The man mouthed something, and Colleen could tell that he was speaking to her. She took off her headphones and waited for him to repeat himself. She was still able to hear the tinny whine of Pat Benatar’s voice.
“You need to go somewhere?” the man asked.
She looked down and pushed stop on the Walkman, then she wiped her eyes behind her sunglasses. She looked back up at the man. “No,” she said. “My father’s coming to get me.”
“That’s good,” the man said. “That’s good.” He turned his head forward, and she knew that from where he stood he could see the spot on the runway where the airplanes were turning around after landing before taxiing to the airport’s one terminal. “Fathers should come get their daughters when they’re crying.”
She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t crying, but she was, and what did it matter if this man she had never seen before and would never see again watched her cry? She also wanted to tell him it was none of his business, but his business was picking people up from the airport, and she very much looked like someone who needed that business. As to her father coming to get her, that seemed to imply a rescue, and she would have to admit her father did have a history of rescuing her.
When she was twelve years old and in the seventh grade, she had saved up her babysitting money to buy a new outfit from Belk’s Department Store for the school photo. She could still picture the outfit now: a pale yellow blouse, a bright yellow skirt with a matching yellow cardigan. A white flower had been stitched over the left breast. The stitching of the flower’s blue stem ran down the front, under the left arm, and across the back of the sweater.
She was incredibly proud of the outfit, and it was easy for Colleen to recall her devastation, along with her humiliation, when she felt the warm dampness of her first period seep into her cotton underwear and wet her thighs where she sat at her desk in Mrs. Roberts’s English class. Colleen and her mother had already talked about her getting her period, and she knew exactly what was happening, but she couldn’t stop a mixture of shame and shock from overtaking her. She resisted raising her hand and calling Mrs. Roberts over for fear of having to tell her what had happened and having anyone else hear. Instead, she slipped off her cardigan and did her best to bunch it around her to hide the stain that she knew was spreading across the front and back of her skirt. Everyone else in the class was bent over their desks, working quietly. She stood and pushed back her chair. Her underwear felt heavy, as if its weight could cause it to slide down her legs to the floor.
“Mrs. Roberts,” she said. The teacher looked up at her. “I don’t feel good. I need to go to the office and call my mom.” She backed away, opened the door, and stepped into the hall. Neither Mrs. Roberts nor anyone else in class had said a word. She fled as soon as she’d pulled the door closed.
Colleen had hidden out in the bathroom while the school secretary called home to tell her mother what had happened and to ask her to bring a new outfit to the school. The nurse had given Colleen a sanitary pad, and she sat down on the toilet, her stained underwear on the floor beside her, and held the pad between her legs. Her sweater and skirt had been folded inside a paper bag that sat on the floor beside her underwear. The outfit was ruined. Colleen cried at the realization that she would not wear it in her school picture, and she wondered when her mother would arrive and what outfit she would bring to replace it. She didn’t know how long she sat there, but she remembered the bell ringing and knowing that she would have to return to Mrs. Roberts’s classroom to gather her things and that she would have to answer questions from her teacher and her friends.
When Colleen heard the door open, she snatched her damp underwear from the floor and held it before her with the tips of her fingers as if it were a dead animal. She expected to hear her mother’s voice, but instead she heard the sound of handcuffs clinking and the squeak of her father’s rigid belt, the heavy footstep of his hard-soled shoes. Her heart sank.
“Honey,” he said. “Are you in there?”
“Yes,” Colleen said, choking back a sob. She had never been embarrassed to cry in front of her father, but sitting there in a closed bathroom stall, naked except for a rumpled blouse and a pad held between her legs, she was humiliated. “You’re not supposed to be in the girls’ room.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been given a special dispensation by the principal.” The stall creaked, and she imagined her father leaning his body against it. “They told me what happened, and I brought you something to wear.” He sighed. “I hope I got it right.”
She pictured her father in her room at home, opening the closet and her dresser drawers, pulling out skirts and sweaters and blouses and placing them on the bed as if trying to fit them into some kind of puzzle that made sense to him. She could not imagine what he had chosen, and she was terrified at the thought of hurting his feelings, but she was even more terrified of leaving the bathroom and sitting for photos in whatever he had brought.
Colleen looked up to see him lowering down an outfit on a hanger. It was the same yellow sweater set she had purchased from Belk’s, the tags still attached. She stood up, still holding the pad between her legs, and took it from his hand. She remembered crying with relief. Her father had never been shopping with her—she didn’t know that he had ever been shopping by himself—and she could not imagine him at the department store alone, wandering through Belk’s until he found the outfit she had ruined.
“How did you know to get this?” she asked.
“You think I don’t pay attention?” he said. “Your mother thinks the same thing. I pay more attention than y’all think I do.” He bent down and slipped an unopened pack of underwear beneath the stall door.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Honey, why are you sorry?”
“Because they called you at work,” she said. “Because you went all the way to the Belk’s in Shallotte.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Don’t ever be sorry. You needed me, and I came. I’ll always come when you need me.”
And here he was, on his way once again.
The man who stood by the taxi was chewing gum, and he blew a pink bubble before pulling it back into his mouth. Colleen had had two more beers in the Charlotte airport during her layover and another one on the flight to Wilmington, and she didn’t want her father arriving and smelling alcohol on her breath. He wasn’t the kind of person to scold or judge someone for having a drink or two, but Colleen didn’t want him to learn that the law school graduate who didn’t practice law and who’d just lost a child and who might be losing her marriage had also become a day drinker.
“You got any extra gum?” she asked.
The man stopped chewing for a moment. He looked away from the runway and back at Colleen.
“I do,” he said.
“I’d love a piece if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.”
He stepped around the front of his taxi and onto the curb. He pulled a package of gum from his pocket and passed a wrapped, pink square of Bubblicious to her.