Alligator - Lisa Moore [36]
She’d worn a black turtleneck, a rust-coloured skirt, and square shoes and she can still see the way his parents looked up from their plates, how startled they were. How their eyes met and how they decided in unison what they thought of the news. They both took another forkful of food before they spoke.
She had called his parents’ house once, looking for him, and they hadn’t hung up the phone properly and she heard their conversation about the groceries they were putting away. She heard them say about the price of peas going up and then heard a can of peas, she assumed, slide across the cupboard shelf. She heard his mother say about her back, his father say about his card game. She was riveted to the phone. They chuckled at some remark about a turn of fate; Father Hearn had been dealt the ace just when all was lost in a game of bridge. They both chuckled, a comfortable, private chuckle, and the phone disconnected, but it had been a glimpse into an intimacy so rich it left her light-headed.
Their forks and knives, which had stopped over their plates, began to move again and she saw they were happy with the decision and she could not believe it.
The toilets were clogged and the floors were sometimes packed earth and straw, sometimes covered in a sluice of shit and chickens ran in and out, and they could not believe their luck. They were in Europe.
They hitchhiked to Madrid and fell asleep in a transport truck and the driver pulled over on a hill and got out to smoke under the stars and came back with a flowering branch of an almond tree cold with dew. She woke because the rain from the almond branch dropped on her cheek. She was disoriented and the flowers filled the cab with a green, sugary tang and the smell of cigarettes reminded her of her father, dead for years then.
Groggy with sleep, the flowers and cold night wind made her potently frightened. She was way too much in love.
Smell the flower, the Spaniard said.
I am too much in love, she said.
Smell the flower, he demanded. And he shook the twig near her nose and raindrops fell on her face. She wanted to know what was in the back of the transport truck. What they were carrying.
The landscape had been slipping past them for weeks and it felt like having a tablecloth pulled from beneath an elaborately laid feast.
For the rest of her life she would judge every trip against this trip and every love again this love and none would measure up.
No love would ever measure up.
The truck driver said they had come through the mountains and it had snowed. She saw a rim of slush outside the arc of the wipers and was surprised because two days before they had been swimming in the ocean near Marseille. Marty had pulled a pink starfish out of the waves, handed it to her, and the arms curled around her wrist.
BEVERLY
DAVID HAD MADE a substantial profit in downtown development in the early ‘90s. He’d had a hand in the construction of many downtown buildings whose main architectural characteristic was an arrogant disregard of the skyline they butchered. This sort of construction — fast and ugly — had inspired months of bitter letters to the Telegram, and left a handful of Newfoundland men as wealthy as any men in the world. David had come very close to attaining that sort of wealth.
Or who can say, Beverly thought, what is close. For years, thinking about how close they’d come to extravagant wealth was a metaphysical exercise that gave Beverly pre-migraine symptoms. A blurry spot hung over her newspaper all morning. The altered vision was accompanied by a hypersensitivity to smells.
She vaguely associated the condition with the supernatural. When she felt a migraine coming she almost always bought a lottery ticket.
The two and a half years of wealth had been the best years of her life. She started to work part-time and had time for watercolour lessons and played tennis three times