Epilogue: One Spare Roll
“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said at last. “It’s not my rule. It’s every little kid’s rule. You just call it the Believe Her Rule, or the Believe Him Rule. Whatever the child is. Believe the child.”
There was a pause.
“We can do that,” Carolyn Whitaker said softly.
Mr. Pruitt was transferred to a store in another state. I heard he took a mandatory course on child safety and abduction response. I hope he learned something. I think he might have. A month later, a regional supervisor came by the store and said Pruitt had asked him to pass along a message.
It said, I should have listened to her.
I folded the note and kept it. It wasn’t much, but it was honest, and some days that’s enough.
I went back to work on a Saturday in January.
The store looked the same. The same blue carpet, the same squeaky cart, the same gust of cold air each time the automatic doors opened. Folks I’d greeted for nine years stopped to shake my hand. A man I didn’t know pressed a twenty into my palm and wouldn’t take it back. A teenager in a hoodie said, “Hey, you’re the sticker lady from the news,” and I said, “I am,” and he said, “That’s badass,” and I decided to take it as a compliment.
At ten o’clock that morning, the doors slid open.
A little girl in pink rain boots came running in ahead of her mother.
“Sticker lady!”
Piper was almost four now. She’d grown an inch and lost the baby-round cheeks, and she’d learned to say my name, sort of. She called me “Miss Mabber.” I would have handed her the whole store if she’d asked.
She held out her hand, palm up, with the grave dignity of a child who knows exactly what she’s owed.
I gave her a smiley face. Then another. Then, because it was that kind of day, I gave her the whole roll.
Marisol caught my eye over her daughter’s head. She wore a new coat, a bright yellow one, and she looked rested in a way I’d never seen before. The shadows under her eyes were gone.
“We’re doing okay,” she mouthed.
“I can see that.”
Piper stuck one of the stickers on my vest, right over my name tag.
“Now you have one too,” she said.
I looked down at the little yellow face grinning up from my chest, and my eyes went hot and blurry.
For nine years, I’d handed out those stickers out of habit, a little something to brighten a Saturday. I never once imagined that the roll in my pocket and the spine in my back were one and the same. I never imagined a smiley face and a stubborn old woman standing in a doorway could stop a car on its way to the interstate.
But maybe that’s what ordinary courage is.
It isn’t a cape or a speech. It’s an old woman with a roll of stickers, standing where she’s supposed to stand, asking a scared child one gentle question, and refusing, when everyone tells her to step aside, to step aside.
Piper tugged my sleeve.
“Miss Mabber? Can you give me another one?”
I laughed, wiped my eyes, and reached into my vest.
I had a spare roll in the other pocket.
I’d been carrying one ever since.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
