Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,48
me sorry I picked you.” McArdle then scooted around in her chair so that she could reach into the bottommost bin of a file drawer. Grunting from exertion, she had drawn out a sheet of paper with a checklist on it. She read the items aloud to Carla—“You might want to be writing some of this down, Miss Elkins, if it’s not too much trouble”—and Carla had brushed aside the sarcasm and did as she was told. Sarcasm was Sally McArdle’s chief means of discourse. She didn’t allow it in others, but she gave herself permission to indulge at will. It was her shield, her way of deflecting the world’s gaze—a gaze either judgmental or pitying, and both were equally repugnant to the old woman. Carla knew that, and was prepared to deal with it in her new job. Sarcasm and Sally McArdle were old pals. They’d gotten acquainted right after McArdle’s leg was amputated and now they were inseparable.
Carla thought about the items McArdle had enumerated yesterday, matching them up with her own list: Got it, got it, got it, got it … Had she skipped anything? Oh, right. The release form. McArdle had handed her a stack of pages. The people Carla would be interviewing had already agreed to participate, but she still had to have them sign the form. It authorized the library to post the material on its Web site.
Carla grabbed her slumping backpack from its place on the passenger-side floor and hoisted it up on the seat beside her. She rummaged through the motley contents—billfold, paperback copy of 1984, ChapStick, an extra pair of gloves, cell charger, earbuds, tube of moisturizer, oatmeal raisin Clif Bar—until she found the release forms. She fingered one from the top of the stack. The paper was wrinkled, a natural consequence of having been thrust into a backpack. She smoothed it out against her right knee.
She was actually excited. She looked out the car window at the small brown one-story house set back from the narrow street. The house needed a new roof, and new siding, and a new front porch that did not tilt violently sideways, but the same was true of just about every house in this neighborhood. And all of them, Carla knew, had an equal likelihood of getting those things—a likelihood which stood at zero.
According to the list of names and addresses McArdle had given her, this was the home of Jesse and Annabelle Harris, aged seventy-five and seventy-eight, respectively. He was a retired employee of the Jiffy Lube over in Blythesburg. She was a retired cafeteria worker from Acker’s Gap High School.
Maybe I’ll recognize her from school, Carla thought. Abruptly, she wondered if that was okay. Or was she only supposed to interview people she’d never met before? Would that somehow taint the interview? Dammit. Why hadn’t she asked Sally McArdle about that?
Before she’d switched schools for her senior year Carla had probably passed through the lunch line—what, two hundred times? Three? She tried to recall the face of a single cafeteria worker. Just one.
Nope. All that came to mind was a blur of hefty women in hairnets; in white uniforms that ballooned out like tents; in hard, black, lace-up shoes that must have been hell on swollen feet. Women with hairy forearms and big hands, ladling out beans and corn and Brussels sprouts into square indentations stamped into beige plastic trays. Women who never reacted to the insults and complaints from teenagers dreaming of fries and Diet Cokes.
I don’t remember any of those cafeteria workers, Carla told herself. Not one. I was too selfish, too self-absorbed. I can’t even remember if their faces were black or white or brown. I won’t know her.
She was troubled by this epiphany, and then she was relieved by it. She was free to do her work. Annabelle Harris was a stranger to her—even though she’d probably passed the old woman many, many times, day after day, in the cafeteria of Acker’s Gap High School, a place that smelled like ammonia and burned tater tots and sometimes—when the flu was at high tide—vomit.
Yum, Carla thought.
She suspected that Sally McArdle’s sarcasm might be contagious.
She gathered up her equipment. She had already put on her cap and buttoned the top button of her coat—it was monstrously cold out there, or as Carla had described it in a text to her mom that morning: friggin FREEZING—and she might very well be shivering on that porch for a while, if Jesse and Annabelle