The Checkout Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

is dark, but she has the same green eyes, the same strong shoulders and back and the same small waist. Where Connie’s figure might be considered lush, Kathy’s is muscular and chiseled, athletic.
    Kathy set the iron to WARM and now she’s testing it to see if it’s ready. The cord swings down, taps against the wall beside her. She spits on her finger and touches it to the metal. The spit doesn’t sizzle but it does slowly evaporate.
    She watches the snow fall around her mother’s reflection in the window. When Kathy arrived after work she asked her mother why she had curtains if she never bothered to use them. Winter dark falls early and when Kathy drove up around 4:30 Connie was backlit in the window so that each detail of her face and hands and clothes, each movement she made was entirely, vividly visible to the world outside.
    Connie said, “I have nothing to hide. The neighbours know what I look like. They know every gaw-damned thing about me, so what the hell is there to worry about?”
    The snow is falling harder now, swirling on a gust of wind, obscuring her mother’s reflection for a moment.
    â€œYou don’t have to shout,” Kathy says, “I’m right behind you.” She touches the warm iron to the sleeve of her shirt.
    â€œThe Boston Bruins used to be underdogs,” Connie tells her, slightly less loudly. “Have you switched your allegiance to some other losing team now that they’re winning? For all those years, Boston lost and lost, and you cheered for them. Your father cheered for them, too. Do you remember? But he was fickle. He cheered for any team that wasn’t Montreal.
    â€œGod rest his soul,” Connie says, and she crosses herself. “I hate saying anything about him when he isn’t here to defend himself. But he was a bigot, Kathy, sure as shit, and who he loathed were the French. Not French from France, French from Canada. Whores-de-horses he used to call hors d’oeuvres. Remember that? Probably better if you don’t.
    â€œI miss him, I really do, but I don’t miss that part of him one little bit. He was a card-carrying Liberal, your father was, all his too-short life. But Monsieur le Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, would have tested his loyalty to the limit.
    â€œNow you, Kathy, you’re not like your dad. As a kid you were always so quiet. So kind, and so …”
    Connie pauses and Kathy waits to hear what she will say, wonders how her mother saw her as a child.
    â€œâ€¦ so receptive. You hardly said boo, and you went along with almost everything you were told. Never had a mean bone in your body, always loved everyone,” Connie says. “Most especially underdogs. Like that retarded kid at school you were always getting in fights over? Stevie what’s-his-name? You were his very best friend. His only friend, if I remember correctly.”
    â€œPocock,” Kathy says, running the iron across her breasts and along her shoulders.
    â€œPocock? What the hell kind of name is that?” Connie says. “If I recall correctly, his mother had him late and he was never right. Didn’t look mongoloid. Looked like Ichabod Crane when his hormones hit, tall and thin, though he had a chubby bum, poor soul. Didn’t have those hands mongoloids have, either.”
    â€œLordy, Kathy, will you look at these.”
    Kathy watches Connie flap her hands in the air. The newspaper slips from her lap onto the floor.
    â€œThey look like an old woman’s,” Connie says.
    â€œHazel!” Connie shouts, and she snaps her fingers.
    Connie’s fingernails are manicured and painted fuchsia and do not look like an old woman’s.
    â€œThat’s her name. Hazel Pocock. I remember now. I admired her. She forced the school to pass Stevie through every grade until grade eight. I never had the energy to fight the school for Shelly. But then, autistic retards are different from