Caught by Lisa Moore

cars and pick up his order. Finally, Slaney saw the Buick pull onto the dirt lot, waves of roiling dust curling up behind it.
    The girl was still wearing a hairnet and she had on a brown polyester apron that looped around her neck and tied at the waist.
    He’d ordered them a large fish and chips to share and the woman stuck her head out the snack bar window and she yelled for him and he got up and paid her and brought the plate back to the table.
    The girl said she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want any but she was picking out a french fry and dipping it in ketchup even as she said it.
    She talked on in one long, breathy rush as if she didn’t want him to leave and she could keep him there if she didn’t stop talking.
    Sometimes she pointed a french fry at him, stabbing the air to make a point.
    She told him that her parents had died in a Ski-Doo accident. They had gone through the ice and when they were pulled out of the water they were frozen together, her mother’s arms around her father’s waist.
    You saw that? Slaney asked.
    I heard, she said. People drunk said the story while I was in earshot. I was eleven. People don’t care what they say in front of a youngster. As she spoke she reached up with both hands and removed pins from the net in her hair.
    She said her grandfather was all she had in the world besides the two dogs. Eventually, when her Pops died, she would move to Toronto and make a lot of money.
    You better believe I will, she said. She took off the hairnet and set it on the picnic table and it glistened like a spiderweb and she shook her hair free.
    She was starting off in a supermarket chain, but there were skills she was picking up that could apply elsewhere.
    Management is management, she said. Basically you tell other people what to do. I’m good at it.
    She took up his cup of soda and rattled the ice around and sucked on the straw and made a loud noise.
    Then the woman in the snack bar called out for him and he went up for the chocolate sundae.
    A crow dropped down from the branches and cocked its head. It eyed a maraschino cherry somebody had tossed on the ground. The bird was blinking, stern and quick. The glazed cherry was an unnatural red. The bird snatched it up and flew into the trees.
    They drove for a while and held hands in her car before he got out and they said goodbye. The girl’s blue eyes went a brilliant aquamarine and there was a limpid film over them and her crying had little hiccups in it.
    Powder Blue
    There’s just the two of us, the woman serving at the snack bar window told Patterson. She said her name was Luanne Johnson.
    Eleanor’s in the back all the time and didn’t see anything.
    I can hear what’s going on, though, Eleanor called out from the back. Luanne closed her eyes for a moment while Eleanor’s piping voice swept through her.
    She thinks she can hear, Luanne said. She can’t hear a bloody thing.
    I can hear, Eleanor called back.
    So it’s the two of you, Patterson said.
    Just us two. We had quite a rush this afternoon, didn’t we, Eleanor? I’m just telling the officer we were busy. She can’t hear over the deep fryers.
    It was very busy, Eleanor said.
    You’re sure it was the man in the paper? Patterson asked. He held the folded newspaper up so she could see Slaney’s picture.
    He’s the one. He was over at that picnic table with a young lady. Had an order of fish and chips and a sundae. Gave me his name, Dave, so I could call out when the food was ready.
    So you took his order, Patterson said.
    And I called out over the lot when it was ready, she said.
    What about his appearance? Patterson said. The woman said that he had been wearing a powder blue shirt and a pair of jeans.
    A child came up beside Patterson and asked for a custard cone. The boy was wrapped in a sand-caked towel and his lips were blue. He was shivering and Patterson could hear his teeth.
    The woman took a cone down from a dispenser attached to the wall and flicked a handle on the