The Daughter They Abandoned Twice novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Puppy
Six-year-old Hallie helps Marlene lure a pretty little girl away from a Dairy Mart with a lost-puppy story, hears Marlene on the phone, lets the girl out at night, and is left at a gas station at dawn with the girl's barrette and a license plate in her head.
The two people who raised me made their living selling children, and when I was six I helped them take one.
I was never allowed to call them Mom and Dad.
Marlene said names were safer in motels, so they were Marlene and Garner, and I was Hallie.
That July we lived in a white van and a string of motels, and Marlene had braided my hair that morning.
She hummed the whole time and tied each braid off with a ribbon from her own purse.
"Ready for the Dairy Mart?" she said, and pressed a cold cherry slush into my hands.
"Today you get to be the brave one. You're going to cry about a puppy."
I was proud, because it was the first job she had ever trusted me with alone.
The Dairy Mart parking lot was hot enough to soften the tar.
A little girl stood by the ice machine in a pink dress, holding a pink backpack with a name tag sewn on the strap.
CASSIDY R.
Her mother was inside, in the line at the register, with her back to the window.
The girl had a pink butterfly barrette in her hair, and she was the prettiest child I had ever seen.
I walked up to her with my face already wet, because I had practiced crying in the van mirror.
"I lost my puppy," I said. "He ran under a car. Can you help me look?"
She looked at the door where her mother was.
Then she looked at my braids, and she took my hand.
I have thought about her small warm hand every day for twenty years.
We walked around the side of the building, past the dumpsters, to where Garner had backed the van up to the fence.
The back door was open.
Marlene was standing beside it, smiling at Cassidy with her whole face.
"Oh, honey," she said. "Hallie found him. He's in here, he's just scared."
Cassidy climbed in after the puppy that did not exist.
Garner shut the door.
I stood there with my braids and my wet face.
Marlene put a hand on top of my head and said, "Good girl."
It was the only time she ever said it.
We drove back to the Sundown Motel with Cassidy in the back, quiet, because Garner had given her something in a paper cup.
At a stoplight she took out her phone and turned toward the window.
She thought I was watching the lights.
"This one's a good find," she said into the phone. "Blonde, five, no marks. She'll bring in more than the last two together."
Marlene put the phone away and smiled at me.
I did not understand every word, but I understood "bring in," and I understood "the last two."
I had been in the van for the last two.
I had been asleep in the back while somebody cried, and Marlene had told me in the morning that it was a cat.
That night the little girl was in the room beside ours, behind a door Garner locked with a key on a green rubber cord.
I could hear her through the wall.
She wasn't screaming.
She was asking for her brother, over and over, in a very polite voice.
I lay on the cot with my eyes open.
Marlene's purse hung on the chair, and the green cord hung out of the side of it.
I was six.
I did not have a plan.
I just knew I had been the one who said the puppy was under the car.
I got off the cot and took the key out of the purse.
I opened the door to the next room in the dark.
Cassidy was sitting on the floor in her pink dress, with her backpack still strapped on.
I held out my hand, the same way she had held out hers.
"Come on," I whispered. "Run to the office. Say a man took you."
She ran.
She got as far as the end of the walkway before Garner's hand came down on the back of her collar.
He did not shout.
He carried her back under one arm while she kicked.
Marlene was in the doorway in her nightgown, and she looked at me, and then at the key still in my fist.
She hit me hard enough that I sat down on the concrete.
She hit me again when I started to hum.
I hummed when I was scared.
It was a song about a yellow kite that I had always known, and Marlene had slapped me for it before.
"Stop that noise," she said. "Whatever that is, stop it."
Cassidy's barrette had come loose in the struggle and lay on the walkway.
I closed my hand over it while nobody was looking.
We left before the sun was up.
Garner drove north on the old highway for hours, and Cassidy was not in the back anymore, and nobody would tell me where she was.
Marlene sat very straight.
In the gray light, outside a Sinclair station near Tucumcari, Garner pulled in and left the engine running.
Marlene turned in her seat and pressed a twenty-dollar bill into my hand.
"Go inside and ask for the bathroom," she said. "Wait for us there."
I got out of the van.
I walked across the cracked lot and into the cold bright store.
When I looked back through the glass, the van was already pulling onto the road.
I read the plate out loud until it was out of sight.
K, L, W, seven, four, two, one.
I was six years old, I had a twenty, a pink butterfly barrette and a license plate, and the people who had raised me were gone.
I didn't know yet that this was only the first time.
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