Theft

We met in kindergarten, I think. I don’t remember exactly where it happened. It could have been at the playground in the park. The front windows of my house faced the park. The playground was the only place where my mother allowed me to go alone—she could watch me from the living room window.

Nellie’s house was on the same street, just a couple of houses away. She, too, played in the park without supervision.

Nellie was everything my mother wanted me to be: pleasant, clean, and with large pink pom-poms holding her sandy-colored hair. The exact opposite of me—I was a dirt magnet.

“I know a word,” Nellie said one morning while sitting on the bench next to me, as the rest of the kids splashed in a shallow kindergarten pool. “But you can’t say it to the grown-ups. Do you want to know what it is?”

Of course, I wanted to know. In exchange, I had to give her my lunch snack to learn it. I’d heard it once from some man in the store. My mother said I could never repeat it.

“Now you,” she said, biting into my chocolate bar. “You say it. It will be our secret.”

I did.

“Again.”

I said it again.

“It’s a very bad word. If a grown-up hears you saying it, you will be in big trouble. So, if you don’t want me to tell the teacher you said it, bring me chocolate bar tomorrow.”

“But you said it too,” I tried arguing.

“But you said it twice!”

For the next two months, I supplied Nellie’s snacks, fearing that she might reveal our secret to the teacher or worse—to my mother. At home, I screamed and kicked, refusing to go to kindergarten, while my mother hissed and pinched my arm, forcing me into a sweater.

One day, Nellie showed up on the steps of my house.

“Do you want to play in the park?”

“I can’t. My mom went to the store. She doesn’t like it when I leave without her permission.”

“We can play in your house then.”

For a while, she watched me as I constructed a Lego castle. I was so engrossed in my project that I didn’t notice when she left the room.

I heard my mother’s voice a while later. When I walked into the kitchen, my mom and Nellie sat at the table. Nellie was leafing through the cookbook, and my mom was telling her about her secret recipe, as if Nellie were her best friend.

“What a nice girl!” My mom sighed when Nellie left. “I wish you were more like her.”

A week later, I was in my room when my mom called my name. When I entered the living room, Mom was running around, opening and closing drawers, searching under the couch, between the couch cushions, and under the rug.

“Did you see my golden necklace? The one with the pearl? The one your father gave me as a wedding gift. I left it on the dresser. Did you take it?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then where is it? It was right here! I remember putting it right here!”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

“If you took it, just give it back. I miss your dad too, you know! That necklace is very important to me.”

“But I didn’t take it.”

Mom sat on the couch and squeezed me between her knees. She told me it was bad to lie, that Dad watched me from the sky and judged me. She begged me to return it, pleading and threatening me with jail.

She searched my room, my bed, my toy box, and every pocket of every dress in the closet. When we went to bed that day, she didn’t kiss me goodnight.

She found the necklace two days later when she was coming home from work. She stopped to say hi to Nellie, who was playing in the park. Nellie wore the gold chain with the pearl. She told her I gave it to her.

A month later, my mother said that we were moving north, closer to her parents. I wasn’t sad. I wanted to go, mostly because at this point I owed Nellie two bags of chocolate bars, and I had no idea how I would ever manage to steal so many candies from the pantry.

I didn’t return to my hometown until I was nineteen. My mother remarried and moved in with her husband. She left me the old Cape Cod where I grew up. It needed a lot of repairs after being rented for almost fifteen years.

I was painting the walls in the kitchen one weekend when I saw Nellie. I wouldn’t have recognized her if she were alone. But her mother, who had not changed a bit, walked next to her. Nellie was pushing a stroller with a toddler in it. She had turned into a tall young woman with slender legs that looked immensely long, barely covered by denim shorts. But there was something different in her face, like a shadow that lingers in the corners of a blooming garden after the storm has long passed.

A few days later, she knocked on my door, and I invited her in. We sat in the kitchen and shared a bottle of wine. She told me about her dad dying and about getting pregnant in high school. And no, the father of the baby wasn’t in the picture. She talked a lot about guys, her job at the grocery store, too, but mostly about guys. How she can’t meet anyone. How they all disappear when they learn about the baby.

All these years, I thought she would become someone great, even if it was a great con woman. As a child, she was clever and cunning, and it was sad to see the events of her life crack the very foundation of her confidence.

“Here.” She handed me a piece of paper. “I met this guy on the beach. He gave me his phone number, but I am too scared to call. He said his name was Rob, and he didn’t seem to mind that I have a child. I just want a dad for my son, you know? Would you call him and ask if he wants to meet?”

I said that I would. I dialed the number. A male voice answered on the other end.

“Hi, is this Rob?”

“Yes, who is this?” The guy’s voice was deep and warm.

I hung up.

“I am sorry, it’s not Rob. It’s some grocery store. The guy probably gave you the wrong number,” I said.

Nellie left shortly after. Before leaving, she asked me if I wanted to go to the beach next weekend. I told her I had too much to do.

Right after I closed the door, my phone rang. It was Rob. He told me it was not nice to hang up. I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was watching football. We talked all night. He wanted to meet the next day, and I said, “Where?”