The Clock Over The Elevator

Her hand stayed out over the table until I took the phone.

It was still warm.

My name was at the top, and under it was everything, in Dana's words.

The office, the twenty-five minutes, the seven times.

Even "Late enough."

Every word of it was true.

I looked at Eli's letter, then at Shawna's money.

I held my thumb on delete until the screen was empty.

Then I set the phone down in front of her.

Dana looked at it a long time.

She stood, folded Eli's letter in half, and put it in her coat with the phone.

When she got to the door, I said, "Dana."

She didn't turn around.

Out front, her car started.

She didn't let it warm up.

Shawna's money was still on the table.

Eli's letter wasn't.

Wednesday was Christmas Eve.

I was at the Mercer district office out by the interstate at ten to nine.

In the conference room, somebody was setting up a speakerphone for nine o'clock.

Greg had my resignation printed and waiting.

One paragraph, dated December 24, my name typed under a line.

His pen lay across it.

"Take a minute if you want," he said.

I didn't need one.

I signed.

Then I took my keys out of my coat and worked my house key and my car key off the ring with my thumbnail.

It took a while.

Greg didn't say anything.

He didn't look away, either.

I set the rest on his desk, the store keys and Walt's brass one.

He looked at them instead of at me.

"Was there more to it?"

"There's always more to it, Greg."

Christmas came anyway.

At two, Dana's car pulled up to the curb and sat there with the engine running.

Eli came up the walk alone with a paper plate under foil.

"Mom made ham."

He gave me the plate and hugged me, quick and hard.

"Merry Christmas, Grandma."

"Tell her thank you, honey."

He said he would and went back down the walk.

Dana kept both hands on the wheel.

I ate standing up at the counter, next to the can she'd turned to the wall.

Eli served his three days the first week back.

The second week of January, the county prosecutor's office asked me to come in and go over my statement.

A victim-witness advocate met me in the lobby.

That's what her lanyard said.

In a little room with no window, she read it back to me the way Officer Brandt had written it up.

"Witness states the juvenile was in the store approximately forty minutes."

Out loud, it sounded like a fact.

She looked up.

"Is that right?"

"That's not all of it," I said.

She went down the hall and came back with the prosecutor, a woman younger than Dana.

They gave me paper and a pen.

I wrote it the way I'd told Dana, in order.

The office behind customer service, 11:14 to 11:39.

A name and a number, then you go.

He asked me seven times to let him go.

I never asked him where the baby was.

My hand cramped on the second page.

I kept going.

The receipt had been in my parka pocket since that night.

I laid it on top.

11:42 p.m., my debit card, two minutes before I found her.

The prosecutor read all three pages without looking up.

"So he wasn't making it up," she said.

"He told the officer he asked you six times."

"Seven."

Caleb told them.

Nobody believes a shoplifter.

They believed me.

Before I signed, she put her hand flat on the pages.

"This helps him," she said.

"It doesn't help you."

It would go in the file.

If anybody ever sued me or Mercer over that office, it would be the first thing they pulled out.

"You might want to talk to a lawyer first."

I signed it.

She clipped the receipt to the last page.

In February, the advocate called with a date and said I wouldn't be needed in the room.

I went anyway.

I sat on a bench in the hallway outside juvenile court, across from the elevator.

There was a clock over it.

I watched it the whole time.

At twenty after ten, the courtroom door opened, and the advocate came out first.

"The magistrate approved diversion," she said.

A caregiver class and forty hours of community service.

When he finished, they'd dismiss it.

I let my breath out.

Shawna came out behind her, still in her work hoodie, and then Caleb.

He was taller than I remembered.

In my head, he was still in that chair.

Same black jacket, the pink daisy still clipped to the zipper.

Shawna saw me and didn't come over.

She pushed the button for the elevator.

Caleb crossed the hall and stopped in front of my bench.

"You should've just let me go."

"I know."

He waited, like there might be more.

There wasn't.

He walked past the elevator and took the stairs.

Shawna stood by the elevator and didn't follow him. She let him go.