Flash Fiction: Missing Someone

Another Flash Fiction prompt from absolutewrite.com. This one is "missing someone or something."
***
Sammy shook the spray can one more time and finished the "Y" at the end. It wasn't much, but he wanted it to be in big letters so everyone walking by would see it. He stepped back and looked down at the words he had painted on the sidewalk.

"I MISS YOU TERRIBLY"

That was all he could think to say. He had gone by Rosa's apartment every day for a week now, ringing the bell and pressing his face up against the iron gate that opened onto the stairway, but no one ever answered. He asked around the neighborhood, at the dollar store where she worked, at Chava's Taqueria where they used to go for lunch, at all the bars that they used to go to, but no one had seen her. It was only then that he realized how little he had known about her. He didn't remember her ever talking about her family back home, or about how exactly she had come to live in the little apartment on 18th street or to work at the Dollar Store. She had agreed to give him her phone number the second time he came into the store and got up the nerve to ask. After that, nothing else seemed to matter.

Now she didn't answer her phone, she didn't come to work, and no one was ever home at her apartment. He decided to go back to Chava's and sit at the table in the window where they had eaten lunch that first day, hoping she might come by. When he got there the windows were all boarded up and the outside walls were blackened and crumbling from the kitchen fire that had burned the place down the day before. Someone had spray-painted "Closed" on one of the boards nailed to the burned out window frame. Sammy stood for a long time looking at that word, wondering why it made him so sad. He wished he could call Rosa and tell her about it, but she was gone too. He went to the hardware store, bought a bottle of spray paint, and hoped that she would see what he had left for her.

***
Author's Note: There really was some graffiti like this painted on the sidewalk when I lived in San Francisco. It was on Alabama street, just down from 18th. It always struck me as one of the most poignant things I had ever seen scrawled onto the urban landscape, and to this day I regret never taking a picture of it even though I walked by hundreds of times. I don't know if it's still there, but if anyone with a camera happens to see it, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a picture and send it to me.