"You’d better not be hiding. If you’re hiding, I’m going to be very angry." She paused. "I’m waiting."

His voice, sounding very far away, piped "I’m here!", and she turned to see a child’s hand waving out the top of a rack of woolen coats. The hand vanished, the rack swayed slightly, and, with a scrape of hangers, a small boy emerged, beaming, and spread his arms wide in demonstration.

"Come here," she said, advancing on him. "I hope you didn’t get any of that on the coats." He fought away from the facewiping, then stooped slightly, clutching his pants. "Do you have to go to the bathroom?" She looked around. Their only companion on the floor was a woman at a far register counting slips of paper.

"In the basement near the carpets. You’ll see a corridor. They’re just past the elevators." The counter woman smiled down at the knock-kneed Patrick. "Hope you make it. The escalators are right over there", she leaned forward, head atilt, and pointed with finality.

In the basement, amid a warehouse of stacked and hanging carpets, Patrick’s mother glanced about for help and saw no one. Spotting an "Employees Only" sign, she dragged Patrick toward it. Beneath the sign, a corridor led off the sales floor, whose décor continued in the corridor only to its first turn. There the carpet ended in bare concrete and the flocked wallpaper gave way to aging yellow vinyl. The homelier passage led through an area shared by two worn wing chairs and a freight elevator. Beyond that, past labelled restroom doors, the hallway narrowed again for a few yards, then disappeared around a second corner. On the wall where it turned, a metal rack bristled with time cards.

Swinging Patrick up by his armpits, his mother gave the door marked "Ladies" a push with her foot and shouldered her way in. There was a single stall, a sofa and a washbowl. "Hang on, Honey," she said, and planted him on the floor before the open stall door. "Hop out, hop out," she urged, pulling pants and underpants down to his shoes in a single motion. She yanked bunched-up pantleg and shoe together off each foot and perched him on the toilet. He relaxed his bladder and heaved a little sigh of relief. His mother breathed an echoing sigh.

"Okay, Honey," she said as she pulled up his pants, lifting him slightly off the floor with each tug, "Now it’s Mommy’s turn. Sit down on the sofa. Here. Hold your shoes. I’ll be right in here. Talk to me."

Patrick sat on the couch as his mother disappeared into the stall. "Put your shoes on, Honey," she said from inside. "You be putting on your shoes. Hiiiee! Patrick? Hellooo!" She would have enjoyed a more talkative child.

"Helloooo," the boy called back, and began pulling on his shoes. After a while, his mother cursed.

"Patrick, Honey, get Mommy a paper towel, will you please? " She reached a hand under the stall. "Honey? Come here. Hold my hand. There are Scott towels over by the washbowl. Bring me some." She let go of his hand and waited as he shuffled off.

In the hallway, Patrick looked around and saw no towels. He walked around the corner and down the passage to the timecards. Standing on tiptoe, he couldn’t quite reach the lowest card. A woman was talking somewhere, and he followed her voice to an open doorway. High cabinets to either side of the door formed an avenue at the end of which the talking woman sat with her back to him, phone to ear, swiveling slowly from side to side in her chair.

Patrick walked up behind the talking woman, who did not look as if she wanted to be interrupted. Her hair was dark and piled up on her head in an odd kind of roll, and one hand waggled back and forth in the air as she talked. A strong sweet smell filled the air in the office. As the boy watched, she paused a moment in her swivelling, clipped the phone in the crook of her shoulder, and leaning, drew a tiny brush from a little pink bottle on the desk beside her. Setting her elbows, she continued talking with the phone clutched awkwardly between one hunched shoulder and her ear. After a while, she returned the brush to the bottle, leaned back and resumed waggling.

The room she worked in was filled with cabinets like the ones that flanked the doorway: each one a dark green column of deep silver-handled drawers. Two tables pushed together in the middle of the room were piled high with papers, yellow, pink and green, in cardboard folders. In the far corner a water cooler stood by a closed door. As the boy looked at it, the door swung suddenly inward, releasing at once into the office a gurgling sound and a large man who sauntered out into the room limping heavily to one side and stuffing a gaudily flowered shirt into still-open pants. He paused outside the door to zip his fly and fasten his belt, which he yanked hard before he buckled it, so that a fold of stomach hung over it when he was done. He reached into his back pocket and brought a small red comb up to his hair. The woman on the phone was saying, "Gotta go. Talk t’ya later."

