I have run a little boat dock on the river here outside Paducah ever since I retired. Fix outboard motors, sell minnows and nightcrawlers, drink my coffee and watch the water go by. It is a good, quiet life for an old man. And for about a month now, this girl, thirteen maybe, has been coming down every single afternoon, sitting herself on the end of my old pier, staying there till dark, alone, just watching the river. Comes from that trailer park up the road. First few days I left her be. But then I started paying attention, the way you do.
Because it was not a happy kind of sitting. She did not fish, did not have a phone out, did not do anything but sit and stare at that brown water going by. And she stayed later and later, till the mosquitoes drove even me inside, and still she would not head home. A kid who loves the river swims in it, skips rocks, laughs. This one just sat, small and still, like the river was the only place she could breathe. I have got granddaughters of my own. You learn to read a girl that age, the difference between one who is dreaming and one who is dreading.
So one evening, near dark, I got two cans of soda out of the cooler, walked down, handed her one, and sat myself down on the boards beside her. We watched the water a while. Then I asked her, easy, why she sat out here till night every day instead of heading home. She was quiet a long time. Then, still looking at the river, she said there was nothing to go home to. That her mama was using again, that there were strangers in the trailer at all hours, that some nights there was no food and no telling who would be there, and that the pier was the only place all day nobody scared her.
Thirteen years old, and a stranger dock at dusk was the safest place she had.
I did not scare her or make big promises. I told her she could sit on my pier any day she liked, and that no child should have to be afraid to go home, and that I knew some folks whose whole job is fixing exactly that. The next morning I made the calls a person is supposed to make, careful, so it could not be brushed aside.
It turned out she had a grandmother two counties over, frantic for her, who had not been allowed to see her. That girl is living with her granny now, safe, fed, in a house with the doors locked against the right things. Her mama is in a program, with a long road ahead but a road, at least.
I used to watch that water and wish I could just float away on it. I did not know a person could ask for help. I did not know anybody would come.
She still comes to the dock sometimes, her granny parked up top waiting. She fishes now. She skips rocks. She laughs. She sits on my pier like a kid who loves the river, which is all she ever should have been.