The Other Side of Water
by Dominic Preziosi
(Continued)
Joanna notices her father bobbing on his feet as he walks. It’s something he does, it’s something she thinks she’s probably always known, but when she sees it now it’s a fresh surprise. He slaps his thigh near the spot where his phone is belted, like something’s got its stinger into him. His legs are thin as canes and his shoulders are narrow but he’s stronger than he looks. She’ll always remember the way he bent back her mother’s arm that night. She has a hard time keeping up with him. She doesn’t it like it when he outruns her.
"Why are you walking so slow?" he shouts.
"You’re walking too fast."
Weeds show in the cracks of the parking lot’s asphalt. She passes a man holding a baby in mid-air, and she can’t tell if he’s putting it into the car or taking it out. Both the man and baby stop to look at her as if they think she’s shouting at them.
"Come on," her father commands, turning halfway to face her. "Come on." He’s worked up now. He gets this way, whenever he has to get in a line. As if the aquarium will be so crowded they can’t get in.
Or maybe it’s the phone: He unclips it and checks the display. She hates when he’s like this, but sometimes, just as quick as it comes up, it goes away. Maybe this is one of those times. She catches up with him at the end of the short line near the entrance. He pulls some papers out of his pocket. There’s money twisted up in there with it too. At the window, he leans down.
"She’s eleven," her father says to the cashier, a brown-skinned girl with a silver cross between her collarbones. He pushes a crumpled card through the slot. "And I got this coupon &."
The girl peers at the card and then lifts her eyes to Joanna. "She looks old for eleven. She looks like almost my age."
"I’m her father. I know her age."
"I didn’t say you don’t know her age. But I got to ask." The girl examines the card again.
"Where you say you got this?"
"Right up there," her father says. "from Dino’s. The amusement park."
The girl turns in her seat. "Destiny," she shouts. "We take a discount from the amusement park?" There’s no response Joanna can hear. The girl turns the card over and looks at the back. "Anyway, it’s expired," she says.
"Expired? Let me see." Her father looks at it now too. "It’s not expired."
"The fifteenth." The girl uses a pen to point it out. "This is this eighteenth."
"Three days," he says. "There must be a grace period. You don’t have a grace period?"
"It’s all right," Joanna tells him. "I have money."
"No," he says. "No. Three days—they can give me three days." He turns to the girl. "Can’t you?"
"They printed these up last year. You had a year to use them. Where you been?"
Her father leans over, close to the window. The mess around his eye seems worse, blacker now than it was, and the way he glares out from behind it makes him look scary. He must know this. The girl gets the idea and sits back a bit in her chair.
"You’re going to be like that," she says quietly, "I’m not paid enough to stop you."
He brings his face right to the glass. "I’m being like that," he says.
The girl works her mouth a little, like she’s planning her response, but Joanna hopes she won’t say anything more. She tries to send a signal. The girl doesn’t receive it. "Some example you set," she says.
The line is building up behind them, but her father just stands there. Joanna focuses on the small space between their heads, the thin pane of glass that keeps them apart. "Talk to me when you know anything about it," he finally says.
On the other side of the turnstiles, pressing his fingers to his eye, he turns to face Joanna. "They push you, you know?"
"I know."
"Never a break." He pulls the cell phone from its clip and checks the screen. "And this, too." She thinks he might throw it across the lobby. Instead, he opens it and moves off from her, covering his other ear against the noise.
The aquarium smells worse than she remembers. Where she stands, the carpet is worn almost through to cement. She knows where she wants to start. But even though the big circular tank just inside the doors is filled with water, there’s nothing in it. The sign on the short pole in front of her reads: "Belugas on the move!" Beneath this it says the whales have been sent to an aquarium in Georgia. "Part of an important national cooperative breeding program," the sign tells her.
She always liked to think of them as a family, even though they weren’t. Two adults and a child, all three of them banging their heads against the glass, as if they refused to believe this thin invisible wall could hold them in. She remembered one of the whales had pushed up against the pane so much that the bulb over its eyes was like a nub of worn chalk.
Through the water, she can see her father on the other side of the tank, wavy and distorted and alien-looking. She puts her face close by the surface of the glass, but he doesn’t come into focus. The pane is flat and cool against her skin, but no matter how close she gets, he won’t take his real shape.
Dominic Preziosi's fiction has appeared in Avery, Cezanne's Carrot, Front Porch, Menda City, Spindle, Storyglossia, and elsewhere. A new story will appear in the anthology, "What's Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey," slated for release
by Word Riot Press in Spring 2010.