When I went out there, I guess the short lady didn’t hear me walk up ’cuz she flinched like she’d been snake bit. The cat jumped to the ground and run off.
“Oh! Child,” she said. “Don’t go sneaking up on people that way. You gave me a fright.” Her voice sounded squeaky as a cartoon character on the TV.
Standing next to her like that, I got the full effect of just how short she was. I could look down on the top of her head and see a line of pink scalp and about an inch of gray hair at her roots.
“You Mrs. Jackson’s daughter?” I asked.
Daddy shook his head and said, “Sorry, ma’am. She’s got no manners. I try to teach her but it just don’t stick. This here’s my daughter Kate. Kate, this is Mrs. Murphy.”
The redheaded lady put out a hand the size of a little kid’s. She was old, though, lots older than Daddy, and heavy makeup was caked on her face, but she probably didn’t weigh no more’n a hundred pounds. When I reached out to shake her hand, she looked scared, like she thought she might catch something.
“Hello,” I said. Her palm was squishy with sweat and she yanked her hand back after one pump. She wore these fake eyelashes like you buy at Walgreens for $6.99. They fluttered at me when she tried to smile.
Daddy said, “Mrs. Murphy’s gonna move into her mama’s trailer. She’ll be our new neighbor.”
For such a little lady, Mrs. Murphy had a good-sized rack on her, and with her low-cut blouse Daddy couldn’t take his eyes off her titties. He kept on talking to her and she kept on backing up, her hands messing with the buttons at the top of her blouse. When her ass hit the side of her trailer, she scooted inside and disappeared.
Daddy sat down at his weight bench and told me to go in and fix him some cereal.
Over the next few weeks I barely ever saw Mrs. Murphy. She mostly stayed inside her trailer, only coming out a few times to drive her little Ford Taurus to the Winn-Dixie to get her some groceries, and even when she done that, she nearly run out to her car like she thought somebody outside was gonna jump out and grab her. One time when she come home in her car, Daddy went over and offered to help carry her groceries but she shook her head no, and she carried those bags up high so’s to cover her chest and her face and she run into her trailer. Daddy laughed out loud.
I seen it all from the windows in Pattie’s Marina office where I went to answer the phones and take folks’ rent checks and mostly just watch TV or jaw with Fred and Pattie. Sometimes I read books. Pattie had a whole bunch of paperback books that folks had left in the office and most of them were pretty good. They were stories about detectives and spies and shit like that. Beat the crap out of watching Days of Our Lives with Pattie.
After she’d been living there about a month, Mrs. Murphy come into the office one day to pay her rent. Pattie’d gone out to her boat to sleep off last night’s Jack and Coke and Fred was over running the forklift for some Miami hot-shot. It was just me and her.
“Hey,” I said when she walked in. She didn’t say nothin’ but just pulled her checkbook out of her little handbag and started writing out the check.
“How d’ya like living here at Pattie’s, Mrs. Murphy?”
“Okay, uh, Kate, was it?”
“Yeah. Like the movie star, Kate Hepburn.”
“I’m surprised someone your age would know about her.”
“I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Oh dear, I didn’t mean to say that you were.”
“Mama used to say I have a active imagination.”
“I’m sure you do, Kate,” she said, but she turned away when I looked up at her from the receipt book where I was writing in the number of her check. She had a look on her face like she just tasted milk that had turned.
“You sure do stay in your trailer lots. You don’t work?”
“Well, I did. I’m an administrative assistant,” she said, like I knew what that was, “but I’m currently between positions.”
“What’s that mean?”
She blinked her eyes real fast and those fake lashes looked like moths that just been hit with bug spray. “It means,” she said, and her voice sounded funny, even for her. “It means that I got laid off.” She was stuffing her checkbook back into that little purse of hers and then she zipped the pocket closed like she thought I was gonna reach across the counter and snatch it away from her. “I still have trouble believing it. Four years short of earning a pension. They said I wasn’t quick enough, but that really means they think I’m too old.” She started crying for real and dragged out that word “old” like it had about sixteen letters.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” I wished I knew what to say. I hated her crying like that. It was goddamn irritating.
“And I keep sending out resumes and the unemployment is going to run out soon. I sold my condo and I’m reduced to living alone in this place.” She looked up at the ceiling like she thought it was gonna just cave in on her that minute, then she snorted up the snot that had started to drip out her nose. I handed her a paper towel from the roll Pattie kept behind the desk.
“Well, Mrs. Murphy,” I said, “living here sure must be lots different from a fancy condo.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know.”
“Pattie’s Trailer Park’s not exactly what you’d call a good neighborhood. I hope you got plenty of locks on that trailer of yours, ’cuz a pretty little lady like you—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Must make you pretty scared living in a place like this all alone with no one to protect you.”
“Yes, yes, it does. But it sounds like you know something. Has something happened?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what? What are you talking about?”
“You ain’t heard about the rapist?”
Her eyes grew big and those lashes quit twitching. “Rapist?”
“Yes’m. I figure I better warn you.”
“Around here? Close by?”
“Yes’m. They’re calling him the Trailer Park Stalker in the papers.”
“Oh my Lord.”
I looked down at the greasy countertop, leaned in closer to her, and spoke quiet. “Happened to me. Daddy was down at Flossie’s. He come into the trailer late at night and climbed on top of me and, well, you know. There weren’t a thing I could do. He’s too strong.”
“Oh, you poor child.”
“I wished I’d a had a gun or something. I would’a killed him,” I said, and I meant it.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that. Getting something for protection.”
I shrugged.
“It must have been so terrible for you. It’s no wonder you dress like that now.”
“Like what?”
“Those clothes — they’re men’s clothes. Those big T-shirts and jeans, and that hair of yours. You know, if you got it cut in a stylish way instead of that mop of snarls, and got your teeth fixed to close up that gap, why, you’d be pretty.”
“Mrs. Murphy, I don’t give a shit about pretty.”
It was about two weeks later, when I was walking over to the office on my day off to get another book to read, that Mrs. Murphy’s door opened a crack and she whispered, “Kate, pssst. Kate.”
When I got to her door, she opened it and pulled me in, slammed the door, and locked it. The inside of the trailer was different now. It was all clean and neat and the furniture looked like it was new and bought all at the same time. There was curtains on the windows with bright yellow sunflowers on them. Against one wall, she had these shelves that looked like miniature boat stacks, but inside each little box was an old-timey doll in a pretty dress.