Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

meat market, a favorite location for fashion shots? Perhaps Roy had turned to the left, had looked at Sally with his round brown eyes, had led her this way. And then what? Had she just decided to go on the spot? Or had one of the trucks stopped to offer her a ride without her asking for it, the way the truck from North Carolina had stopped for me.
    “Can I give you a ride home?” he’d said, a little guy, sitting on a couple of pillows to get high enough in the cab to I see over the steering wheel. When he smiled, I saw he had a front tooth missing. “You look like you might be lost,” he said when I hadn’t answered right away. “This ain’t no place to be walking your dog at night.” And when I still hadn’t responded, “I won’t hurt you. You have my word on that.”
    He reached out his hand for mine, I thought to help me up into the cab, but then he said his name, “Fred White,” as if that was the assurance I’d been waiting for.
    When I shook my head, he shook his right back at me. “You take care, hon. Maybe walk him that way,” he said, pointing toward Ninth Avenue. “These ladies here, they don’t play nice.” Fred winked, shut the door and drove off.
    Dashiell and I headed home. No wonder there were so many people who disappeared and were never heard from again, I thought. It was so easy.
    You could hitch a ride out of town, no problem. But then what? You get out of the truck the next day in Fayetteville, say, and go job hunting with your Border collie? So what if you could get out of the city. Wouldn’t that just be the beginning of your troubles, not the end?
    Sally would have needed a job, preferably one that included room and board. I checked my watch, remembering only afterwards that I’d left it at home. Sally would need a watch, too, I thought. If she got a job, she’d have to get there on time in order to keep it. But she couldn’t buy a watch until she had the job—one of those dilemmas.
    I thought it was probably too late to call Leon, ask him what work skills Sally had. We walked back along Greenwich Street, just in case. If I saw a light in Leon’s window, I would have called. But Leon’s window was dark. It was Madison’s room that had the lights on, Madison up past midnight. I wondered if she was reading in bed. Or if she’d had a bad dream. I wondered if Madison were willing to talk, if she needed to talk, would Leon be willing to listen? I wondered if anyone had ever listened to Madison, and if no one had, maybe that was why she’d stopped speaking.
    Why call Leon anyway, I thought, heading over to Hudson Street, crossing over to the side where the playground was, the sandbox empty, the swings still, no sound of little kids having fun. What skills could Sally have had, knocked up at fifteen, taking care of a baby all day when she was sixteen, then starting school at night? There wouldn’t have been a chance for her to work summers either. She’d been too young. Maybe she’d babysat. Kids started that at thirteen or fourteen, those without huge allowances and credit cards, and I didn’t for a minute think Sally fit into that group. Could she have gotten a job as a nanny? That would have given her room and board plus a little bit of money. But how would you do that without references? And how would you do that when you had a Border collie with you? If you had a Border collie with you. If things didn’t look too good for Sally, they looked even worse for Roy.

CHAPTER 11

    Not a nanny, I thought the moment I woke up. Or had I been dreaming? She couldn’t have walked out on her own child to end up taking care of someone else’s. I didn’t believe that was possible.
    After breakfast, I checked the want ads, looking for jobs that included food and lodging, or if not food, at least lodging. A place to stay, that would have been the first problem that needed solving. Of course, the jobs in the Times were mostly local. I didn’t know what Sally might have found in other cities, or in a town so small it only made it onto local maps.
    I thought about the truckers, most of them lonely, some of them trying to deal with their loneliness by spending a few bucks and a few minutes with a transvestite hooker. A lot of them willing to bend the law and pick up a woman and a dog, have company part of the way back home. If Sally had been picked up by a trucker, might someone have seen that?
    The hookers were out on weekend mornings. After working all night, they looked like