Читать книгу White Vespa - Kevin Oderman - Страница 19

Eleven

16 June

Anne looked at the box of salt fish by the door and shuddered. It smelled bad but it smelled, and she liked that, anyway. The air in the little store was thick with the smell of olives and coffee, spices in newspaper cones and braids of garlic hung on nails on both sides of the doorjamb. The simple density of the smells reminded her of the Pike Place Market of her childhood, where she’d gone with her family to buy spiced tea and dates and powdered vanilla by the ounce. This was nothing like shopping at Fred Meyer where she shopped at home, a store that hardly smelled at all.

She carried her basket around the pell-mell aisles, trying to find in the jumble the few things she’d forgotten when she’d bought for her room: something to juice oranges, a serrated knife, stick matches and mosquito coils. The store was busy and she waited with fitful impatience in the checkout line, a line of tourists buying snacks or suntan oil or fruit from the produce baskets that lined the curb outside the store. She listened to the girl at the register, her friendly if broken English punctuated by swift, clacking Greek.

The light shone thick in the store window, but only half-lit the dusky shop. Anne stood there, still, feeling the world rush around her. The couple in front of her, she realized, was upset; the man put down their basket on the counter and mouthed, “Okay!” They were looking out the window at three girls, beautiful gawky girls, who were smiling furiously at an animated man who was laughing, holding out a peach to the oldest of the three. She had taken a bite and a drop of juice had run down to her chin, which he was wiping away with a finger that somehow lingered suggestively near her throat.

“Larry! Do something!”

Larry called out, “Hey!” And, pushed a little, started for the door.

The girls looked startled, caught out, but turned toward their father obediently.

The man with the peach licked his finger and then half-turned to look, too. It was Paul, smiling still, as if he was the only one of them more than half alive. “Ciao,” he called out to the girls’ backs.

Anne stepped behind their mother. Over Larry’s shoulder she could just see the insolence in the look Paul turned on him.

“Daddy?” Paul asked, head cocked, then strode away.

“Miss?” Anne looked around, the family of girls was gone. The cashier took her basket with one hand, gesturing toward where Paul had gone with the other. “That man,” she said, “he is like honey.”

Out in the cobbled alley, Anne’s first impulse was to go now, after Paul, but that impulse was weak, and she turned toward the harbor. “So,” she thought, “he still has it.” She stared at the sack in her hand as if she couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there. She felt impaired, frozen. She needed to sit down in the sun.

Later, curled on her bed in her shaded room, she cried. She remembered deep as her bones that she was grown from a little girl who had often cried alone, nobody to tell.