Missing

My daffodils are tall and green and fat with hidden blooms.  Here and there, a bit of yellow peeks between curtains of green, a fallen slip showing beneath a dress.  The robins bounce across the yard, pecking here and there in sun-softened soil. 

At the local garden store, I order a yard of topsoil for my new raised bed and I see there’s a flyer for a boy—a young man, really—who has gone missing. 

We take V’s dress to the dry cleaners to have it altered.  She stands upon a rickety pressboard table while the woman tucks and pins and marks with white dressmaker chalk.  A man comes in to pick up his dry cleaning.  He chats with Squints and Filibuster then nods to V, standing upon the rickety table. 

“That’s a lovely dress.”

V blushes and smiles and looks down while the woman begins marking the hem.  The skin on the back of her hands is taut and I can see thick veins, purple and blue, running along knobby bones.  “Every time I measure another spot on this hem, it changes.”  She yanks out the safety pins and begins again.  “It’s not going to have the same hem,” she snaps.  "I can't do a hidden hem on my machine."

“We’re not going to be angry about the hem,” I tell her.  “I’m sure you’ll do a better job than I ever could.”

She nods and begins measuring and folding again. 

Finally, she is satisfied with her work.  V steps down from the rickety table and goes to change back into her sweats. 

The cashier can’t figure out the register.  She sighs and grumbles and sighs some more before putting in a random price.  “I don’t know what it’s going to cost you,” she says, handing us a bill for forty dollars. 

We run to the drugstore to pick up a prescription and here, too, the cashier is grumpy. 

And when we head for milk, I see another poster of the missing boy.  He is smiling in the picture; standing in the kitchen.  And I can’t help—on this first day without jackets—but think of his parents and how frustration over the day's trials must seem trivial to them now.

The robins continue to hop across the grass and the daffodils peek from behind the curtains and even the hyacinths are daring to show their purples and whites.

I hope the boy finds his way home, that the posters will be removed from store windows.

Tonight I resolve not to dwell on the frustrations of the day.