Every October, somewhere in the middle of the month, the doll man came into the Highline Supercenter on Pueblo Boulevard, and every October, Bonita Valdés told the new cashiers not to ask him about it.
She told Cassia Renfro the first year Cassia worked there, three Octobers ago, while they were both refolding a bin of fleece blankets somebody had turned inside out looking for the last queen-size in plaid. "He's a big guy," Bonita said. "Gray beard down to here, vest, the whole thing. Rides in on a motorcycle, buys three of the princess dolls from aisle twenty-two, always three, always the same three, pays cash, leaves. He doesn't want to chat. One year a girl from the deli asked him if they were for his granddaughters and he just looked at her until she gave him his change. Didn't say a word. She cried in the break room after. He wasn't mean about it. That was the bad part. He just looked sad enough to kill a houseplant."
"Maybe they are for his granddaughters," Cassia said.
"Maybe." Bonita smoothed a blanket flat with both palms, the way she smoothed everything, receipts and coupons and the hair of small children who wandered away from their mothers. She was sixty-three and had worked at the Highline since it was a Kmart. "But I've been watching him do it for eighteen, nineteen years, mija. Granddaughters grow up. Nobody wants a princess doll at twenty."
That first year, Cassia had been working evenings and the doll man came on a weekday morning, so she missed him. The second year she was in the middle of midterms at Pueblo Community College and had switched her shifts around, and she missed him again, and heard about it from Bonita, who said he looked older, which Cassia supposed was true of everyone. The third year she forgot about him entirely, because by the third year she had a car payment and a roommate who left wet towels on the bathroom floor and a statistics professor who believed partial credit was a moral failing, and the doll man was just one of the store's ghost stories.
So when she clocked in at seven in the morning on Saturday, the seventeenth of October, she was not thinking about the doll man at all. She was thinking that she was twenty-two years old today, and that she was spending the first eight hours of being twenty-two at register nine of a supercenter in Pueblo, Colorado, under lights that made everybody look slightly embalmed.
She had picked up the shift on purpose. Gaby, her roommate, thought this was the saddest thing she had ever heard, and had said so twice the night before, once while standing in the doorway of Cassia's bedroom with a face mask on and once through the bathroom door. "Nobody works on their birthday," Gaby said. "Not on purpose. That's a cry for help."