Alligator - Lisa Moore [23]
The dark hair, floating in the toilet bowl, embodied the simplicity and horror of her mother’s grief and it terrified Colleen. She wanted to be as far away from the voyeuristic intimacy of that floating nest of tangles as she could get.
She woke up on her bed, the light still on; she was wearing her winter coat. The snow on her boots had melted all over the bedspread. She woke as though she hadn’t slept at all but it was 4 a.m. and she went to the living-room window and saw her mother had fallen asleep in the car, her forehead resting on the steering wheel, the windshield frosted over.
BEVERLY
COLLEEN FINISHED THE undercooked, mucuslike egg Beverly had prepared. Beverly believed in a proper breakfast. She believed that even a daughter who disappoints irrevocably deserves breakfast.
She put the cracked eggcup on the placemat in front of Colleen.
Just eat it, she said. She stood at the window with her back to her daughter. She was watching a cat stalking a robin in the backyard. She looked vindicated and dreamy.
What can possibly happen to me next? she whispered. The cat pounced and held the bird under its paws for a long, considered instant, then tore off its head.
You look lovely, she said. They had fought over the piercing in her tongue for three months and, as a concession, Colleen had removed the stud.
Off to youth diversion then, said Beverly.
FRANK
HE HAD BOUGHT the first hot-dog cart with his paper route money. He put every cent of it away for four years and during the winter he went door to door asking if people wanted shovelling and he asked if there were beer bottles they wanted to get rid of.
There was a restaurant downtown that let him wash dishes in the summer when it was busy.
His friend Kevin got him a part-time job at a photocopy place; he helped cut posters and business cards, he fiddled with the machines when they wouldn’t work. He put every cent away and paid for his own school supplies in September.
One day in June he and his mother got the bus to the Village Mall and took a taxi the rest of the way out Topsail Road. They told the taxi driver the address he’d found in the Express and when they arrived it was a used-car lot with a string of faded plastic flags sagging from one street light to another.
They’d arrived at dusk and it was cold and had been raining for eight days and the lot was muddy and someone had laid down two-by-fours on the walk up to the house. The cars had their prices marked in white shoe polish on the windshields and some were missing a tire or two and the rusted axles sank into the ground. There was a small bungalow at the end of a dirt driveway. It had pale blue vinyl siding and two narrow windows. The front door was six feet above the ground with no front steps. They went around the side and found the back door and rang the bell. A row of faded men’s jeans hung on a clothesline. There was a German shepherd on a short chain tied to a doghouse. Someone had written Shep on the doghouse in red, dripping paint that looked like horror-movie blood. The dog rose when they approached and it sniffed the air and turned three circles and lay down again on a patch of concrete. They had heard the doorbell chiming through the house but no one came to the door so they knocked.
The man who finally opened the door wore jeans and a white undershirt and he asked them in and they had to take off their shoes in the tiny porch and step through a pile of children’s boots and