A Cowardly Woman No More by Ellen Cooney

Author:Ellen Cooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press

Twenty-four

Food!

And I knew the person bringing lunch to me, in a Rose & Emerald uniform.

“Hi, Trish. How’s it going?”

You’d think we last saw each other a day ago, when I hadn’t laid eyes on him for over a quarter of a century.

Turk, he was called. When I knew him, he was lean to the point of being almost too skinny, and he was sharp and keen in his beautiful big brown eyes that could glint sometimes with the light of being smart and trustworthy, and wary and edgy, all at once.

If he’d gone to the trouble of playing an instrument, I used to think, he could have been a rock star. He had a standoffish manner easily taken for arrogance, but not in an adolescent way. It didn’t matter to him that he was a teenager. He’d been a man since he was, like, eleven, he’d say, and you’d believe him, although he barely had to shave, and his voice would crack now and then into the voice of a little boy.

He was “Turk” because once on a dare when he was high on pot with his friends, he walked into a supermarket, ordered a deli rotisserie chicken, managed to get it into his backpack, and strolled out. It helped that it was late in the evening and there were not many grown-ups among the employees.

The chicken was quite large. The members of his boy gang were so stoned, they thought they were eating a turkey. At the time, it was almost Thanksgiving.

That was my favorite story about him, as disgusted as I was to think of those guys ripping apart cooked poultry in the woods behind the same grocery store, like apes, like they couldn’t even wait to proceed to someone’s kitchen. I knew he wasn’t basically a thief. I knew he was scared he’d be caught. He was forever trying to prove himself. His own sense of worth or something. His manliness.

He was brilliant at pretending he wasn’t growing up in what to me was luxury. I was never in his house. It was an ordinary large colonial, but to my eyes it was a mansion. His bedroom, I knew, had its own bathroom. I couldn’t imagine what that might be like. He never owned just one pair of shoes at a time. I couldn’t imagine that either.

His family had something to do with commercial real estate. He was supposed to be part of it. He took shop. He talked about trades. He was going to become an electrician, a mason, a carpenter; it changed weekly. He sat in the back in every class and acted like he was deaf and mute if a teacher called on him. He got away with what he called his “resistance,” when kids who were modeling themselves on him kept getting detentions.

He dressed grunge. He claimed he hadn’t spoken a word to his parents since he was a toddler just emerging from babbling, and you believed that too. He had the idea he’d been adopted.

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