A bird on every tree by Carol Bruneau

Author:Carol Bruneau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Published: 2017-08-23T18:56:40+00:00

Solstice

He’d never seen a kid with whiter skin, he was pretty sure. A sparkly stud in her cheek. Eyes blue as a baby doll’s that never left his face, except while inspecting the van and when she was test-driving it—his idea, the test drive.

“How much will you take for it?” she said, climbing out. She had a man’s-man sort of voice. A shiver to it, though, there in the frozen yard, too cold even for Dog to come out of his house. She was skin and bones, he guessed, if you could’ve seen under those baggy black clothes—that uniform kids wore these days, the type that’d come out of nowhere to wash your windshield. Get away from my vehicle! he’d yelled last time, hadn’t been to the city since.

“Well?” Those eyes of hers lit into his.

He’d play her a bit, maybe, a smolt on a line so to speak. That chain hanging down below her hoodie—it was hitched to a wallet, he hoped. First you look at the purse, the song swam through his head, better than the rum-pa-pum-pum Eileen and her girlfriends had blaring from the house, the festering, oops, festive season upon them.

“How much you got?”

“I can give you fifteen hundred.”

Funny, a little girl being that direct. But he liked it, wasn’t going to take no. These shoppers you got off Kijiji, tire-kickers usually, make you bend over backwards, like they were doing you a favour taking whatever it was off your hands.

I’m looking for something I can live in, she’d emailed.

Then she’s just the ticket, he’d emailed back.

A pinging jumped from under her heaped-on clothes; clothes that put him in mind of tarpaper, sugar shacks, outhouses and the like. A cellphone. He let out a big exhale, to let her know he didn’t have all day. The wife wanted the van out of the yard yesterday, and just the one answer to his ad! A kid who looked like Ozzy Osbourne’s illegitimate spawn, only starving. If he didn’t get this deal on the road Eileen would be inviting her in for Ovaltine and a bath. Or maybe not. She was up to her armpits in “craft”—crap, he called it, in his head anyway. Her and her friends having a few sips, making lamps out of pickle jars and plastic holly. He’d drilled the holes in the bottoms, driven all the way to the mall to buy electrical cords, skinny ones, white not green.

“I’m sure you can amuse yourself in the garage.” Eileen had given him strict orders to stay out, she and her hens wanting the house to themselves.

The kid turned the phone off. “Sorry. So. Like. Okay? Fifteen hundred?” Goth girl, Eileen’s friends, especially Susie the soccer mom, would’ve called her. “You’ll take cash?”

“Done!” He hadn’t expected money up front. Yeah, that was a wallet at the end of the chain. The van barely worth the cost of the safety check, but he wasn’t going to argue.

A wad of mostly fifties fresh from the bank is what she hauled out.

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