Running on Empty

by Don Aker

  His father nodded toward the money. “I have to hand it to you, Ethan. I’m surprised you were able to pay everything off as fast as you did. I heard the pool was cutting back on its part-time hours.”

  “I haven’t worked there in weeks,” Ethan spat. He hadn’t intended to say anything about his job, but his father’s comment pissed him off. Flipping through TV channels in his bedroom last night, Ethan had seen his old man’s face appear on the screen, and he’d caught the last minute of a news segment on his father’s candidacy. A statement the commentator offered at the end about Jack Palmer having “his finger on the public’s pulse” had angered him. This about a guy who didn’t have a clue what was happening in his own home. Christ!

  “Then where’d you get the money?” asked Jack.

  Ethan thought about the robbery downtown that he’d just heard about. The second one in a month. “I hold up convenience stores,” he said. “The hours are crazy but the pay’s not bad.”

  “Don’t even joke about something like that.”

  “Might turn off the voters, huh?”

  “Ethan—”

  “I’m waiting tables at a diner. Happy?”

  If not happy, his father looked visibly relieved.

  “So that’s where you’ve been,” said Jillian, appearing in the doorway in an ivory pantsuit that clearly hadn’t come from Value Village. No question about it—the woman had a thing for white. Ethan imagined her wearing that outfit in the January room, pictured her disappearing against those Brilliant Cream walls. Wishful thinking.

  “If you’d actually been interested,” Ethan snapped at her, “you could’ve asked me,” and he enjoyed seeing the wounded expression that appeared on her face.

  “There’s no need to be rude, Ethan,” said his father. Then, as if to keep the tension from escalating, he asked, “Which diner?”

  Ethan glowered at his father’s fiancée a moment longer before replying, “The Chow Down.”

  “Near the waterfront?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “I’ve driven by it,” said Jack.

  Of course you have, thought Ethan. Jack Palmer would never actually eat in a place like that.

  “Maybe I’ll stop in sometime,” his father added, surprising him.

  So you can perform the perfect-father routine for the cameras? “I wouldn’t bother stump-thumping for that crowd,” Ethan said, thinking of Ike. “You might get more than you bargained for.”

  He turned to go. Lil had asked him to cover for her that afternoon so she could leave early. Something about a baby shower. Jillian stepped aside to let him pass.

  “Ethan?”

  Ethan stopped in the doorway and looked back at his father. “What?”

  Jack seemed about to say something, then reached into his pocket. For a second, Ethan thought he might be returning the money, but instead he pulled out a set of car keys, got up, and walked toward his son. “Here,” he said. “Now that you’re all paid up, you can drive the Volvo again.”

  Ethan stared at him, surprise rooting him to the spot. Then, just as he was about to reach for the keys, he changed his mind. “Turns out the bus isn’t so bad. No strings attached.” Then he left.

  As much as he needed the money, Ethan regretted having agreed to fill in for Lil. Wednesdays were usually the restaurant’s slowest times, so they needed only one server, but for some reason there’d been a steady stream of diners through the door for the past two hours. At one point he was almost running between the kitchen and the tables, and Ike told him to slow down. Actually said it without snarling. Of course, not more than ten minutes later, Ethan upset a Spaghetti With Meatballs over an All Day Breakfast as he hurried to load his tray, and Ike’s roar seemed to rattle windows, giving new meaning to “Halifax Explosion.”

  Toward the end of the shift, though, things levelled off and he even had time to chat with some of the customers. “The girls” had returned and immediately launched into questions about girlfriends, because the one with the bad wig had a teenaged granddaughter they all thought would be perfect for him. “Honey,” she told him, her synthetic hair glittering under The Chow Down’s fluorescent lights, “if this Allie person ever gives you any trouble, you just let me know, okay?”

  Boots stopped by, too, ordering the Western Sandwich without the tomato. Ethan forgot to deduct the quarter, but he remembered just as he passed Boots the bill, so he took it back to the cash register and rang it up again. Boots told him not to bother, but Ethan could see he was wearing the same baggy pants and sweater, which, while clean, looked even more threadbare than before. Cleaning off the guy’s table, he found another lottery ticket. With zero dollars in his bank account, he might have been even more pissed than the last time, but he thought about the man’s sweater and just shrugged, sliding the ticket into his wallet.

