Some sunflower seeds.
A crumpled diner receipt.
But his watch was missing.
Mom called the authorities repeatedly.
She contacted the hospital.
The towing company.
Anyone who might know where it had gone.
Nobody had seen it.
We assumed it had been thrown from the vehicle during the accident and buried somewhere along Route 9.
That spring, after the snow melted, Mom took me to the roadside.
We searched the ditch for hours.
We never found it.
She rarely talked about the watch afterward.
But I knew how much it hurt her.
She had saved so carefully to buy it.
And she’d engraved a message on the back.
Dad had worn it every day.
Then, suddenly, it was gone.
I finally fell asleep imagining that watch buried beneath damp leaves, somewhere beside the road where we’d lost him.
The next morning, I arrived at work four minutes late.
I’d barely entered through the employee door when Lori hurried toward me.
Lori never hurried.
So the sight of her practically rushing across the store immediately worried me.
“Rachel,” she said. “Mike wants you in his office.”
“Why?”
“Right now. He asked me to cover your register.”
My stomach tightened.
“Lori, am I in trouble?”
She hesitated.
Then she squeezed my arm.
“Just go, sweetheart.”
I walked toward the manager’s office with a thousand possibilities racing through my mind.
Maybe someone had complained about yesterday.
Maybe paying for that woman’s diapers had violated company policy badly enough to get me fired.
Maybe my cash drawer had been short.
