Alligator - Lisa Moore [45]
The young couple married in the Basilica and shared the room across the hall from his mother until there were five small children and it was time to put his mother into an old-age home. The marriage was passionate and durable until Mary died of ovarian cancer after her last child, fifteen years later. The oldest by that time could take care of the youngest, and Duffy had already started on his fortune.
He was looking forward to this meeting with Colleen Clark. He’d driven over the highway at sunrise to get here on time. August was a busy time for him, but he was curious about the girl. He saw the sun come up over the barrens, all those grey, lichen-scabbed boulders tinged pink, one or two men on the side of the highway with fly rods. The ponds between the rocks like sheets of metal, the sun twinned in every one. He meant to make sure Colleen Clark remembered him every time she saw a sugar dispenser for the rest of her life.
COLLEEN
I WALK INTO the liquor store at the mall and they’ve got four people working there. This is the day before the youth diversion meeting and I’m revved up and anxious. I take a bottle of vodka off the shelf and a bottle of wine and I go to the counter and say, My friend bought me this, but I don’t drink vodka so I’d like to exchange it for this bottle of wine which is almost the same price. It’s a horseshoe counter and they have baskets done up with coloured Cellophane and bows, bottles of wine and corkscrews, fancy wineglasses.
If I have to, I can gently nudge one of these gift baskets off the counter. The woman at the cash says, Do you have a bill? and I say, It was a gift, which is why I want to exchange it, and the manager turns and says, Did she have that bottle in a bag when she came in? and the other woman who has just finished serving someone on the other register says, Do you have identification? The manager’s arms hang away from his body, as if he were wearing an eiderdown coat, and he flexes his fingers. The girls behind the counter step closer to the manager. Either they step closer or they are already close. They form a phalanx, ready to pounce.
And I say, I’m not buying, I’m exchanging. And there’s a customer behind me and I turn to him, a tall man, maybe six feet tall, with longish hair and gorgeous grey eyes though he’s over forty for sure, old enough to be my dad, probably, and maybe he saw me take the vodka off the shelf, but the thing is, once I’ve imagined the absolutely worst thing I could do in any given moment I have to do it. I have to see how it will end.
I had come to the mall to buy striped socks but as I was strolling past the liquor store, I got the idea of stealing a bottle of something. I had to know how such a thing would turn out. I can feel my pulse, the thunk-thunk of blood, before what is about to happen and what has already happened. I say to the tall man behind me, I’m so sorry for holding you up. I try to sound relaxed and sincere. Even if he saw me take that bottle, he will doubt what he saw. He will doubt it for perhaps two or three minutes, by which time I’ll be gone.
Now just a minute, the manager says.
I say, I can see you can’t help me and I fully understand, I’ll just have to regift.
I leave the store with the vodka and when I get around the corner I put on my jacket and sunglasses and put the bottle inside my jacket and I’m in the parking lot before they’ve even had a chance to shut their mouths.
MADELEINE
THERE’S A PROBLEM in the art department. The cinematographer, Guy Leblanc, wants to shoot the interiors with natural light so there will have to be skylights, holes cut in the sod roofs. Where in the budget does it say skylights? the art department wants to know. Of course, there were no skylights in the 1830s.
Guy had drawn a sharp breath when Madeleine mentioned this fact, as if she had slapped him. Film is an impressionistic medium, he’d said, as if she were an idiot.
You don’t tell the truth, he’d said. But what you tell becomes the truth. He was pompous and irate. She loved his tirades. He could be