"Who’s the kid?" said the bathroom man as he combed oily black hair back into a glossy wave. The woman hung the receiver in its cradle and turned, still waggling a hand slowly across her chest. She looked at Patrick without surprise and said, "Not mine."

"I hope not. You’re fast, but not that fast."

"Musta wandered in. Hey, you wash your hands?"

"What for? They just get dirty again."

"You ain’t touchin’ me till you do. They got no potty on the dock?"

"The company’s not as good. Who was that? " He gestured at the telephone. "Anyone I know?".

"Joyce." She screwed shut the little pink bottle and deposited it in the desk drawer.

"Uh-oh. Were you talkin’ about me?" He leaned back against one of the tables and folded his arms, eyebrows raised.

"She says we lost her last order."

"I’ll check. You talk about me?"

"Loose lips sink ships."

"Then hers sunk the Pacific fleet. What’d she say? My ears are burnin’."

"She says you’re in the category of a mistake."

"She should know. Hey, kid, you want a drink? " The bathroom man took Patrick by the hand and led him to the water cooler. From a dispenser on the wall he drew a flat slip of paper, squeezed it delicately between beefy thumb and index fingers, and filled the resulting cone-shaped cup with water. He extended it to Patrick. The boy drank it and handed back the mushy cup. He was looking into the little bathroom. From a hook on the back wall hung a soiled white terrycloth towel. He pointed and said brightly, "Towels!"

"Yeah. Towels!" replied the man just as brightly. "Maybe he wants to use the bathroom. You want to use the bathroom?" The boy shook his head. "You sure?", said the man.

"He’s just lost," said the phone woman. "Take him up to Lost and Found. He can watch the cashiers. Kids love those tubes. You can watch too."

"His clothes are weird. Look at those shoes. Where do you get stuff like that? Maybe he’s foreign. A war orphan."

"Yeah. They all come to Bullock’s."

"Well look at ‘em. They’re some kind of rubber."

"They’re hand-me-downs or something. Good kid’s shoes are hard to get now."

"They’re rubber."

"They’re old."

"They don’t look old. His haircut’s kinda strange, too. Here, kid, let me put a part in that hair." He drew out the little red comb and began dividing Patrick’s hair on the right side.

"Don’t use that filthy comb on him. His mother’d faint if she saw you doin’ that. You ever wash that comb? Found it on the dock, I bet."

The man kept working. "I’ll have you know this is an excellent comb. Rexall’s finest. Twenty cents."

"For that, it better be miraculous."

"It is. It leaves more hair on your head than when you started." He looked at the boy. "Don’t worry, kid. It only works on grownups."

The phone woman was now putting on bright red lipstick, watching herself in the mirror of a tortoise-shell compact. She turned her head slightly to either side, went "ma-ma-ma" at herself in the mirror and packed away the lipstick and compact in her purse. Leaning across the desk, she picked up a cigarette pack and a large glossy black lighter. She tucked both in the purse and squeezed it shut with a loud snap. "It’s noon. I’m going out. When you’re done giving the kid a pompadour, take him upstairs. His mother’s probably going nuts."

Patrick’s mother emerged from the Ladies’ room wiping her hands on her pants and looking to either side. "Patrick!", she called. "Patrick!", she shouted louder. She hurried out to the carpet room, looked around, saw no one, and hurried back. For a moment she considered the elevator, then looked down the hallway around the corner from the restroom door. The empty timecard rack stared back at her.

In the corridor past the card rack there were two doorways. She hesitated a moment before the first door, then from within, as clearly as she sometimes heard her own name called in the night, she heard his voice, trailing into the distance like the voice of someone on a departing train: "Towels!"

"Patrick!", she called. "If you’re hiding, I’m going to be very angry!" She stared into the darkened doorway, waiting for a reply. The room was piled high with large cardboard cartons that left only a small amount of floorspace for walking. The stacked boxes formed a tight passageway leading into the room and around a turn. Past the turn, it was dark. Walking in as far as the hallway light carried, she peered into the gloom around the turn, then felt her way onward, talking to him as she went. Abruptly, she ran up against a closed door. She knocked loudly,calling his name, then, finding a cut-glass knob, gave it a sharp twist and the door swung in. She ran her hand up the wall inside, and, to her surprise, the room lit up. It was a small restroom, grimy and apparently abandoned, its toilet dry.

She backed away, and hurried out to the door she had entered by. Hanging above it, in the half-darkness, a clock, looking older than her mother, with a yellowed face and large, stylish numerals, read five of twelve.