A six-year-old went right by me, by my manager and by a county deputy, and wrapped her hand around two fingers of the scariest man at our fuel pumps. Then her mother’s boyfriend walked in smiling and said, “She lies to strangers. Hand her here.” She held on, and what she pulled out of her backpack next shut the whole store up.
She’d been sitting on the stool behind my register for twenty-six minutes by then.
Twenty-six minutes of nobody coming for her.
I’ve worked the front counter at the travel plaza off Highway 30 outside Denison for eleven years. Sundays it’s church traffic, hunters, and men buying beef jerky they don’t need.
She came in from the lot alone at 2:17, in a pink raincoat with the hood down, and asked me where the bathroom was.
Then she didn’t go to it.
She stood by the rack of phone cords and watched the door.
When I asked who she was with, she said, “Emilia.”
That was her name, not an answer.
I asked again.
“The white car,” she said.
There were four white cars at the pumps.
My manager Angela walked the lot holding the cordless phone up like it could help. Deputy Jamar Kwon was already inside for his free coffee, so he took her birthday, her school and the name of her teacher, and wrote all of it on a napkin because his notebook was out in the cruiser.
She answered every question he had.
She never once said who drove her.
Then the bikes came in.
Eight of them, backed in at pumps six and seven one after another, and the glass in the front windows buzzed with it.
Every head in the place turned.
Seven riders stayed out with the machines. The eighth came inside to pay cash for all of it.
He was around sixty and wide through the shoulders, with a silver beard kept short and silver hair cropped close. He had on a black leather vest gone soft at the edges and nothing under it, old faded ink running down both arms to the wrists. An eagle. Roses. Something that used to be a flag.
His knuckles had white scars across them like somebody had drawn on him with chalk.
A woman in line with a bag of sunflower seeds took one look at him and moved to Angela’s register.
He set a roll of twenties on my counter. “Six and seven, all eight bikes, ma’am,” he said.
That’s when Emilia got off the stool.
She didn’t hurry.
She came around the end of my counter, past me, past Angela, past the deputy and his napkin, and she reached up and took hold of two of the rider’s fingers.
Just two. Like she already knew how many fit.
He looked down.
She was looking at the round patch on the front of his vest.
“I’m supposed to stay with you,” she said.
The deputy put his coffee down on the lottery machine. “Sweetheart, come on back over here by me.”
Her grip stayed put.
The rider didn’t pull his hand away. He didn’t close it around hers either. He just left it there for her to hold.
“I don’t know her,” he said to Kwon, and then to me. “Never seen this little one in my life.”
“Then let go of her, sir.”
“She’s the one holding on,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. You’ve got a camera right over the coffee.”
His face was hard and set, and his eyes had gone to the door.
Then the door opened.
A man about thirty-five came in wearing a tucked navy golf shirt and clean khakis, a key fob swinging off one finger, smiling the way people smile at a uniform.
“There she is,” he said. “Emilia. Bud. You scared the HELL out of me.”
He said it to the deputy, not to her.
“Keegan Spruill.” He shook Kwon’s hand across the napkin. “I’m with her mom. I’ve got her this week while Tierra’s away.”
Away.
He said it like a word he’d practiced in the car.
“She does this,” he said. “She tells strangers stories so they’ll feel sorry for her. Hand her here.”
Emilia’s hand stayed right where it was.
The rider’s eyes were on him now and nowhere else.
“Where’s her mother?” the rider said.
“That’s family business, chief.”
Kwon bent down a little. “Emilia, is this your mom’s friend?”
She nodded.
“You want to go with him?”
She kept looking at the patch.
“He said Mom’s not coming back,” she said.
Flat. The same voice she’d used to ask me about the bathroom.
Keegan laughed. “She’s SIX. Her mom’s in treatment, and I’m not explaining treatment to a six-year-old in a gas station, okay? Emilia. Car. NOW.”
He reached past the rider’s arm for her raincoat sleeve.
The rider moved his boots once. Half a step. He was between them, and he still hadn’t touched anybody.
“Don’t,” he said.
Just that.
Outside, the seven riders had stopped talking. Two of them were walking toward the door.
Keegan pulled his hand back and turned to Kwon. “Are you going to do your job? Her booster seat is in my car. I have her BIRTH CERTIFICATE in my glove box. Who is this guy?”
