Alligator - Lisa Moore [8]
Out on the sidewalk a flock of pigeons lifted as he came down the stairs. They cooed and settled again to peck at the bread crumbs left for them. Inside Frank’s empty bed-sit, water drops travelled in hesitant, zigzagging paths down the plastic shower curtain, and in the window several air bubbles on the stems of the flowers in the Mason jar floated to the surface and broke soundlessly. The breeze nudged the flowers into one another and the stems tippytoed across the bottom of the jar.
COLLEEN
THE ELEVATOR DOORS fling themselves open and Colleen sees a judge heading toward her from the end of a long hallway. He’s in full stride, forehead first, the arms of his black robes billowing. The reflection from a tube of fluorescent ceiling light runs over his oily bald head like a charging train.
She assumes he’s a judge; he towers above her. Colleen is seventeen and slight, with pale white skin, a light spray of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her hair is kinky, almost black, like bitter chocolate, and gathered loosely with a rainbow-coloured shoelace at the nape of her neck. Her expression is forthright and blatantly innocent. But she has recently been caught trying to destroy several thousand dollars’ worth of privately owned forestry equipment. Colleen Clark had poured sugar into the fuel tanks of some bulldozers belonging to Mr. Gerry Duffy; the youth diversion meeting had been set for early August and she had waited, feeling sure of herself and unsure by turns, all through July. She had wanted more than anything for the day to be over. She had fervently imagined the rest of her summer with the youth diversion meeting behind her. But she had not imagined being in an elevator about to come face to face with Mr. Duffy. She had not imagined this judge or the light sweat she could feel at her hairline on her forehead. She had not imagined the pitch and tone of her fright.
Mr. Duffy is waiting in an office several floors above to talk about the damage and how she might pay for her vandalism with community service.
Colleen looks at the judge’s reflection in the brass panels of the elevator. His eyebrows hang down into his watery eyes. His face is warped in the polished metal.
A haze of smarting cologne hits her; she can taste it at the back of her throat. When she was six years old she gave a gift package of four bottles of Aqua Velva to her father for Christmas. David was her stepfather, really, though she has never thought of him that way. She thought of him only as her father and she was obsessed that Christmas with buying him a present. She had received an allowance that year and saved most of it in a pink plastic bank shaped like a pig with a rubber stopper in its belly. She’d had to fish the bills out with a fork.
Two days before Christmas, at the door of Wal-Mart in the Avalon Mall, with a flurry of snow and wind at their backs, Colleen and her mother, Beverly, were greeted by a woman in a white plastic apron with eggplant-dark lipstick and big teeth who brought a hand-held whirring set of blades in close proximity to a carrot and sent film-thin coins flying into the air.
Imagine all the time you’d save, Beverly had said, giving her hands a quick clap. Beverly had short, curly hair that she dyed a dramatic, solid black as soon as streaks of silver appeared at her temples. Her eyes were large, strikingly luminous — the white visible below the pupil. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes gave her an etched intensity. She could look rapt and full of judgement, but when she smiled her face was entirely altered. When Beverly smiled she looked girlish and wantonly generous. Her expressions were too honest and full of bare emotion for anyone to think her pretty. But she was strongly attractive.
The woman with the vegetable dicer attacked