschooling was something she called social graces. She would show me how to walk and sit and greet people. If I did it right, she’d clap and hug me. I knew I wouldn’t get that from a teacher in public or even private school.
Lately, however, whenever she had smiled, she looked like she had just risen and was surprised it was daytime, even if she had been up for hours and hours. And then her smile would float off and evaporate. She would return to what Daddy had called “her face drenched in sleepwalking.” She had cut back on my homeschooling, too. Sometimes it barely lasted an hour before she would get that far-off look in her eyes. I had to do a lot more to amuse myself.
The Umbrella Lady glanced behind her and then down toward the other end of the station platform before she looked longer and with more interest at me. She was tall, with shoulders that seemed as wide as Daddy’s. In the dim light, her face and neck were yellowish white.
“Where did he go? The station is closed.”
She sounded angry, and I wondered if she was some sort of train-station clerk. She wasn’t wearing any sort of uniform, nor did she have a badge. The hem of her gray dress stuck out from under her heavy wool black coat. Her black shoes had thick, wide heels, and she had black socks that went up under her skirt.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said. “He wanted to buy us things we need right now.”
“What things?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to list anything. “Things. We don’t have very much with us. I know he wanted a newspaper, and he was getting me some books.”
She started to smile but abruptly stopped and looked quite upset.
“When is he supposed to come for you? There are no more trains tonight. And why wouldn’t he take you to buy things, if that’s what he’s doing?” She asked her questions with her head tilted a little, as if she was testing me to see how I would answer, if I knew the answer.
“I don’t know,” I said. I had begun to wonder that myself. Mama would never, ever leave me alone like this, and she would surely be very angry at him for doing so now. But I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her anything, ever again, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell the Umbrella Lady.
“Did he say anything else?” she asked. “Well?” She sounded like someone who had run out of patience and would soon be stamping her feet.
I looked again for him. I didn’t want to say anything that would get him in trouble. Maybe this lady really was some sort of policewoman in a disguise. I recalled Daddy accusing Mama of being one when she had confronted him with something on our credit-card bill, but I had no idea what it was or why she was so angry.
“My father said, ‘Work on this until I come back,’ ” I said, and took out my coloring book to show her. Maybe that would stop her from asking all these questions, I thought.
She plucked it out of my fingers and looked at it, turning it around to look at the back and then the front again.
“Is this brand-new?” She brought it to her face and closed her eyes. “It smells brand-new and still has the sticker that tells its price on the cover.” She looked very suspicious.
Did she think Daddy had stolen it?
“Yes. He bought it for me today or yesterday, and a new box of crayons, but he didn’t give them to me until we were here and I was sitting on this bench.”
“Why didn’t he give them to you on the train?” she asked. She looked even more upset now. “You’d think he’d know enough to do that. For children, it’s boring just sitting on a train. Well?” she followed again when I didn’t answer instantly. She scowled and looked quite disapproving.
I shrugged. It wasn’t a mystery and certainly nothing to get as upset over as she was. “He forgot and fell asleep. Then I fell asleep, too. He wouldn’t wake me up just to give them to me.”
She paused, her scowl slowly disappearing. Then she took a deep breath that lifted her bosom up against her coat. She tilted her head back, as if she wanted to look down at me from a great height.
“Sleep is the best way to travel,” she said, nodding. “Most children will if they have to travel long.”
She started to smile again but stopped.
“But giving you things to do is just as good. He should know that. Even my father knew that, and he wasn’t fond of children. But fathers and mothers were children once, too. They should remember all that when they have children of their own. Some people turn their childhood memories off like a faucet because they can’t stand remembering, and some people should shut them off because they never stop babbling about how much better things were then. They can rupture your ears.”
She paused and looked harder at me.
“Which one are you? Someone who can’t stop remembering or someone who should?”
I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell her I had memories I wanted to stuff in a hole in the ground. It would surely make me cry, and she would have many more questions.
“I don’t know. I turn my faucet off and on, but I’m too young to remember much yet.”
“Very clever,” she said, nodding. “You know how to avoid an answer, and yet you are very honest. I like a little girl who is honest and clever at the same time.”
She flipped through the coloring book and continued nodding, with a look that was now full of approval and delighted surprise.
“The colors you chose are perfect for each and every thing you’ve colored in, and not a color out of the lines. It’s all very good,” she said. “If I were going to give it a grade, I’d give it an A plus, plus.”