She hesitated, then reluctantly obeyed. She didn’t like the idea of leaving both the money and the ticket there, but she was afraid he’d ask more questions if she protested.
He was a long time at it. He was on the phone a while, talking in a muffled voice. Then he was poring through his books. Once he got up and went back into the baggage room and stayed away for several minutes.
It was almost four forty-five. If he didn’t hurry, she might miss the five o’clock bus. She got up and got a drink from the water cooler. The water was warm, and somebody had dropped a piece of gum on the drain. She went back to the red plastic seat still thirsty.
The clock said four forty-eight when the clerk came back and sat down without even looking her way.
“My ticket?”
But just then a man and woman came in, and the clerk got busy with them. It wasn’t fair. She’d been there waiting since four thirty. Gilly stood up and started for the counter. She didn’t even see the policeman until she felt his hand on her arm.
Gilly snatched her arm back as she looked to see who had touched her.
“Where you headed, little girl?” He spoke quietly as though not to disturb anyone.
“To see my mother,” said Gilly tightly. Oh, god, make him go away.
“All the way to San Francisco by yourself?” She knew then the clerk had called him. Damn!
“Yes.”
“I see,” he said with a quick look at the clerk, who was now staring at them with both eyes well open.
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Nobody’s charging you with anything.” The policeman pulled his cap straight and said in a very careful, very patient voice, “Who you been staying with here in the area?”
She didn’t have to answer him. It was none of his business.
“Look. Somebody’s going to be worried about you.”
Like hell.
He cleared his throat. “What about giving me your telephone number? So I can just check things out?”
She glared at him.
He coughed and cleared his throat again and looked up at the clerk. She might have gotten away in that instant—except for the money. Where could she go without the money? “I think,” the policeman was saying, “I’d better take her in for a little talk.”
The clerk nodded. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Here’s the money she brought in.” He held up a manila envelope. The policeman took her gently by the arm and walked her to the counter. The clerk handed him the envelope.
“That’s my money,” Gilly protested.
“I’ll just bet it is, kid,” the clerk said with a fake smile.
If she had known what to do, she would have done it. She tried to make her brain tell her, but it lay frozen in her skull like a woolly mammoth deep in a glacier. All the way to the station she asked it, Shall I jump out of the car at the next light and run? Should I just forget about the damn money? But the woolly mammoth slept on, refusing to stir a limb in her behalf.
In a back room behind the police station’s long counter two policemen tried to question her. The new one, a big blond, was asking the first one: “She ain’t got no ID?”
“Well, I’m not going to search her, and Judy’s gone out to get her supper.”
“What about the suitcase?”
“Yeah, better check through there.”
She wanted to yell at them to leave her stuff alone, but she couldn’t break through the ice.
The blond policeman riffled carelessly through her clothes. He found Courtney’s picture almost at once. “This your mother, kid?”
“Put that down,” she whispered.
“Oh, now she’s talking.”
“She said to put her picture down, Mitchell.”
“OK, OK. Just trying to do my job.” He put the picture down and continued to poke through the suitcase. “Bingo,” he said, picking up the postcard. He read it carefully before handing it to the other officer. “All here, Rhine. Name and current address. And big surprise! She does know somebody in San Francisco.”
The one called Rhine read the postcard and then came and stooped down beside her chair.
“Is this your father’s address here?” he asked, pointing at the address on the card.
She sat perfectly still, staring him down.
Rhine shook his head, stood up, and handed the card back to Mitchell. “Check out who lives at that address and give them a call, will you?”
Within a half hour, a red-faced Trotter, holding the hand of a white-faced William Ernest, puffed through the station-house door. Her eye immediately caught Gilly’s, still seated in the room on the other side of the counter. She tried to smile, but Gilly jerked away from the gaze. The policewoman was back from her supper and on duty at the counter.
“Maime…Maime Trotter”—Trotter was puffing worse than if she’d run up her steps—“Got a…taxi…waiting…No money…to…pay…him.”
“Just a minute, please.” Judy, the policewoman, came in and spoke quietly to Rhine, and then Rhine got up and they both went out to the counter. The only part of the conversation Gilly could make out was Trotter’s breathy replies:
“Foster child…Yes—somewhere…San Francisco, yes, maybe so…County Social Services…Uh—Miz Miriam Ellis…yes…yes…no…no…no…Can someone pay the taxicab? Still waiting out there….” Officer Rhine gave Trotter the yellow envelope. She sighed and nodded, taking out some money which she handed to him. He handed it to Mitchell, who handed it to the policewoman, who frowned but went out anyway to pay the cab driver.
“No, no,” Trotter was saying. “Of course not. She’s just a baby…” Trotter was still shaking her head at Rhine as he brought her back around the counter, W.E. clutching at her shabby coat.
Trotter’s breath had returned, but her voice shook as she spoke to Gilly from the doorway. “I come to take you home, Gilly, honey. Me and William Ernest come up to get you.”
Rhine came all the way in and stooped down again beside her. “Mrs. Trotter is not going to press charges. She wants you to come back.”
