Alma Read Free Page B

in the front window. Alma had pushed open the door with the little bell overhead and approached the grey-haired man who had somehow made his way to the top of a ladder that stretched to the shelves near the ceiling.
    “G’day,” he had said, placing a thick book on the shelf.
    “Hello,” Alma said.
    “Kin I do for you?” the man asked over his shoulder as he crept down the ladder. Alma wasn’t sure if it was the ladder or his bones creaking.
    “Do you have any books by RR Hawkins?” she asked.
    The clerk scratched his head. “Hmm. Believe I’ve heard the name.” He led her to the wall of books and ran his finger along titles under H. “There’s six of them here.”
    “Oh,” Alma replied, scanning the titles. “I have those. And a seventh. I was looking for something else.”
    “Don’t know if there’s any more,” the man said, pushing his hands into the pockets of his cardigan as if he wanted to stretch the garment to his knees. “But, to be sure, let’s take a look. Come this way.”
    He led Alma down one of the two narrow aisles between tables piled with books to a counter at the back of the store. He pulled a thick red volume toward him and put on the half-moon glasses that hung from his neck on a black ribbon.
    “This tells us all the books in English that are in print,” he explained, turning a few pages no thicker than onion skin, then running his finger down the columns of fine print. “Here, ‘Hawkins, RR.’” He squinted for a moment before going on. “No, nothing else listed.”
    Alma’s shoulders slumped.
    “You’re a fan, are you?” the man asked.
    “Yes. I have both sets. My mother got them for me. Is RR Hawkins dead?”
    “Couldn’t tell you. Don’t know much about him. Never was a fan, myself. I prefer realistic fiction.”
    “Well, thanks anyway,” Alma said. The bell tinkled as she left the shop.
    Alma now took up the library book she was reading, a story of an orphan girl sold to a farming family, and turned to where she had left off before supper. In the pub upstairs she heard the band tuning up, and soon after that the Celtic music began, reels and jigs and hornpipes, sadairs about lost battles and faraway homelands, raucous drinking songs. She read until her eyes refused to stay open, then put on her pyjamas and went to sleep.
    She woke briefly to the odour of cooking oil and cigarette smoke, and the touch of a kiss on her forehead.

CHAPTER
Four
    O n Saturdays, Alma was quiet because her mother slept in, behind her closed bedroom door, until noon. This morning Alma slid back the bolt and opened the milk box beside the outside door, removing the bottle of milk and loaf of bread left there during the morning’s delivery. She counted the change in the envelope her mother placed in the box each night with enough money for the milk and bread. She put the milk in the icebox, pulled on her jacket, checked to be sure she had her key, grabbed four cookies from the jar on the counter and slipped out the back door.
    It was a sunny morning and the air was crisp and clean. From the street in front of the Liffeycame the
cloppity-clop
of Gertrude, the ice man’s horse, hauling the wagon that squeaked under a ponderous load of ice blocks buried in sawdust. Alma walked over to Little Wharf Road and turned toward the harbour. The old buildings on either side were made of wood, with shiplap siding, built one against the other so that there was one long front with many doors and small porches. The owners had painted them in different colours so they looked like boxes lined up in a row from the harbour to the square.
    As she walked past the Customs House under the tall maple trees, a movement in the window of the house next door caught her eye. She stopped. The Stewart house had been uninhabited for half a year. It was one of the oldest buildings in Charlotte’s Bight, and Robbie Thornton, who was in Alma’s class, claimed it was haunted. Robbie was silly. Ghosts weren’t real. A