The Checkout Girl Read Free Page B

body in bed next to her at night even though he’s engaged to Rachel. She has nothing against Rachel, who’s a really nice girl. In fact Kathy’s glad he’s engaged to Rachel because it means he doesn’t want anything from her but the sex, but that’s one more thing she doesn’t get about herself right now.
    Kathy likes Barry’s wannabe rich-boy smell: Ban roll-on deodorant and Breck shampoo, and on alternating days Canoe or English Leather cologne. Likes the softness of his breath on the back of her neck as he falls asleep, each exhalation so full of gratitude.
    Sometimes Kathy wonders how she got into this mess.
    And when she’s being honest, she even has to admit that Barry is fun to be with in an aspiring-to-Westmount electrician kind of way. Barry wears loafers and white socks, straight leg chinos, never, ever bellbottoms. He wears psychedelic print shirts with pointy collars and his hair, though shaggy, is neatly trimmed. He shaves every day and uses aftershave, and his sideburns are an ordinary length. He has a big watch. He’s generous and likes to indulge Kathy, likes what he calls her wild side, will do almost anything she asks as long as it won’t get him in trouble with Rachel. Sometimes they smoke dope and laugh and talk without making love. It feels so good to laugh.
    But tonight Kathy decided to take Barry skating instead of smoking dope or having sex with him. She hadn’t been skating since she got back from Vancouver, and on her way home from work at suppertime she noticed that the local rink was flooded and ready to go. She wanted to test the ice, test herself, because she hadn’t been on skates for way too long.
    But there’s another reason to put Barry off. She’s having supper at her mother’s tomorrow and she doesn’t want to betray herself, doesn’t want to go home with even an inkling of Barry because she thinks her mother might be able to tell. Her mother’s unhappy with her these days, and is only too willing to tell her so. Connie uses all the ammunition she can find against Kathy to press her to change her life, so Kathy has to stay alert. She doesn’t want anything to distract her from whatever defence she’ll have to mount against her mother, because, except for skating, she really doesn’t know what she wants and it takes enormous effort to disguise the fact. To maintain that what she’s doing right now is all she really wants to do.
    When Freddy hit the glass and Barry ran into her room, Kathy told him to get dressed, they were going skating. When he said he didn’t own skates, she dug out a pair from a pile of old sports equipment in Pete and Penny’s furnace room. She told him to put on warm clothes. She told him it was skating or nothing.
    Barry listened to her. He got dressed, got into her car, put on his borrowed skates. There he is now at the end of the rink, moaning and muttering about the cold, trying to keep his balance. Kathy skates hard, getting a sense of the ice, beginning to sweat. She stops hearing Barry’s complaints; she pushes her mother’s voice away. Worry slides from her shoulders, down her back and legs and into her feet, which slice the ice, over and over, slice it. Her body takes charge, as she hoped it would, and all she thought she’d lost returns. She is a skater.

“Listen to this,” Connie calls out. She knows Kathy and Shelly are around the house somewhere, but it doesn’t matter. She talks to herself. And she reads the newspaper out loud, has done since Charlie died in the car accident ten years ago. Not that she’d been shy of the sound of her own voice before his death. But after he died there was far too much emptiness and she felt compelled to fill it in whatever way she could. The newspaper teemed with words, all of them soothingly impersonal and so removed from the rawness of her own pain that they became necessary, and she was soon