Estelle soon loses sight of her in the crowd and is left to ponder the injustice of a child as bright and winning as Barry having to die when the world is so full of hopeless ones.
“I’m tired of this place,” Guy says, getting up. “Let’s move around.”
The lake is dismally uninviting in the grayness of dusk, so they wander up to the penny arcade where the musk of sweating youth and the shelves of junky unattainable prizes and the slam-bang clamor of blinking, popping, rat-a-tat-tating games of chance do not offend Estelle, for this was Barry’s favorite haunt on those Fourth of July excursions. There’s the sharpshooter game he loved to play, the iron hand that tested his strength, the wax medium who told his false fortune, the booth where he mugged for two-bit snapshots which even now are enshrined among a dozen other photos in Estelle’s purse, her precious pictorial record of Barry’s ten years on earth.
Between the machines of chance, Estelle glimpses the strange girl’s face once more, pale, rapturous, framed by lank ribbons of dirty brown hair.
“I’m going to the Men’s,” Guy says with a nudge, telling her to wait there for him. She nods absently, all her attention focused on the girl, who is now lingering over one of the machines. Estelle moves closer. It’s the machine displaying slick-skinned smiling faces of film stars, male and female, which will pop out, autographed, at the insertion of a coin and the pressing of a button.
The girl fishes out a coin and slides it into the machine, pushes a button. Nothing happens. No picture drops into her waiting hand. Once more she presses the button, and again, and finally, trembling with frustration, she paws at the glass-shielded faces with white bony fingers.
Furious, Estelle rushes forward to help.
“Let me try, dear. This the one you want?”
Close up, the girl’s eyes remind Estelle of a flowering plant called Job’s Tears that bloomed in her grandmother’s garden, bluer than violets but somehow sad-looking, perhaps because of its name.
Estelle jabs the button with no better results. Truly angry now, she sets her purse on an adjoining machine and, literally embracing the photo machine, she tries to shake it into action, the world once more reduced to symbolic terms: helpless victim against evil management.
My gosh, she thinks, maybe the kid used the wrong coin. She reaches for her purse — and finds it gone. Three laughing nuns jam her against the machine and not until they’ve passed does she realize that the girl, too, is gone.
When Guy comes back he finds Estelle quizzing the family the girl had been following. The woman answers lackadaisically, wary of this frail copper-eyed woman who has cornered her in this bedlam, but the small girl pipes up: “She ain’t with us. We don’t even know her.”
The man says, “Saw her down by the rink. Some goofy teenager.”
Guy demands an explanation; she tells him what happened.
“What do you mean, took it? Grabbed it out of your hand?”
“I set it down for just a—”
“Are you nuts? In this place?” Yet he seems maliciously pleased with what happened. “Feeling sorry for every freak you see, good, hope it learns you a lesson. Well, come on, might as well report it. Fat chance it’ll do any good.”
“All Barry’s pictures. Every one. Oh, Guy, I’ve got to get them back. I can’t lose them. They’re all I’ve got left.”
His reply is lost in the noise of the crowd and, anyway, she is crying too hard to hear.
In the following days she grieved for the loss of the pictures almost as intensely as she had grieved for the loss of the boy himself, all her energies absorbed by the emotion to the point where she could handle only minimal household duties. Together with a mind-wilting heat wave, this freshness of grief quite immobilized her and she would sit in the swing on the front porch gazing sightlessly over the unwatered boxes of geraniums and petunias to the empty street, over which the maple leaves seemed to cast shadows as thick and black as boiling-hot tar.
Then a strange and disconcerting thing happened. As she sat there one afternoon listlessly fanning herself with an unread magazine, she saw the odd girl from the penny arcade, dressed in the same shabby clothes, trudging down the street toward the house.
That the girl should pop up in this neighborhood filled Estelle with confusion and foreboding. Her first impulse was to scurry inside and lock the door, and this was such a strong impulse she would surely have yielded to it had the girl not by now come close enough for the object in her hand to be recognized. The purse!
Suddenly giddy, Estelle had to grip the chain from which the swing was suspended and cling tightly to it as she watched the girl come down the sidewalk and up to the porch, where she stood looking up at Estelle with those vivid, empty, flower-like eyes.
“You’re the girl in the penny arcade, aren’t you?” was all Estelle could think to say. The girl nodded.
“You’ve brought the purse back.” Estelle slowly released her grip on the chain. “Well, that was nice of you. Very nice. You’d better come up here out of the sun before you melt.”
Obediently, the girl came up onto the porch and sat down beside Estelle on the swing, but this proximity was somehow unwelcome to Estelle; she was not quite ready for it and she got up, saying, “You must be parched. I’ll bet a glass of ice-cold lemonade would just hit the spot. Be back in a jiffy.”
The girl hadn’t spoken a word, and though she looked perfectly harmless sitting there on the swing, Estelle remembered the vanishing act in the penny arcade. “I’ll put the purse inside.” When she moved to take it, the girl hugged it to her thin chest. Estelle laughed uncomfortably. “Okay. Lemonade first. Thanks for guarding it so well. My husband swore I’d seen the last of it.”
No recriminations seemed the best way to handle it. All that mattered was that she get it back.
She brought out a pitcher and two glasses and some glazed doughnuts. The girl hadn’t moved. This time, Estelle sat down in the green wicker chair. The girl raised her glass to her lips.
“My poor geraniums,” said Estelle conversationally. “I guess they need a drink, too.”
At this, the girl would have poured her lemonade into the flower box had Estelle not stopped her with a startled cry.
“They don’t like lemonade. Too acidy. I’ll water them later.” She tried to keep her eyes off the purse pressed snugly against the girl’s hip. “You haven’t told me your name. I’m Estelle Thurman.”
The girl reached into her pocket and handed Estelle a very grubby-looking card. It said: I am mute. Nothing more; no name, no plea for funds. The utter simplicity, the cruel baldness of the message quickened Estelle’s sympathy.
“I’m so very sorry, dear. Would you like some more lemonade? And don’t be afraid of the doughnuts.” Having said this, she was at a loss. Of course it occurred to her, not being a complete simpleton, that the girl might be a phony, and yet she wouldn’t really have cared one way or another, being the sort of person who looks beyond the obvious trickeries for those shadowy sick impulses of the soul that prompt them; in other words, the possibility of deceit did not undermine her compassion but only added an element of melancholy to it. If it were all a trick, she would play along.
“You’re a dear precious child for finding my purse and bringing it back to me. I’m going to give you a reward!”