Chapter 4: Shoplifter
I hadn’t been to the fourteenth floor in three years.
The elevator still had the same brass buttons. The receptionist didn’t know me. Gloria did, and she walked me past her and down the long hall herself, one hand on my back, like I was twelve again.
My father was standing at his window when I came in. He’d gotten older. Whiter. He leaned on a black cane with a silver top that he hadn’t needed the last time I saw him.
“Your knee,” I said.
“My knee is fine,” he said. “Come here.”
He held me for a long time. He smelled like the same cedar soap. When he let go, Gloria had already laid the invoice, the prenup and a photo of Vanessa’s message on his desk.
He read them standing. The cane tapped the carpet once. Then again.
“Ken,” he said into his phone. “The Whitmore renewal. Pull it. Today.”
“Dad. No.”
He looked at me over his reading glasses.
“Three hundred people work at the Whitmore mill in South Carolina,” I said. “They didn’t write page nine. They didn’t engrave a name tag. If you kill that contract today, Patricia goes on a cruise and they lose their jobs.”
“So what do you want, sweetheart? You want me to do nothing?”
“I want them to do it themselves,” I said. “In public. Where they can’t call it a misunderstanding.”
He sat down slowly. He was quiet for a while.
“You’re going to that party,” he said.
“I’m going to that party.”
“Then so am I.”
I sat across from him, in the chair I used to spin in when I was small, and the thing I’d been holding all night finally came out.
“Was I lying too, Dad? I let him believe I was nobody. Maybe that’s its own kind of trap.”
He took off his glasses.
“You didn’t trap anyone,” he said. “You just didn’t hand him a reason to pretend. Your mother did the same thing to me. She made me come back three days in a row before she’d tell me her last name.”
I laughed. Then I cried, a little, into his handkerchief, which still had his initials on it.
I went back to work that afternoon. I wanted one more normal day at counter seven.
At four o’clock, Patricia walked into the cosmetics hall with Vanessa beside her, Doug the floor manager hurrying behind, and a store security guard behind him.
“That’s her,” Patricia said, loud enough for the whole hall. “That’s the girl.”
“Mrs. Whitmore,” Doug said, sweating. “Let’s keep this calm.”
“My pearl bracelet went missing on Thursday night,” Patricia said. “The night this girl stormed out of my home without saying goodbye.”
“I’ve never touched your bracelet,” I said.
Vanessa drifted to the end of my counter and picked up a tester. Then she set it down and bent toward the cabinet where I keep my tote bag. “Oh my God,” she said. “Patricia. Look.”
She held up my tote. Inside, on top of my wallet, lay a strand of pearls.
The hall went silent. A teenager by the lipstick wall raised her phone.
“I’m so sorry, Lena,” Doug said, not looking at me. “I have to ask you to come to the security office.”
The guard took my elbow. Gently. He was just doing his job. I walked with him past my own testers, past the woman who’d bought the jasmine yesterday, past forty phones.
Patricia leaned close as I passed.
“Tomorrow night,” she whispered, “everyone will know exactly what you are.”
In the security office, my phone buzzed.
Bradley.
Mom says if you show up tomorrow and sign, she won’t press charges.
