She paused and squinted at me.
“It’s almost all done. You must have been working on it carefully for hours and hours. Has it been hours?” she asked suspiciously.
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t have a watch.”
“Oh, you don’t need a watch to know you’ve been here long. We all have a built-in tick-tock. You know just when it’s morning. You know just when you’re hungry, and you know just when you’re tired enough to go to sleep. What else would a little girl like you need to know?”
“I need to know when my father will return,” I said. I almost added, thank you very much, but didn’t because it would surely make her feel foolish.
She smiled. I guess I was making her happy, and she looked like someone who needed to be happier. Maybe that was why she stopped to talk to me. She couldn’t be pleased about her graying light-brown hair. I thought she had it cut too short. It was so thin that I could see the little bumps on her scalp because of how the station-platform lights shone on and behind her head.
“You’re such a smart little girl. Some parents can’t handle their children when they are so smart. They ask too many questions. For them, it’s like too much rain. You can’t ask for no rain, can you? That’s a drought, and nothing will grow, just like if children don’t ask questions, they won’t grow.”
I didn’t know what to say. She sounded right, but I had never thought of questions that way, and for a moment I worried that I hadn’t asked enough and I wouldn’t grow. I looked anxiously at her, expecting her to tell me more. She seemed very wise.
“Did your parents ever tell you to stop asking questions?”
“No,” I said quickly. I almost added, but often they would act like I hadn’t asked anything.
“I see,” she said.
“Are you waiting for a train, too?” I asked. Maybe she was hoping she could ride with Daddy and me.
“What?” She smiled softly. “Is that what you think? I told you there are no more trains tonight.”
I shrugged. “Maybe you’re waiting for someone who’s coming on a train. Are you?”
“There are no trains leaving, and there are no trains coming tonight. But you are inquisitive. See? You are full of questions. That’s good. You’re bound to grow up fast,” she said, and then paused. “Maybe too fast. That kind of little girl gets into big trouble if she is not guided correctly.”
I didn’t know what she meant. How do you grow up too fast? And how could she say there would be no more trains? Daddy told me we were getting off to get on another one. She just doesn’t know, I thought. Daddy had the train schedule in his pocket, didn’t he?
She handed my coloring book back to me and stood straighter, pulling her shoulders back but keeping both palms down on the handle of her umbrella. She looked left and right again. We were still alone on the train platform, and the only thing I heard was a car horn far off to my right, sounding mournful and sad, like a lost goose. We often heard them over the lake near our house.
“There’s probably nothing sadder in the world than a bird losing its sense of direction,” Mama once told me when we were both sitting outside and listening. “A panicked bird will fly in circles until it dies.”
We couldn’t see the birds, so I wondered how she knew any had lost their sense of direction. I sort of felt like that right now. I knew Mama had felt like that often.
There wasn’t anything nice about where I was right now. There was nothing pretty to look at or interesting to hear. The bench was feeling hard and uncomfortable, and I was tired of talking. I didn’t like what I smelled around me, either. It made my stomach growl. I thought the Umbrella Lady would realize all that and would leave if she wasn’t waiting for someone and there was no train for her to catch, but she leaned toward me, both her hands still on the handle of her umbrella, looking like someone I had seen on television who was about to do a dance with an umbrella.
With her face so close, I could see tiny pimples under both her eyes, which were really that purple-gray color like some of the flowerpot marbles. Her eyebrows had little gray strands in them, too. I sat back a little more, because she was close enough to kiss me. Also, it took her longer than it would take most people to speak again. She was staring hard at me and thinking too much, I thought. Maybe I was thinking too much. Daddy accused Mama of that all the time.
“The long silences in this house are unhealthy,” he had told her. He had looked at me and then added, “The kid hardly speaks. I wonder why?”
When Daddy spoke to Mama like that, the silences only got longer and deeper.
“What’s your name?” the Umbrella Lady asked finally, like someone who just remembered it was an important question to ask.
“Saffron,” I said.
She nodded and said, “Good,” as if that was the right name. Most people when they heard my name would smile and say, “How unusual, but fitting.” They were thinking about the color of my hair.
“Saffron Faith Anders,” I said.
“Well, you are the first Saffron I have ever met. Do you like your name?”
No one had ever asked me that. The Umbrella Lady asked as if she could change it if I wanted it changed.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, Saffron Faith Anders, I think you should come home with me. You probably haven’t eaten, and you are probably a little cold. Maybe more than a little, huh?” She pinched the collar of her coat closer together to emphasize how cold it was. “Brrr,” she said, shaking her head. “Yes, you’ll come with me, okay?”
“But if I go with you, Daddy won’t know where I am,” I said, a little annoyed that I had to tell her something any grown-up would know.
She thought a moment and then raised her right hand, her forefinger up. She shoved it into her dark-blue overcoat pocket and came out with a pencil that looked like it had been sharpened down to the size of a thumb. There was some fuzz around it that had come out on her fingers. She blew it off like someone blowing out birthday candles.
“We’ll need something to write on,” she said, taking back my coloring book. She opened it and found some blank space, which she carefully tore out.
“Don’t worry. I’m not ruining any of the pictures. I’m leaving your name, my address, and my phone number for him to find,” she said as she wrote on the paper. “I think it would be a good idea to put this under the corner of the coloring book so the coloring book keeps it from blowing off the bench when we leave, because there is quite a breeze, and a breeze can become wind. Okay?”
“I don’t know. He bought it for me so I would have something fun to do.”
“When he comes for you, he’ll bring the coloring book, won’t he? And then you can finish it when you continue on to wherever you’re going with him,” she said rapidly, like someone who had lost all her patience. Mama could get that way, and the words would burst out of her mouth in an explosion that would hurt my ears. Daddy had a way of shutting his off on the inside. At least, Mama said he did.
I thought about what the Umbrella Lady was saying. She obviously wanted me to think hard about it. It was like one of those logical things Mama told me she wished wasn’t true. I wished this wasn’t true, but it was cold, and I was hungry.