“Bryan Gagnon,” the rider said. “Ask her why she came to me.”
“I’m asking YOU, sir,” Kwon said.
“And I keep telling you. I have NEVER seen her before today.”
Emilia let go of his fingers.
For one second I thought it was over.
She unzipped the little front pocket on her backpack, the one shaped like a ladybug, and took out a square of paper folded so many times it had gone soft as a dish towel.
She held it up to him. Not to the deputy. To him.
He opened it flat on my counter, right next to his roll of twenties.
I was reading it upside down.
It was a photograph.
Keegan saw it too, and his smile went somewhere.
Bryan looked at it for a long time. Then at the patch on his own vest. Then at her.
“Where did you get THIS?” he said.
Emilia turned and looked at Keegan before she answered.
Upside down on my counter
“Mom put it in my ladybug,” she said. “She said don’t show Keegan.”
Keegan laughed. Nobody else did.
The photograph was a girl about nine on the back of a motorcycle, in a helmet so big it sat on her eyebrows. Behind her were stone steps and two columns. A man stood beside the bike with one hand flat on the seat behind her. Dark beard. Black vest. And on the front of the vest, the round patch.
“She said if he says she’s not coming back,” Emilia said, “find the circle.”
Bryan put one finger on the patch in the picture. Then he turned the photograph over.
On the back, in ballpoint gone purple: T.E., age 9. Crawford Co. Courthouse. March 2006.
The Crawford County courthouse is eleven miles from my register. I drive past it to get to the Hy-Vee.
Kwon leaned in over the napkin. “That’s you.”
“That’s me,” Bryan said. “Twenty years and about forty pounds ago.”
“You told me you’d never seen her.”
“I never have.” He tapped the girl on the bike. “I’ve seen this one.”
Kwon looked at Emilia. “Sweetheart, who’s the girl on the motorcycle?”
The stool behind register two
The stool is mine. It’s tall and wooden with a split in the seat that catches your jeans. Angela says it looks lazy. I keep it anyway.
When Emilia wouldn’t go to the bathroom, I lifted her up onto it so she’d be out of the way of the door. She didn’t argue. She sat with her backpack on her lap and her hands on the ladybug.
She asked me for a pen.
I gave her the one on the string, and a receipt out of the trash that somebody hadn’t wanted. She wrote numbers on the back of it. The same ten numbers, over and over, in rows, the sevens backwards. She said them under her breath while she wrote, the way kids practice spelling words.
I thought it was a game. I put the receipt under the edge of my scanner so it wouldn’t blow off when the door opened.
The bathroom key here is chained to a hubcap. She asked me about the hubcap.
Out the front windows, pump three had a white sedan at it with the engine running. Nobody pumped. Nobody came in to pay. I figured somebody was taking a nap, because people do that here, they pull off 30 and sleep at the pump like we’re a motel.
Angela came back in from the lot around 2:30 with the cordless phone and no news.
“We don’t do family business at this counter,” she said to me, low, so Emilia wouldn’t hear. “We call Jamar, and we sell gas. That’s the job.”
That’s her rule. She’s said it to me about drunk husbands and a man who wanted to sell us his tires. I’ve never argued with it.
So when Kwon asked who the girl on the motorcycle was, I was standing there with that receipt still under my scanner and no idea it mattered.
Emilia didn’t look at Kwon. She looked at the picture.
“That’s my mom,” she said. “When she was little.”
Pump three
Keegan put his hand out flat on my counter, palm up, right on top of the twenties.
“Great. Family photo. I’ll hold onto that for her.”
Bryan slid the picture across to Emilia instead. She folded it back up along the soft lines, all of them, and zipped it into the ladybug.
“It’s hers,” Bryan said.
“Okay.” Keegan put both hands up like he was being reasonable for all of us. “So some biker club knew her mom when she was a kid. That’s supposed to make me feel better? Deputy. A stranger in a leather vest has a picture of somebody’s kid from twenty years ago. You don’t think that’s the creepy part here?”
It landed on Kwon. It landed on the sunflower seed woman too.
Bryan didn’t answer him. He answered Kwon.
“We walk kids into court,” he said. “The ones who have to testify. Back then she had to sit in a room and say it in front of the man she was saying it about. She wouldn’t go up the steps unless she rode up to them. So she rode.” He nodded at the patch. “Every kid gets a picture and a phone number. We tell them, you see this circle, you’re safe with whoever’s wearing it.”
