She was walking down 17th street. He was walking west on Kalorama. She shuddered when his huge frame turned the corner. He slowed, like a ferry drifting into a pier to disgorge its passengers. Then came the warm smile that never matched the face he could make so menacing.

“Hi, Sally. Some time has passed since we see each other. Yes?” A hint of the accent that had lingered since he left San Juan decades ago. For a second her words wouldn’t come.

“I want to give you a hug, Hector.”

“¿Un abrazo?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It is more than what the gringos call a hug. It looks like a hug, but it means that we have history together, that we are in each other’s lives, and that we want things to stay that way forever.”

“Yes. That is exactly what I want to do.” She smiled back at him and inched forward.

“Do I have the time to get a cup of coffee before you start the abrazo?”

“How do you say smart-ass in Spanish?” Then he stepped towards her with his arms spread wide. She stepped into them. She smelled his cologne, felt herself melt into his embrace. No one in her family, no lover, no friend had ever made her feel this safe. Tears streamed down her face.

He put his hands on her shoulders and slowly extended his arms, never taking his eyes off hers. His right hand stayed on one shoulder. The forefinger of his left hand rubbed the tears away.

“That was a good abrazo.”

“Yes, Hector, it was,” she said through a mix of sobs and giggles.

********************

She was coming up on 35 when the urges had gotten their hooks into her. She would stroll into a CVS or a Safeway or a Walmart and roam the aisles. Sometimes nothing would catch her eye, and she would drift out the way she had drifted in. Other times it was as if there were a thick rope knotted around her waist and some unseeable force was tugging her towards a tube of lipstick or a miniature bag of chips or a ballpoint pen. Cheap stuff. She would snatch the thing and stuff it somewhere. No glancing furtively at other customers or surveillance cameras. Just take it.

At first she tried to quell the guilt and the shame. Didn’t work. Then she started going to the cedar trunk where she stashed the stuff and think, “What are you doing, girl? What is wrong with you? You’re a klepto. You have to stop this. You have to get help.”

The one person she could have talked to about all this was gone. Aunt Hilda. Her mother’s older sister. Where her mother had been distant and frosty, Hilda had been warm and nurturing. And not judgmental. So wonderful not to be picked at about her clothes, her job, her choice of men, her lack of ambition.

With Hilda she could have talked about it. It would not have been easy. Of course not. But she could have broken down. She could have laid herself open. And Hilda would have done something for her. She would have held her, stroked her hair, kissed the top of her head. She would have said the two of them would work through this together. And they would have. They would have gotten the urges under control by doing whatever it took. Therapists. Support groups. All that.

But Hilda had departed. That’s what the old Irish people in her childhood neighborhood had called it. A vicious cancer had devoured her immune system and taken this wonderful, saintly woman from their midst. That had put a dent in her soul. Sally could never voice the words, but she thought them all the time: “Why not mother? Why not the sister who had no compassion, no love to give. Where was the fairness in that?”

************

Finally, it happened. Maybe she even wanted it to. She had climbed up the steps to the Harris Teeter that everyone on the surrounding blocks had waited for so long. (At last, an alternative to the disgraceful Safeway on Columbia Road.) She had walked into the airy openness with its rumble of cackles from employees she would not have heard in DC’s posh suburbs. The aromas from the roasted chickens and the cheeses and the fresh breads and the spices and other stuff swirled together and calmed her. But they weren’t enough to dampen the urges. She knew she was going to grab something. She should just walk out. Now. But she didn’t.

After she had checked out, she headed for the stairs. His voice was right behind her neck. Deep. Resonant. Like it had come from the bottom of a barrel.

“Miss, you will have to come with me.”

“I beg your pardon.”

When she turned around, she was looking at his chest covered with a blue windbreaker and a white plastic tag that said, “Rodriguez/Security.” She looked up. All she saw was coal black eyes. They were bottomless. She began to shiver.

She tried to say, “Is there a problem, sir?” Whatever came out, he ignored it.

“Please, I would prefer not to put you in handcuffs, but I will if you do not come with me.”

“But I didn’t do anything wrong.” He took her elbow and guided her toward an office behind the checkout registers. It had a window that looked like a mirror. Inside it was not much larger than a closet. A tiny desk. He did not sit behind it. If he had, given his hugeness, he would have looked comical, like parents at a PTA meeting siting in the seats of a first grade classroom. He sat in one of two chairs in front of the desk and gestured for her to take the other.

“May I have your driver’s license please?”

“I told you. I didn’t do anything. Why are you treating me like a criminal?”

“Please, miss. We have it, what you took, we have it recorded. It will go much easier for you if you cooperate. Once again, I am asking that you give me your driver’s license.”

Her hands came up and covered her face. Then the keening sound, like Herbert, her Bassett Hound, would make all those years ago when she wouldn’t give him what he wanted.

“I must seem pathetic to you,” she managed.

He leaned towards her. In a voice so soft she couldn’t believe it was his, he said, “You do not seem pathetic. You seem like a young woman who has lost her way in the forest. She wants to get back on the right path. But so far no one has come along to help her do that.”

Then he did nothing but sit there until she had neither the voice nor the tears to keep crying.

****************

The next few months she assaulted her problem. She scoured bookstores, libraries, and the internet for information on kleptomania. She started seeing a therapist who had helped her through her grieving years ago after Hilda had died. She tried out some support groups. She rejected all of them until she found one way out in Potomac. All of the members were women over 60 and rich. Each had been arrested and booked. None had been prosecuted. A few were a bit haughty. Those were the ones who got pummeled by the others.

***************

One day in early April she was siting on a bench in Meridian Hill Park. Engrossed in a book, she was surprised when she heard, “Mind if I join you on that bench, young lady? Not sure my arthritis gonna let me get back home ‘less I take a little respite.”

The old woman was black and dressed as if she had come from church.

“Of course, please sit down.”

“What’s that you reading there, honey?”

“You know what, I’ll tell you about the book and why I’m reading it. But, well … I’ve been so focused on me lately that it would be kind of refreshing to hear about someone else.”

“How much time you got, baby?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just start wherever you’d like to start.”

It rolled out slowly. Almost melodically. Elmira was 75 and had come to Washington from Mississippi when she was a child. She had left school in the ninth grade. She was raising five grandchildren whose mothers and fathers were drug addicts or in jail or both. Sally was so taken with the timbre of her voice and her accent that she had to focus hard on the content of what the old woman was telling her.

“That’s enough ’bout me. Tell me about that book.”

“It’s a book about kleptomania.”

“That means shoplifting, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Pretty much. That’s what it means.” Elmira nodded, but said nothing. Sally didn’t want to look at her, but when she did, her head jerked.

“Did I say something wrong, baby?”

“No, no, of course not. I just realized you remind me so much of someone I lost long ago.”

“Must have been a crotchety old gal who went on and on to strangers about her problems.”

“She was the kindest person I ever knew.” Elmira reached over and took her hand. The two of them sat there silently until a man in a green uniform came up and said, “Ladies, the park is about to close, but … ah … Why don’t I come back when we have to lock the gates.”

“Thank you, young man.”

Until she gave Hector the abrazo, Sally never went into a store without Elmira right by her side.