Alligator - Lisa Moore [77]
He wanted, when he went to the paint store, to get the trim they suggested went with the burnt sand colour he had chosen. He wanted, when he looked into the eyes of the idiot they had working there, who said he couldn’t mix that colour but he could mix one pretty damn close, to grab him by the front of the shirt and shout in his face that he didn’t want close.
He never wanted close again. He had been living with close his whole life.
He wanted to communicate how this acceptance of second-best infuriated him and the guy better find a way to mix the right colour.
One of the women at the Salvation Army was named Gert, and the other was Shirley, according to their nametags. Frank could tell by looking at them they were seriously religious women, and he saw they kept a stern eye out for shoplifters and they stood in the late-afternoon light with their arms crossed under their chests and watched the weather come in over the harbour.
Frank had been coming to the Salvation Army on Waldegrave with his mother ever since he was born, but he wasn’t sure that they put him together with the baby and small kid he had been, or if they thought about his mother and wondered what had happened to her.
On the January day when Frank got the sugar bowl, Gert had pulled a chair across the floor and was leaning with a long pole to unhook a wedding dress from the ceiling. The dress was swathed in plastic and the plastic was covered in dust and Gert had to lean out too far and had lifted one foot in the air like a ballerina and Johnny, the groom-to-be, took her hand.
Frank saw how firmly he held her hand, saying, Hold on to me, Gert girl, before you break your neck. Everyone in the store was watching the hook sway slightly here and there around the wedding dress hanger, which was hooked over a waterpipe hanging just below the ceiling.
Gert lowered the wedding dress and shook off the plastic, clawing at it, and without the dusty plastic, the wedding dress, they all saw, was covered in sequins and it crackled with light and the girl with the misaligned face had covered her mouth with both her hands.
This dress was never worn, Gert whispered. She had fished a pricetag out of the froth and it said the dress was worth $1,500.
The girl gathered the dress up in her arms and went into the tiny dressing room and Gert and Shirley turned at once and started clucking and waving their arms at Johnny, telling him to turn around for the love of God and close his eyes.
After a few moments Shirley called out, Does it fit?
The door of the dressing room creaked open and the bride came out, and she was a scalded red with embarrassment and pride. She ducked her head into her shoulder and the beauty of the dress seemed more than she could bear. The red in her face made her eyes a dark, dark brown. Her misaligned face was lit up by her blushing and for a minute she looked weirdly beautiful.
Frank thought that maybe in the future this Johnny guy would beat the shit out of her, or they’d just live on welfare for the rest of their lives, or they wouldn’t know about Canada’s four food groups and the kids would be eating cake with blue icing blocked with sugar and chemicals and chips and cola and they’d be saucy and out of control all the time, and the parents would get something like cancer or they’d be alcoholics or have gambling addictions, but for now, in the middle of a snowstorm with the dress on, the girl, Frank saw, was ecstatic.
Frank saw her shoulders and neck were covered in deep brown freckles but below her neck the skin looked creamy and her body was pretty nice. Then he found the lid to the sugar bowl, his fingers had just brushed against it. It wasn’t chipped and there was a small dip to fit a spoon in.
This sugar bowl, now in the cupboard in front of him, on the yellow mactac is shimmering, struck