The Postcard by Tony Abbott Page B

get us a newspaper. Run into that hotel and pick up a paper.”
    I looked up at the big place next to us. He said he needed to know about the fight, the big battle in Tallahassee.
    “Dad?” I grew scared, because I didn’t know about any battle so near us and if people got hurt or how many had died.
    “They’ll have a paper, Nicky,” he told me again, his eyes searching the storefronts from one side of the street to the other. “I’ll go to that stand on the corner. But get a copy from the lobby if they have one, will you?”
    He gave me a nickel and hurried away along the street, his head stretching every which way, his hands shaking like palm leaves in a storm.
    “Okay, Dad, okay.” I ran up the steps and stumbled into the lobby. It was the famous Hotel DeSoto. It was vast and rich and fancy. . . .
    Whoa, whoa, whoa,
what
? The hotel on the postcard? The hotel my great-grandfather owned? The place being bulldozed next week? No way!
    I was sucked in again.
    Before I saw anything, before I saw the rack of papers or the neat-haired boy selling them or the long mahogany counter or the silver bell gleaming on top of it or the postcard rack or the gilded columns or the tufted cushions, I saw her.
    I saw her. A single willow, all in white except for the pastel green ribbons on each shoulder of her dress and the one in her hair. She was standing in the middle of the carpet, standing like something made of white stone (like a gravestone angel, I thought), except that she was turning to see me, to see what the noise was, startled by my rush into the lobby, and watching me trip past the doorman, nearly landing on my face, her light brown hair waving in the breeze of the doors.
    Her green eyes, her hazel-green eyes, were looking at me now and frowning. Those eyes, that white, bright forehead with the hair pulled back from it and tied in that ribbon, were frowning at me, but half smiling, too.
    My mouth must have been hanging open, and I froze where I lay, and everything froze.
    Who are you? I wondered.
    Soon enough a beefy hand broke out of nowhere and snatched hers, shaking loose the scene and starting everything moving again. When my eyes flicked up, I saw a man in a pink suit not quite as big as a circus tent. His fat face was lobster-red; his eyeteeth glistened in his mouth and were longer than any man’s I’d ever seen. His dark eyes flashed like pistol shots at midnight. He pulled the girl to him.
    Just then my father came into the lobby and right up to me, a paper folded under his arm. He knelt and helped me up from the floor and dusted me off. I remember his hat fell on the floor when he did that.
    She spoke then, and I turned away from my father.
    “Daddy, is he —,” she said.
    “Never mind him, Marnie. Let’s go,” the fat man said.
    Marnie!
    But he didn’t go, not right away. Eyeing my father and me, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a silver cigarette case. It had a blue stone in the center of it. He clicked it open, pulled out a cigarette, closed the case, and returned it to his pocket in a flash of silver.
    Then he tugged the girl across the lobby to where a group of impossibly thin men in oily black suits held open the door of an elevator. A young man with legs like stilts was loping down the stairs into view. He was far over seven feet, close to eight, a giant-in-training with shoes the size of ash cans. Next to him was a squat balloon, also young, also in oily blacks. A flash of curved silver came from his ample waist, but I turned away. The girl was looking over her shoulder at me, and my mind was filled with her, her hazel eyes, that face, that bouncing waterfall of hair, the shattering of the lobby into pieces like a cracked mirror, the sudden earthquake of her her her.
    With that half smile, she drew my nine-year-old heart right out of me. She took it into herself and never gave it back. She has it still. She’ll always have it.
    “Come on, Nicky,” my father murmured as he