Press charges? Oh, the money. Did the stupid man think that Trotter would have her arrested? But how could she go back? Gilly the Great, who couldn’t even run away? Botched the job. She stared at her fingers. The nails were grubby. She hated grubby fingernails.
“Gilly, honey…”
“Don’t you want to go home?” Rhine was asking.
Want to go home? Don’t I want to go home? Where in the hell do you think I was headed?
When she didn’t answer him, Rhine stood up. “Maybe we should keep her tonight and call Social Services in the morning.”
“You mean to lock the child up?”
“She’d be safe. It would just be overnight.”
“You don’t think for one minute I’m going to let you lock a child of mine up in jail?”
“Maybe it would be best,” Rhine said quietly.
“Best? What do you mean? What are you trying to say?”
“She really doesn’t seem to want to go with you, Mrs. Trotter. Now, I don’t know…”
“O, my dear Lord, you don’t—O, my dear Lord—”
It was the closest to cursing Gilly had ever heard Trotter come to. She looked up into the fat, stricken face.
“O, my dear Lord. What can I do?”
“Gilly! Gilly!” William Ernest streaked across the room and began to beat his fists on her knees. “Come home, Gilly. Please come home! Please, please!” The blood vessels stood out blue and strained on his white neck.
The ice in her frozen brain rumbled and cracked. She stood up and took his hand.
“Thank you, precious Jesus,” Trotter said.
Rhine cleared his throat. “You don’t have to go unless you want to. You know that, don’t you?”
Gilly nodded. Trotter in the doorway lifted her arms, the brown purse dangling from one of them; the faulty clasp flew open as she did so. She dropped her arms, embarrassed, and forced the purse shut. “I
need another taxi, officer.”
“I’ll get Mitchell to drive you,” he said.
POW
There was a fight between Trotter and Miss Ellis. Gilly heard the sounds of battle in the living room when she came in from school the next afternoon. “Never, never, never!” Trotter was bellowing like an old cow deprived of its calf.
Gilly stopped still in the hallway, closing the door without a sound.
“Mrs. Trotter, nobody at the agency looks at it as any indication of failure on your part—”
“You think I care what the agency thinks?”
“You’re one of our most capable foster parents. You’ve been with us for more than twenty years. This won’t affect your record with us. You’re too valuable—”
“I don’t give a spit about no record. You ain’t taking Gilly.”
“We’re trying to think of you—”
“No, you ain’t. If you was thinking of me, you’d never come to me with such a fool notion.”
“This is a troubled child, Maime. She needs special—”
“No! I ain’t giving her up. Never!”
“If you won’t think of yourself, think of William Ernest. He’s come too far in the last year to let—I’ve seen myself how she upsets him.”
“It was William Ernest got her to come home last night.” Trotter’s voice was square and stubborn.
“Because he saw how upset you were. That doesn’t mean she can’t damage him.”
“William Ernest has lived with me for over two years. He’s gonna make it. I know he is. Sometimes, Miz Ellis, you gotta walk on your heel and favor your toe even if it makes your heel a little sore.”
“I don’t understand what you’re driving at.”
“Somebody’s got to favor Gilly for a little while. She’s long overdue.”
“That’s exactly it, Mrs. Trotter. I’m quite aware of Gilly’s needs. I’ve been her caseworker for nearly five years, and whether you believe it or not, I really care about her. But I don’t think it’s her needs we’re talking about right now, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s your needs.” Said very quietly.
A silence and then, “Yes, Lord knows, I need her.” A funny broken sound like a sob came from Trotter. “I like to die when I found her gone.”
“You can’t do that, Mrs. Trotter. You can’t let them tear you to pieces.”
“Don’t try to tell a mother how to feel.”
“You’re a foster mother, Mrs. Trotter.” Miss Ellis’s voice was firm. “You can’t afford to forget that.”
Gilly’s whole body was engulfed in a great aching. She opened and slammed the front door, pretending to have just come in. This time they heard her.
“That you Gilly, honey?”
She went to the doorway of the living room. Both women were on their feet, flushed as though they’d been running a race.
“Well, Gilly,” Miss Ellis began, her voice glittering like a fake Christmas tree.
“Miz Ellis,” Trotter broke in loudly, “was just saying how it’s up to you.” There was a flash of alarm from the social worker which Trotter pretended not to see. “You want to stay on here with William Ernest and me—that’s fine. You want her to find you someplace else—that’s fine, too. You got to be the one to decide.” Her eyes shifted uneasily toward Miss Ellis.
“What about,” Gilly asked, her mouth going dry as a stale soda cracker, “what about my real mother?”
Miss Ellis’s eyebrows jumped. “I wrote her, Gilly, several months ago, when we decided to move you from the Nevinses. She never answered.”
“She wrote me. She wants me to come out there.”
Miss Ellis looked at Trotter. “Yes. I know about the postcard,” the caseworker said.
Those damned cops reading people’s mail and blabbing, passing it around, snickering over it probably.
“Gilly. If—if she had really wanted you with her—”
“She does want me. She said so!”
“Then why hasn’t she come to get you?” A hard edge had come into Miss Ellis’s voice, and her eyebrows were twitching madly. “It’s been over eight years, Gilly. Even when she lived close by, she never came to see you.”
