The Hammerhead Chronicles by Scott Gould

Author:Scott Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Georgia Press
Published: 2023-08-21T21:45:42+00:00

Cheryl

Louise did not walk like a woman with a destination. For the record, she meandered. She stared into windows, she hesitated at corners deciding on a direction, she was overly attentive to the sidewalk under her feet. She even backtracked unexpectedly once, and when I couldn’t avoid her, she passed right by me, heading the opposite direction. I mean, she wasn’t going anywhere. Even from the distance I kept, I could see Louise was a practical woman. She wore sensible, flat shoes. Her brown hair was cut short and blunt, so it never got in the way of her face, a face that was oval-shaped and wide open to the world. I didn’t worry about her breaking into a fast-walk; she didn’t appear to be in terrific shape. Her figure was . . . I don’t know, like I said, pragmatic. It worked perfectly, for her.

She, pragmatically, checked her goddamn watch every forty-five seconds or so, and it finally struck me: she was in the process of wasting time, burning minutes until she reached some sort of witching hour when she had to be somewhere, and that deadline must have been the top of the hour, because at five ’til, she became a woman with a purpose. She picked up her pace and beelined it for The Stratford School. Louise could move when she wanted to.

The Stratford School stood out in the downtown landscape. While most of our city blocks had been knocked down and renovated in the last fifteen or twenty years, the school was the one thing that hadn’t changed, an enigma in the downtown architecture. An old bluish Victorian house with gingerbread molding and a long porch that ran the length of the front and cupolas sticking out like lighthouses, The Stratford School was given a pass from destruction, probably because nobody wanted to sign off on bulldozing a school for special students.

You couldn’t help but notice how the place stuck out, and its students were the same way. If you walked by the school, you saw them sometimes, wandering in the yard, their teachers shepherding them one way or the other. They couldn’t attend a regular school, so they attended The Stratford School, where they had their own safe little world.

Louise marched up the steps of The Stratford School with a bouncy familiarity. Have to say, the woman knew where the hell she was going now. I waited across the street, in the doorway of a florist shop where I’d bought flowers a bunch of times. I even waved to the man inside, behind the counter. When I had been there long enough to feel uncomfortable and awkward, I moved a couple of doors down and put a telephone pole between me and The Stratford School. Louise reappeared on the steps, holding hands with a boy that, from where I stalked, looked too old to be holding hands with her.

Physically, he was way different from Louise. None of her pragmatic, pear-shaped body, none of her short limbs.

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