Read Online Galveston by Paul Quarrington - Free Book Online Page A

note from my fricking
mommy.”
    “It’s just that there’s a schedule,” Polly explained. She was in her mid-forties, pretty but almost trying not to be. Her hair, a light golden colour, was tied back so severely that it seemed to stretch the skin on her forehead. “The cook goes home at seven.”
    “Sorry,” repeated Caldwell.
    “Now listen,” said Jimmy Newton, but then he fell silent. Maywell Hope was standing nearby, in a passageway thatseparated the restaurant from the resort’s bar. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, which made him squint, darkening his eyes. Newton looked back at Polly and nodded slightly. “Yeah, we’re sorry.”
    Polly led them to a table and slipped menus onto the plastic placemats. The blonde woman sat nearby and was speaking to the two girls at a neighbouring table. The girls still wore their bathing suits and had soggy towels draped over their shoulders.
    “You have to be careful of the undertow,” she said. “Even strong swimmers are often powerless against it.”
    From his seat Caldwell could see the blonde woman in profile. Her nose was a little bit snubbed—a clinical observation, which is all Caldwell had been making for the past few years. She had shoved her plate of food away—the salad looked intact—and was drinking coffee.
    “At Acapulco Bay in Mexico,” she said, “twenty-four swimmers disappeared once, within a few seconds, all taken away by the undertow.”
    “Well,” said Gail, “it’s a good thing we’re not in Acapulco.”
    The blonde woman nodded. “We’re not in Acapulco.”
    Beverly had once planned to go to Mexico with Margaret. She had purchased an all-inclusive package, airfare and hotel, two meals a day, at a resort named Vista Playa de Oro in Manzanillo. The trip had, in a sense, been Margaret’s idea. When the little girl started school, it hadn’t taken her long to determine that the typical annual routine included a trip south during spring break. Margaret had no clear sense of what lay south; as far asshe was concerned, there might be serpent-filled seas. All she knew was, most kids went away during the winter, and Margaret, fatherless and belonging to a mother branded with the mark of a particularly squalid devil, was determined to join those ranks.
    Beverly hadn’t managed to put anything together for that first year, when Margaret was in kindergarten, but the kid was so morose for the entire vacation that Beverly determined to do better. She took a second job, bagging groceries at Pilmer’s Grocery on Tuesday and Thursday nights. She enjoyed that job, although she was not very good at it. Each conveyor belt of foodstuffs seemed a puzzle, a twisted mystery. Beverly would bite her tongue with concentration and try to visualize how to pack it most economically, but there was always a jar of instant coffee or something left lying in the catch-all. Beverly would take it and make vague feints at the stuffed plastic. Finally, she would shrug and hand the jar to the customer.
    She lasted at the job because she was pleasant and, Beverly supposed, because Mr. Pilmer felt sorry for her. She saved up enough for the trip, did the research and located the least expensive resort. She had the whole thing arranged by early fall, and Margaret had weeks of feeling normal in at least this tiny regard. Beverly even found herself looking forward to the trip. She put the brochure about Vista Playa de Oro in the washroom with the old
House & Garden
magazines. Every so often she would open it and review the amenities and activities.
    One night, she noticed an odd sentence sitting in the middle of a paragraph about water sports:
sometimes there isa strong undertow.
Of course, she’d seen that sentence before—she’d read the brochure countless times—but caught up perhaps in Margaret’s childish enthusiasm, she’d been interpreting this as another selling point.
A strong undertow
was perhaps a condition favoured by surfers or fishermen. The