Little Pretty Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

the comforter and waited, but it wouldn’t stop. I shoved my hands into my pockets. My fingers grazed something—the barrette. I’d forgotten it.
    I held it in my palm, then went to the mirror and clipped the bauble into my hair. I let down my ponytail and combed out my hair with my fingers.
    I changed into an old T-shirt and sweats and retrieved the pen from where it had landed. I listened for my mom for a second before entering the bathroom and closing the door. In the vanity, a hundred tiny bottles rolled to the back of the bottom drawer and then forward again. The bulk of them pleased me. The scents. The variety of what people left behind from other places they’d been. I chose a lotion, probably a Hyatt or a Radisson brand, better stuff than the Mid-Night offered, and used a dollop to calm the raw skin on my hands. Then I reached behind and under the open drawer and pulled out the old makeup bag I kept there.
    The bag was faded black with white polka dots. Something from childhood, maybe. I sat with my back against the closed door, unzipped the bag, and started pulling out the collection. I lined them up on the floor, one piece after another. Nothing valuable: an interesting spiral paperclip; a single earring I thought might be turned into a pendant; a lipstick from a designer brand, but in a color I could never wear. I pulled the glittering barrette out of my hair and added it. My lost and found.
    Except that no one ever found these things again. No one ever came looking. Not for the single pink-and-orange-striped baby sock that my hands hadn’t been able to resist. Not for the empty cut-glass atomizer that still smelled as fussy as the old woman who’d told me about her trip to visit her grandkids. No one came back for the little pretty things that I couldn’t help but want. That I couldn’t help but take.
    The benefit of the schedule Lu and I split was that I always ended up cleaning the rooms of the guests I’d signed in the day before. I checked in the cheapskates and pensioners, the glassy-eyed parents with yowling kids and sullen teens up until Billy took over the evening shift, and then the next morning I got to see what was left behind. Usually they left me greasy pizza boxes or a sticky, overturned juice bottle, but sometimes they left clues.
    Like the jittery guy with a trim beard and a mega-sized gas station coffee, gone by the time I arrived the next day. He’d left a picture postcard of Italy tucked into the bathroom mirror. I’d cleaned the room around it, expecting him to come back—because of course I’d read it and knew that he hadn’t meant to leave it. But who means to leave anything, even things they don’t care about?
    I picked it up now and turned it over. I barely needed to read the words— Pigeon: I promised you something and I mean to deliver. Love, Your Jedi . Other people led interesting lives. I mean—that was a promise I wanted the guy to keep. That was a promise that I wished I could keep for him.
    But most of the things were just things. They had no other life, no other purpose. They were orphans. That lipstick never got used. That private postcard was forgotten. I gave them a home.
    I held the card to my cheek until I felt foolish, reminded of Teeny and her gumballs. I packed it all up, adding the pen from the Mid-Night. Maddy had used it.
    These things didn’t make me happy. They didn’t make me sad. Often, when I took them out from their hiding place, they seemed like litter. Why had anyone ever owned them in the first place? Who bothered with fancy paper clips? Why would anyone allow someone to call her a pigeon? I should throw it out. I should take it all to the motel and put it into the box under the counter, the real lost and found. Or dump it all in the bin in the recessed alcove next to Billy’s room. That’s what it was. Trash.
    But I didn’t want to . . . No, I wanted to. I couldn’t .
    The gleam of the perfume bottle or the gold bit on the lipstick tube