“That was 2006,” Keegan said. “That’s a different family.”
“It’s the same girl.”
Kwon took a breath and picked his coffee back up off the lottery machine. “Mr. Spruill, which car is yours?”
“Pump three.”
He walked out with Keegan. Bryan stayed where he was, Emilia against his leg with her hand back around his two fingers.
Through the window, Keegan opened the back door of the white sedan, and there was a booster seat. Pink. He opened the glove box and came up with a folder.
Kwon got on his radio for a minute, reading off the plate.
When they came back in, Kwon had a birth certificate in a plastic sleeve. Emilia Rose Eriksen. The birthday matched his napkin.
“Car’s registered to Tierra Eriksen,” Kwon said. “He’s driving the mother’s car with the mother’s paperwork and the kid’s seat in the back.”
“Which is what I’ve been saying for ten minutes,” Keegan said.
Angela came around her register. “Jamar. He’s got the seat and he’s got the paper. There’s a line out to the jerky. Let the man take his kid home.”
“She’s not his kid,” I said.
Every one of them turned around and looked at me. I hadn’t said a word since the bikes came.
“His car sat at pump three for twenty-six minutes with the engine going,” I said. “She was in here the whole time. He never came in.”
Keegan didn’t even blink. “I fell asleep. I drove all night from Omaha to get her. I woke up, she wasn’t in the back, I came in. Is that a crime now?”
Kwon looked at me. “You saw him asleep?”
“I saw the car.”
“Ma’am, I can’t do anything with a car.”
Angela took my elbow, light, the way she does with a customer who’s had too much coffee. “Camille. We don’t do this.”
Kwon crouched in front of Emilia and made his voice soft. “Okay, sweetheart. Time to go with Keegan.”
Three fingers
Emilia didn’t move.
Kwon didn’t reach for her. I’ll give him that.
Bryan got down too, both knees cracking, till his face was level with the ladybug.
“Hey,” he said. “What did your mom tell you to do when you found the circle?”
“Stay with it till she calls.”
“Does she call you?”
“Every night. Before bath.”
“When did she call last?”
Emilia let go of his fingers and held up her hand. She folded down her thumb and her pinky and showed him the three that were left.
Three.
“Three nights,” Bryan said.
She nodded.
Keegan had his answer ready before Bryan stood up. “Because they take your phone in treatment. That’s how treatment works. Nobody gets calls. That’s the whole point of it.”
It sounded right. I didn’t know anything about treatment, and neither did Kwon, from his face.
“Who told you she’s not coming back?” Bryan said to Emilia.
She pointed at Keegan without looking at him. Just her arm.
“I said she might not be back for a WHILE,” Keegan said. “Kids hear what they hear.” He turned to Kwon. “Run my license. I’m clean, I’ve got the paper, I’ve got her seat, and you’ve got a guy in a leather vest coaching a kid with a picture.”
Kwon stood up. He had his hand on his radio again. He didn’t key it.
Angela said, “Jamar.”
That was all she said. Just his name, the same way she says mine.
Bryan stayed down by Emilia. He said to her, “Your mom gave you that phone number too? The one we gave her?”
“No,” Emilia said. “She gave me hers.”
“You know it?”
She nodded and started to say it. Seven, one, two. Then she stopped, because Keegan had taken a step.
I looked down at my scanner.
The receipt was right where I’d put it, under the edge, the sevens backwards.
The receipt under my scanner
My cell phone was in my apron pocket, where Angela says it isn’t supposed to be on shift.
I took it out. I pulled the receipt out from under the scanner. I didn’t say anything to anybody. I dialed the ten numbers in the top row, the ones she’d written neatest.
It rang in my ear.
And it rang ten feet from me.
A factory ringtone, the marimba one. Everybody patted their own pockets.
Keegan didn’t pat his.
His hand went to the front of his khakis, the left side, and pressed flat over it like he could hold the sound in.
The ringing stopped. He’d declined it through the fabric.
I hit redial.
It went again. Marimba. Right there in his left pocket, two feet from the lottery machine.
Emilia said, “That’s Mom’s.”
Not loud. Not scared. The bathroom voice.
Keegan smiled at Kwon. It was the same smile he walked in with. “It’s my phone. She’s six, she doesn’t know whose phone is whose.”
“Then you can answer it,” I said.
