Yellow Stickers
“He’s not my daddy! I want my mommy!”
The little girl couldn’t have been more than three years old. She was crying so hard she could barely breathe, her small chest heaving, her face red and wet and twisted with a kind of fear I hadn’t seen on a child in a long, long time. Both of her hands had reached out and grabbed the front of the blue vest I wore at work, and she was holding on to it with everything she had.
The man carrying her tightened his arms around her and pulled her back against his chest. He was tall and lean, maybe thirty-five, in a gray hoodie and a ball cap pulled low, with a scruff of beard and eyes that never quite settled anywhere. He smiled at me, but the smile didn’t go anywhere near those eyes.
“She’s just tired,” he told me. “I’m her father. Now please move.”
My name is Mavis Keller. I’m sixty-seven years old, and on that Tuesday afternoon in March, I’d been working as a greeter at a big-box store on Rogers Avenue in Fort Smith, Arkansas, for nine years. I stood beside the automatic doors in my blue vest and my comfortable shoes from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, five days a week, saying hello to everybody who came in and goodbye to everybody who left.
Before that, I spent thirty-one years carrying mail for the United States Postal Service. I walked a route in the Park Hill neighborhood for most of those years, and I knew every dog and every porch and every widow who waited at her mailbox for me just to have somebody to talk to. When I retired at sixty, I thought I’d enjoy the quiet. My husband, Lloyd, had died of a heart attack two years before, and our son lives in Denver and calls on Sundays. I lasted about four months in that empty house on North Thirty-Second Street before the silence started to swallow me.
So I took a job welcoming customers. It wasn’t glamorous, but I enjoyed it more than I can tell you. I liked the people. I liked the old men who came in every morning for coffee and a newspaper, and the young mothers with their carts full of diapers, and the teenagers who rolled their eyes at me and then said goodbye anyway.
I kept a roll of yellow smiley-face stickers in my vest pocket. I bought them myself at the Dollar General, five hundred to a roll. Whenever a child came through the door, I’d crouch down as far as my knees would let me and offer one. Some of the children remembered me from week to week and came running in looking for their sticker before their mamas could even get a cart. One little boy named Tavion had a whole collection of them on his lunchbox.
Most days were predictable. That was what I liked about them.
But one Tuesday afternoon in March, everything changed.
It was a little after three o’clock. It had been raining all day, a cold, gray spring rain, and the floor by the doors was slick with tracked-in water. I was standing near the automatic doors, wiping a puddle with a mop, when I noticed a man walking fast toward the exit with a little girl in his arms.
She had curly brown hair pulled up in two puffs on top of her head and bright pink rain boots with little white hearts on them. She was wearing a purple raincoat with the hood down. And she was screaming.
At first, I thought she was having an ordinary tantrum. Lord knows I’ve seen a thousand of them in nine years at that door. Children get tired and hungry and overwhelmed in a big store, and they scream, and their parents carry them out red-faced and apologizing to everybody they pass.
Then I heard what she was shouting.
“You’re not my daddy! I want my mommy! You’re not my daddy!”
Something about her voice made me uneasy. It wasn’t a tantrum voice. I raised a son and helped raise four grandchildren, and I know the difference. A tantrum is angry. This little girl wasn’t angry. She was terrified.
I set the mop against the wall and stepped closer and took out my roll of stickers. I peeled one off and held it out to her.
“Hello, sweetheart,” I said, as gently as I could. “Would you like a smiley face?”
Instead of reaching for the sticker, she grabbed my vest.
The man gave me a strained smile. “She’s going through a difficult phase,” he said. “Excuse us.” And he tried to walk around me.
Her fingers were knotted in the fabric of my vest, and when he moved, she held on and pulled me with them. I took one step with them, and then I planted my feet. I remained near the doorway, between him and the glass.
“Sir,” I said, “she’s clearly frightened. Would you mind telling me her name?”
His expression changed. The smile went away completely, like somebody had turned off a light.
“Get out of my way,” he said.
“What’s her name?”
He hesitated. It was only about two seconds. But I was watching his face, and I saw it.
“Quinn,” he said. “Her name is Quinn. I’m her father.”
I looked at the little girl. Her face was buried against my vest now, and I could feel her shaking through the fabric.
“Quinn, sweetheart,” I said. “Is this your daddy?”
She lifted her head and shook it frantically, back and forth, back and forth, so hard her curly puffs bounced.
“No! He took me! He took me from Miss Corliss’s!”
My stomach tightened.
The man shifted her higher in his arms, and her fingers came loose from my vest. “She’s three years old,” he said. “She doesn’t understand what she’s saying.” Then he leaned toward me, so close I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, and his voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Move, or I’ll move you myself.”
I was frightened. I won’t pretend I wasn’t. I’m five foot two and I’ve got arthritis in both knees, and he was a foot taller than me and thirty years younger. But I didn’t step away.
“I’m going to ask my manager to come over,” I said. “Just to make sure everything is all right.”
I pressed the button on the little radio clipped to my vest and called for a manager to the front entrance. A few moments later, Mr. Darby arrived.
Chapter Two: Step Aside 