"Thank you for dropping it," he said, and it was such a strange, unexpectedly sweet thing to say that I didn't know how to answer it, and while I was still deciding, he lifted a hand and turned and walked off toward the parking garage, orange hat bobbing over the crowd like a buoy, and was gone.
I finished my shopping. I bought my mother a scarf she would never wear, and my father a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition that he would not read, and I stood for ten minutes in front of a display of fuzzy socks and thought about the word reserved. Then I drove home through a dusting of new snow to my apartment in the Perry District, which is the top half of an old house with a furnace that thinks it's a steam engine and a landlady named Mrs. Okabe-Lund who leaves me loaves of banana bread with notes on them saying things like You look thin. I carried my bags up the outside stairs. I put the Santa picture on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a grand piano. I took off my coat and hung it on the hook and sat at my kitchen table with a roll of tape and the silver paper, to fix the torn corner.
I unzipped the pocket. I took out the box.
I knew before I opened it. It is hard to explain, but there is a kind of weight that only an empty thing has. The box was an inch and three-quarters of nothing. I opened it anyway. The green felt was there, and the impression of the base of the knight in the felt, a little circle where it had stood for nine days.
The knight was gone.
I turned the box upside down and shook it, which was stupid. I turned the coat pocket inside out. I turned all my pockets inside out. I took everything out of all the shopping bags and shook each item, the scarf and the book and the socks and the gift card for Liv. I went down the outside stairs in my socks to look in the car with my phone flashlight, under the seats and between the seats and in the little well under the parking brake where I have lost so many things, a hairbrush, a Chapstick, a single earring I had been looking for since August. No knight. I came back upstairs with wet socks and stood in the middle of my kitchen and looked at the Santa picture on my refrigerator, at my own hand pressed flat over my pocket, and I thought: it was there. It was there when I put my hand on it. I'm sure I felt it. And then I thought: the tear.
The corner had split when he caught it. A tear along one edge. And a white knight is about an inch and a half tall and about five-eighths of an inch through the base, and I had seen, as I stood beside the photo kiosk, the paper flapping, and I had not thought about it, because I had a stranger's phone number and a stranger's mother to think about and a Santa Claus telling me that life is short.
I sat down on the kitchen floor. I am not a person who cries easily. I cry at exactly two things, the slow movement of the Schumann piano concerto and dogs being reunited with soldiers on the internet. I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet under the sink and I cried like the little girl who had screamed at Truett, as though somebody were lowering me into a volcano. Eleven months. Six ruined knights and one Elvis. Twenty-four years. I had finally made the thing, and I had carried it nine days, and I had lost it in a shopping mall in the space of an hour because I wanted to look at it while I drank a mocha.
When I was done, which took a while, I picked up my phone. I scrolled to the most recent text. Thank you for your service.
It was nine-forty at night. He had said he was going to sleep for six hours and go to work. I typed, I'm so sorry to bother you, and deleted it. I typed, This is going to sound insane, and deleted it. Finally I typed: It's gone. The knight. It must have fallen out through the tear. Is there any chance it fell in your jacket or your car or anything? I know it's a long shot. I'm sorry.
I sent it. I put the phone face-down on the floor. I looked at the ceiling.
The phone buzzed eleven seconds later.
On break. Checking my jacket now.