INSIDE THE DEPOT, it was just as I feared. The waiting room was jammed with the camp kids madly swirling around until their bus arrived, everything in total confusion, redheads bobbing everywhere in the milling herd, and I knew, absolutely positively knew, picking me out was impossible. Tucking in my shredded shirttail as best I could and trying to cover torn seams with my elbows, I stood there, desperately looking around, but while there were all kinds of grown-ups mixed in with the crowd, for the life of me I couldn’t see anyone I imagined to be an Aunt Kitty or an uncle named Dutch.
When my greeters didn’t show up and didn’t show up, I decided there was only one thing to do. Resort to the slip of paper with their phone number. Not that I knew squat about using the instrument evidently hidden in the forbidding closet-size booth with GREAT LAKES PAY PHONE on it, all the way across the terminal. Pay phone? Like a jukebox, was that, where you stuck coins in and a bunch of machinery was set in motion in the guts of the apparatus, or what? Everywhere I had lived, the construction camps, the ranch, telephones were a simple party line where you merely picked up the receiver and dinged two longs and two shorts or whatever the signal was for whoever you were calling. This was not the best time to have to figure out strange new equipment, especially if you were as close to having the heebie-jeebies as I was.
Then I slapped my pants pocket, remembering. I’d spent the last of my loose change buying Tuffies for the arrowhead. To get coins to call with, I would need to break a ten-dollar bill from the stash under my remaining shirt pocket, which meant undressing even further right here in the most public place there was, where anyone like the convict in the suit and tie could be watching. I didn’t dare retreat to the men’s room to do it out of sight—that was a guaranteed way to miss Aunt Kitty and Uncle Dutch should they show up looking for me. This was becoming like one of those nightmares in which the predicament gets deeper and deeper until you think you never will wake up back to sanity.
Trying to fight down the jitters, I cast another wild gaze around the teeming waiting room, hoping for salvation in the form of anyone who might resemble Gram enough to be her sister. No such luck, not even close. People of every shape and form and way of dress, but none showed me any recognition and of course I couldn’t to them. I must have been looked past hundreds of times, as if I were too ragged for anyone to want to pack home. I was stuck.
There was no help for it, I was going to have to throw myself on the mercy of GREAT LAKES PAY PHONE. Setting down my suitcase to try to get things in order, especially myself, I first of all reached out the autograph book from my jacket pocket and flipped through the pages to find the slip of paper with the phone number. Then again. My fingers began to shake.
The piece of paper was gone. It must have fallen out when the campers, the grabby bastards, were tossing the album around.
Distress hit like an instant paralysis, as a terrible omission caught up with me. Worse, what might be called the commission of an omission. I hadn’t bothered to so much as glance at the phone number or street address even when showing those to the Schneiders. Now I stood rooted there, feeling worse off even than I was when stranded in Minneapolis—unmet, my clothing half torn off, as good as lost in a weird city, with night coming on and not even the dog bus as a haven anymore. Rough introduction into being a total orphan, it felt like.
I was dissolving into utter surrender, tears next, when I heard the melodious voice behind me.
“So here you are, sweetie pie. We wondered.”
I whirled around to the woman and man who evidently had appeared from nowhere. “How do you know I’m me?” I blurted.
The woman trilled a laugh. “Silly, you look just like Dorie, two peas from the same pod.” Gram and me? Since when?
In the meantime the man was giving me a bucktoothed expression of greeting, like a horse grinning. “Looks run in the family, hah?” he said in a voice as guttural as hers was musical. “Hallo.” He shook hands, mine swallowed in his. “I am Herman.” Not Dutch? Gram had said he was something else, but not that he was something you couldn’t put a name to for sure. Seeing my confusion, he grinned all the more. “You are thinking of how I used to be called, I betcha. Herman fits me more now.”