Ringing.
“I don’t answer numbers I don’t know.”
I held up my phone with the number on the screen, and the receipt in my other hand, the sevens backwards.
“She wrote that on my stool at twenty after two,” I said. “Before any of you came in. It’s her mom’s number.”
The phone in his pocket quit ringing. Kwon took one step toward him.
“Mr. Spruill, take that out of your pocket and set it on the counter.”
Tierra’s phone
He didn’t take it out right away.
“This is unbelievable,” Keegan said. “I drive all night. I take off work. I watch somebody else’s kid for three days while her mother’s in treatment, and some cashier with a receipt…”
“On the counter,” Kwon said.
Keegan set it down hard enough that the twenties jumped.
A purple glitter case. The lock screen lit up: Emilia in a paper crown at a Pizza Ranch, and under her the missed calls. Mine, twice. Above mine, a Sioux City number, eleven times, and texts from it stacked so you could read the first lines.
This is Tierra on the nurse’s phone where is she
Keegan bring her back
I’m calling the police if
Kwon read them without touching it. He dialed the Sioux City number on his own phone, on speaker, and set it next to the purple one.
A woman picked up on the first ring. “Hello? Hello, who is this?”
“Ma’am, this is Deputy Kwon with the Crawford County Sheriff. Is this Tierra Eriksen?”
“Is she with you? Is she okay?”
“She’s right here with me. She’s fine.”
There was a sound on the other end I don’t want to describe.
Keegan talked over it. “Tierra, tell him. Tell him you said I could have her. Tell him about Wednesday.”
“I had my appendix out on Wednesday,” the woman said. “You said you’d keep her two days. You took my phone out of my purse in the ER.”
“Because you weren’t going to need it lying in a bed!”
“Where were you taking her?”
He didn’t answer that. He was talking fast now, to Kwon, to Angela, to anybody who’d look at him.
“You know what she did? Two weeks ago she packs a bag and goes to her cousin’s. Takes the TV I paid for. Takes the dog. I raised that kid two years. Two years, I took her to school, I bought that seat, I bought the raincoat she’s standing in. And Tierra thinks she just walks out and gets to keep all of it. She gets nothing. She doesn’t get to keep everything.”
Nobody said anything.
Angela went back behind her register and started ringing up the jerky line, one at a time, without looking up.
Keegan picked up his key fob off the counter and walked out the door toward pump three.
The seven riders were already there, standing around the white sedan with their hands in their vest pockets like they were waiting for a ride. A tall one with a gray ponytail nodded at him.
“Afternoon,” he said.
Keegan stopped about ten feet from his car. Then Kwon was out the door behind him, and Kwon said, “Mr. Spruill, that vehicle isn’t yours to drive.”
Inside, Emilia leaned up toward Kwon’s phone on my counter.
“Mom,” she said. “I found the circle.”
On the speaker her mother didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Good girl,” she said. “You stay with it. I’m coming.”
Bryan picked his roll of twenties up off my counter and held it out to me.
“Six and seven,” he said. “All eight bikes.”
Angela came over after he’d gone back outside. She waited until the line was empty.
“You called a customer’s phone off a piece of trash,” she said. “In front of a deputy. On my floor.”
“It wasn’t his phone.”
“That’s not the point, Camille. You’re on nights starting next week.”
Seven in the morning
Overnight it’s truckers and a kid named Roger who mops in his earbuds.
Three weeks in, I was counting down my drawer at the end of a shift on a Tuesday when I heard them come off 30. Eight, backed in at six and seven.
A silver car pulled in behind them. Not the white sedan.
Bryan came in first, to pay. After him came a woman with a bandage still on under her shirt, the way she held herself. I’d have known her from the photograph if I’d been looking at her.
Emilia came in behind her mother in the pink raincoat, hood down. She’d had a hearing in Denison at nine, Bryan said. They were early for it. They were stopping for gas.
She went right by the jerky. Right by Roger and his mop. Right by her own mother.
She came around the end of my counter and reached up and took two of my fingers.
I left my hand there for her to hold.
If this one stayed with you, send it to the cashier, the bus driver or the lunch lady you know who’s always the one somebody picks.
For more stories about riders stepping up for kids, read the biker who bought a helmet for his son and the biker who poured out the kids’ lemonade; for a family story with sixteen riders watching, see the stepdaughter who took his family chair.