“It’s different now!”—wasn’t it?—“She’s gonna come! She really wants me!”—didn’t she?
Trotter came over to her and laid her arm heavily on Gilly’s shoulder. “If she knowed you—if she just knowed what a girl she has—she’d be here in a minute.”
Oh, Trotter, don’t be a fool. If she knew what I was like, she’d never come. It takes someone stupid like you—Gilly removed herself gently from under the weighty embrace and addressed herself to Miss Ellis, eye to eyebrow.
“Till she comes…till she comes for me, I guess I’ll just stay here.”
Trotter wiped her face with her big hand and snuffled. “Well, I’m sure we’ll be seeing you sometime, Miz Ellis.”
The social worker wasn’t going to be swept out quite so easily. She set her feet apart as though fearing Trotter might try to remove her bodily and said, “Officer Rhine told me when he called that you had well over a hundred dollars with you last night.”
“Yeah?”
It came out sassy, but Miss Ellis just squinted her eyes and went on: “It’s hard to believe that it was all your money.”
“So?”
“So I call taking other people’s money stealing, Miss Hopkins.”
“Yeah?”
Trotter patted Gilly’s arm as if to shush her. “So do we, Miz Ellis. Surely you don’t think this is the first time something like this has happened to me over the last twenty years?”
“No, I know it’s not.”
“Then how ’bout trusting me to handle it?”
Miss Ellis shook her head and smoothed her pants suit down over her rump before she put on her coat. “I’ll be in close touch,” she said.
Trotter nearly shoved her out the front door. “We’re going to do just fine. Don’t worry your pretty little head about us, hear?”
“I get paid to worry, Mrs. Trotter.”
Trotter smiled impatiently and closed the door quickly. When she turned back toward Gilly, her face was like Mount Rushmore stone.
Gilly blinked in surprise at the sudden and absolute change.
“I don’t take lightly to stealing, you know.”
Gilly nodded. No use pretending sassiness.
“I figure that money ain’t all mine, right?”
“No.”
“Well, where’d you get it?”
“I found it,” said Gilly softly.
Trotter came over and with two hands lifted Gilly’s face to look into her own. “Where did you get it, Gilly?”
“I found it behind some books next door.”
Trotter dropped her hands in disbelief. “You stole from Mr. Randolph?”
“It was just lying there behind the books. He probably didn’t even—”
“Gilly, you stole it. Don’t put no fancy name on it. It was his, and you took it, right?”
“I guess so.”
“How much?”
“Uh, for—thir—”
“Don’t fool with me. How much?”
“Forty-four dollars,” Gilly said miserably.
“Well, you gotta take it back.”
“I can’t.” Trotter stood there, hand on hip, staring at her until Gilly continued, “I gave five dollars to Agnes Stokes.”
“You did, huh?”
Gilly nodded.
“Well”—a great sigh—“I’ll lend you the five to pay Mr. Randolph back, and you can work it off.”
Giving back Mr. Randolph’s money was not as bad as it might have been. The old man apparently had no idea that there had been any money behind his books. Either he’d forgotten, or it had been put there by his wife, dead long before Trotter’s Melvin. At any rate, when Gilly gave the forty-four dollars to him, Trotter looming behind her like a mighty army, he accepted her mumbled explana
tion without showing shock or undue curiosity, but with a strange little dignity.
“Thank you,” he said, for once not doubling the phrase. He put the money in his pocket, rubbed his hands together briefly, and then put out his hand to be led to supper.
Gilly hesitated for a moment, waiting for the sermon that was bound to pour forth, if not from him, surely from Trotter. But neither spoke, so she took Mr. Randolph’s hand, instead of his elbow as she usually did, as a kind of thank you.
Trotter had obviously never heard of either the minimum-wage or the child-labor laws. She posted the following sign in the kitchen:
Washing dishes and cleaning kitchen 10¢
Vacuuming downstairs 10¢
Cleaning both bathrooms including floors 10¢
Dusting 10¢
Helping William Ernest with schoolwork,
one hour 25¢
Gilly began to spend a lot of time with W.E. She discovered several things. One was that the boy was not as dumb as he looked. If you held back and didn’t press him, he could often figure out things for himself, but when you crowded him, he would choke right up, and if you laughed at him, he’d throw his hands up as if to protect his head from a blow. It finally occurred to Gilly that he really thought she would smack him every time he made a mistake.
Which was why, of course, Trotter tiptoed around the boy as though he would shatter at the least commotion, and why she was death on anyone she caught fooling around with him.
But it wasn’t going to work. W.E. wasn’t a fluted antique cup in Mrs. Nevins’s china cupboard. He was a kid—a foster kid. And if he didn’t toughen up, what would happen to him when there was no Trotter to look after him?
So Gilly asked him, “What do you do when somebody socks you?”
His squinty little eyes went wild behind the glasses.
“I’m not going to hit you. I was just wondering what you do.”
He stuck his right index finger into his mouth and began to tug at the nail.
She took out the finger and studied his stubby-nailed hand for a minute. “Nothing wrong with this, I can see. Ever think of smacking them back?”
He shook his head wide-eyed.
“You going to go through life letting people pick on you?”