“I surely did.”
A plumbing specialist arrived, and we discussed my situation, eventually choosing a new showerhead and the tools I could use to try to install it. The clerk also gave me the number of a reliable plumber. I suspected I’d be calling him before long.
“Delaney!” I turned around, but she was gone. Shit. I looked at my phone and dialed Adele’s oboe instructor while jogging back to the paint section. “Hi, Marcia, I’m running a little late. . . . She’s got a book, right? Just tell her I’m on my way.”
Marcia said that Adele was fine and could fill the extra time by practicing. Delaney wasn’t in the paint aisle. “Excuse me,” I called, raising my voice so the shoppers could hear me in the huge, echoing store. “Has anyone seen a little girl with curly hair? Pink and white shirt, sparkly sneakers?” People shook their heads as the PA system crackled, and I heard, “Would Rachel Pearl Kravitz please come to the service desk up front?”
Smiling, I raced to the front of the store. Delaney’s middle name was Pearl, so, of course, she’d assumed that mine was, too. I saw my daughter perched on the counter, her paint samples fanned out in her hand, talking intently to a man with close-cropped dark curls.
“Mommy!” she squealed. I saw that somehow she’d also glommed on to a balloon and a Hershey bar. “I got lost!”
“I’m so sorry, honey. I turned around and you weren’t there, and I was so worried!”
She handed me her pile of paint chips and hopped nimbly to the ground. “A lady asked if I was lost and took me up here, and this man says I can have a free sample of any color paint I want! And I can take it home and paint it on my wall and if I don’t like how it looks, then I can come back and get another one and it is also free! And look what he made me!” She opened her palm and showed me the letter D, made out of a straightened and rebent paper clip. “D for Delaney! And I can keep it! Can I have the candy bar?”
“No more candy, and we don’t have time right now, but . . .” My voice died in my throat as the man turned and I could see him. The manager. The paper-clip man.
“Andy.”
“Rachel,” he said. “I didn’t know your married name.”
“Oh, she isn’t married,” Delaney said smartly. “We are divorced. That means Mommy and Daddy don’t live together anymore, they live three subway stops apart, and in my daddy’s house I have to share a room with my big sister.”
He kept looking at me, his dark eyes, his smile, all of it so familiar, so welcoming. “Andy,” I said again, in a voice that I could barely hear.
Delaney frowned. “His name tag says An-DREW.”
“Andy is a nickname,” he told her. He was looking at me, and I felt like I was going to faint. My heart was beating so hard I felt myself shaking.
“Honey, can you go wait for Mommy on that bench right there?”
“Can I have the Hershey bar?”
“Yes.”
Delaney skipped away with her prize before I could change my mind. Andy came out from around the desk and stood close enough to touch me. When I’d known him he’d always been in motion, but now he was still, motionless, waiting.
“I should have known,” he said. “She looks just like you.”
I put my hands on the desk, turning away. I couldn’t look at him. I was so sad, so mad at him, and my heart was in my throat, and I had so many questions: Why didn’t you come for me? and How did you live through what happened? and Who are you? Who are you now?
Instead, I pulled the showerhead out of my purse. “It broke,” I said, and then I started to cry.
“Then I’ll fix it,” he said.
“I missed you,” I said. “I thought you’d come back for me, but you didn’t.”
“I should have,” he said. “I wanted to, so many times, but I thought you didn’t want me, and then I made such a mess out of everything.”
“So now you’re here?” I tried to make myself look at him. He was bigger than he’d been as a runner, that almost scary whippet-lean look gone. He looked like a man now, broad-shouldered and solid, with a nametag that said “Manager” and glasses with gold rims.
“Now I’m here,” he confirmed. I looked at his hands. No rings. He was close enough for me to feel the warmth from his body, to smell his familiar smell, and I realized, as he touched my cheek, then my hair, that I had never stopped hoping for this, not in all the years we’d been apart.
My phone buzzed. WHERE R U? Adele had texted, and I knew that if I didn’t leave soon Delaney would be late for her party. “I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded gaspy. “I’m late . . . I have to . . .” The showerhead and the paint samples I’d been holding spilled onto the floor. I bent down, still crying, not knowing what I was doing, with no idea of what I wanted to happen next.