The Yellow-Haired Girl Short Fiction by Patty Cooper

The Yellow-Haired Girl

I was working outside when I first saw her.  The yellow-haired girl was running across all five lanes of the busy road that runs in front of our house.  I gasped with fear.  She made it and came running up the hill towards me.  Her face was a solid smile.

She introduced herself and I me. She said that she was selling candy for her school.  I bought some.  I always tried to help the kids out.  She asked if she could sit down and we began talking.  It was as if a spout had been opened on one of those huge tankers that run up and down the road.  She had so much to say.

She returned the next day and more spilled out.  She came from the trailer park across the road and up the hill.  The one at the foot of the mountain.  She had been abused in every way.  Her mom had been in prison and some of her step-daddies had used drugs.  I never could figure out how many brothers and sisters she had.  All half.

One day, not long after we met, she told me that she wished that she could live with my husband and me.  I told her that I wished that she could, too.  We both knew that couldn’t happen.  Somehow she instinctively knew that she would be safe here.  She knew that she would be secure here.  I grew to love her and she me.  My husband, too.  She kept coming back. 

Fall turned to winter.  Her family was in dire straits and I helped them some.  Not enough.  She bought me a Christmas present and drew me pictures.  They hang on my wall.  I have no pictures drawn by my own grandchildren only by the little yellow-haired girl.

She kept saying they were moving.  Her mama had a job.  Her daddy had job prospects.  They couldn’t pay their rent, but things were always going to be better on Friday.

It was a bad winter with lots of snow.  I constantly worried about the little yellow-haired girl.  She came through the deep snow.  She said that they really were leaving, because the water had gotten turned off and the electricity was going to be turned off.  I asked if they had a safe place to go and she said that they were going to move in with family.

She was right.  They did move that night.  Every time someone knocks at the door I hope that it is the little yellow-haired girl.  So far, it hasn’t been.  I wonder about her and I’d like to know, but I am afraid to know.  It has now been years. 

I wonder why if a man and a woman want to leave each other they can.  Then strike up with who they want to, but it isn’t the same if an old woman and an old man and a yellow-haired girl love each other and want to be together.  Wonder why that is?

©   By Patty Cooper

Elizabethton, TN

June 17^th, 2014