Alligator - Lisa Moore [88]
Hadn’t Helen remarried? The young girl behind the cake counter was biting her bottom lip in concentration. Beverly saw her lift the plastic nozzle with a flourish when she had made the letter n in Colleen.
Helen said, My God, Beverly, I heard. I’m so sorry.
It had been unexpected, to have David’s death mentioned like this, early on a Saturday morning in the supermarket. Beverly had picked up two lobsters for a special birthday dinner and she saw one of the lobsters in her cart tentatively raise a claw with its green elastic band, and lower it, as if exhausted. She had always left David the job of dropping the live, moving lobsters into boiling water. She’d felt a tingling through her scalp that might have been the start of tears.
The girl had placed the cake in a box and was taping the sides.
It doesn’t get any easier, Beverly had said. She had admitted this to absolutely no one before and she covered her mouth with her hand. Grief was on the outer rim of human experience. She had been on that rim for too long and now they had sprayed her house with shaving cream. Someone was threatening her daughter, she was sure that’s what the graffiti was about. They were threatening a fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her father. A threat or an insult devised to make Colleen unsure of herself. The girl behind the counter was writing the price of the cake on the box with a Magic Marker — she held the cap in her teeth — Beverly had felt such an overwhelming feeling of gratitude, that Helen had understood, had made her say in the middle of the supermarket that yes it was hard, it was hard — she was so brimming with gratitude that she had ended up ordering seven custom-made doilies for every available surface in her new home.
Helen, I must have them, she’d said.
There was steam rising from the cod. Colleen will phone from an outdoor booth. Beverly knows this suddenly and unequivocally. Some gas station — she’s probably hitchhiking — on the side of an eight-lane highway. Rural Louisiana, her last message said.
The flake of the cod was quivering on the tines of her fork. There was a wine-coloured vein, thin as a strand of hair, visible in the translucent fish. Beverly had been dieting for six months. She had given up alcohol and sugar. She had given up butter on her toast. The diet meant she was hungry all the time.
The fish wasn’t cooked. It should have been whiter. The phone will ring as soon as she puts the fish in her mouth.
Colleen is walking across the parking lot toward a bank of phone booths, Beverly can see her plainly. The phone booth will be hot from the sun and smell of cigarette smoke and a faint tinge of urine or spilled beer. Colleen’s skirt will bell with the warm Louisiana breeze.
Beverly had left the house early on Colleen’s fourteenth birthday to pick up the cake. The cake would be a surprise. She’d started the car before she saw. Then she saw. The front of the house was still in the shade. She turned off the car and got out and shut the car door as quietly as she could. Each of the four panes of glass in the bay window had a letter sprayed on it spelling slut. S-L-U-T. White globs had dropped into her rhododendron bush and had scattered across the lawn.
She trotted through the gap in the hedge. She felt a great urgency. She had to get the word off the window before Colleen woke up. She didn’t want Colleen to know. She would protect her from this; it was important that she never have to face this kind of wickedness. Beverly thought of it as a wicked act. The dew on the grass made her stockings wet. One of her spiked heels wiggled beneath her. Beverly pressed against the rhododendron bush, stepping into the cedar chips at the base of the old tree, and reached in to scrape at the letter S. Half the letter came away in