It wasn’t the leaving that broke Tildy’s little cotton-cloth heart; It was the getting left behind.

In the years that followed, Matilda May Doll often said to Uriel, the crow, that she could have lived knowing Addy didn’t need her anymore; that happened eventually to all beloved toys as their friends grew up.

What drove the peace from Tildy’s plain, open heart was that she never knew for sure. Was Addy all right? Where did she go?

Even when the hurt began to fade, Tildy would sometimes feel a pain so hard that she wondered if Addy could feel it, too, wherever she was.

When Addy came back, she would ask her.

The day Addy’s family left, burly men in red shirts lifted everything in the house up, one piece at a time. They carried the pieces, two men at a time, up into a long truck.

Tildy watched from the window shelf next to the silver Humpty-Dumpty coin bank, and the two of them -- Humpty, and her -- wondered to think that the whole family’s life fit into the truck, when most sunny days the house was so full of life that it spilled out into the yard, the garden, and the pond at the edge of the wood.

Tildy watched, too bewildered to feel left out, as Addy and her younger brothers ran under the ramp of the truck and around and around the driveway.

“Wait! Wait!” called Addy, when they swooped down to pack the children into the family sedan. Tildy’s stuffing turned cold, and she looked in fear around at the room, stripped of everything but some wire and the coin bank.

“You don’t think they’ve forgotten us, do you Matilda May?” the coin bank whispered.

Tildy spoke more sharply than she meant to; the fear took hold of her throat. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “How could they leave us behind?”

“Wait! Wait!” called Addy, and Tildy breathed a silent prayer. She heard the car door slam shut, and then open. Then the house door opened. Then the footsteps, heavy adult steps, rattled the staircase of the hundred-year-old house.

Then Tildy fell off the shelf, as she had a hundred times before. This time, it seemed to take forever. He’ll never see me on the floor, thought Tildy frantically. Adults never look down.

Even the coin bank cried out.

Addy’s father, worried and hasty, snatched the bank off the shelf. “All this fuss over a few cents,” he muttered.

He slipped the coin bank into his pocket, and slipped out the door, leaving Matilda May alone -- really alone -- for the first time in her life.

Tildy's first fright: and a friend. >>