  All in all, he made over forty bucks in tips by the time he cashed out. Not bad for a Wednesday supper shift. Rather than heading straight for his bus stop, he turned toward Spring Garden Road. At the Ragged Ending concert he’d taken Allie to, the group had announced they had a new album coming out, and he wanted to pick it up for her at HMV instead of downloading it like he usually would. Maybe giving her the CD would help ease some of the tension that had developed between them after he’d cancelled plans with her a bunch of times to take extra shifts. Today was one of those times. Although she’d told him she understood, something in her voice suggested otherwise. She hadn’t sounded pissed exactly. Something else. Hurt? Hopefully, the CD would help make it up to her.

  On his way to Spring Garden, Ethan passed the convenience store where he’d checked Boots’s first “tip,” and remembered the ticket in his wallet. He was in a hurry to get to HMV, but he backtracked anyway and headed straight for the ticket scanner, pulling the rectangular slip of paper out of his wallet. He smoothed it between his fingers and slid the bar code under the red light, waiting for the machine’s display to tell him Not a winning ticket.

  His mouth fell open.

  Chapter 15

  At his locker the next morning, talking to Pete and Seth, Ethan glanced at his watch for the tenth time. It was only minutes until first bell, and Allie always got to school long before that. He was having a hard job not telling anyone else his news before he shared it with her.

  Finally she appeared at the end of the hall and headed toward them. He waved to her and was surprised when she didn’t respond. He was even more surprised to see her turn into their homeroom instead of coming over to chat with the guys and, more important, to give him a kiss.

  Pete seemed surprised, too. “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “Beats me,” replied Ethan. “Later, guys,” he said, then headed into homeroom. Moore-or-Less was putting up yet another godawful print she’d probably bought in New York, this one with watches stretched like putty over tree branches, and he swallowed a snicker as he wove through his classmates toward Allie’s seat.

  “Where were you last night?” he asked when he reached her.

  “Hello to you, too,” she replied. She was organizing her books for first class, but there was no mistaking the edge in her voice.

  “Sorry, babe,” said Ethan, bending down to kiss her, but she pulled away and his lips met air. “Hey,” he said softly, “you wanna tell me what’s wrong?”

  She looked up at him. “You sure you can spare the time?”

  He sighed. “I called you three times last night. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “Last night? That was, what—the nineteenth?”

  Ethan felt himself growing annoyed. “All day,” he said.

  “I certainly don’t know why I’d be hanging around waiting for you to call me on the nineteenth,” said Allie, and he could see something more than annoyance in her eyes.

  And suddenly he knew. November nineteenth. “Jeez, Al, I’m sorry.”

  Turning away, she asked, “Sorry you couldn’t be bothered to call me until after ten? Or sorry you forgot it was our anniversary?”


  He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. Allie had dropped a couple hints a few days ago, but he’d been too caught up in his own shit to realize what she’d been getting at. If he’d been paying attention to the dates rather than just the circles on his schedule, he might have remembered they’d gone out for the first time exactly six months ago last night.

  Allie Fontaine hadn’t been the warmest person when she’d arrived at John C. Miles last May. Having transferred in from another district during the final weeks of the school year, she’d kept to herself, speaking whenever someone spoke to her but never starting a conversation. Despite this, there was something about her that drew him to her, something more than just her physical beauty, which made his pulse race just sitting beside her in class. It was the way she gave all her attention to whoever might be talking: teacher, student, even one of the school secretaries on the PA. It was like everything was important to her, like she didn’t want to miss a thing. During the week that followed, he’d found himself wondering what it would be like to be the focus of all that attention.

  When he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out, he took her to see an early show at the Oxford Theatre and, afterwards, to Irene’s Ice Cream Emporium, which was spur-of-the-moment on his part because he didn’t want the evening to end. Ethan had dated lots of girls since junior high and had gone steady for a while in grade ten, but Allie was nothing at all like those others. She didn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t, didn’t put on an act you knew would falter around the fourth date. And neither had he. That very first evening with her at Irene’s, he found himself telling her things he’d never once mentioned to those other girls, and Allie had seemed just as open in the things she’d shared with him. He knew it sounded corny, but it was like he’d been waiting for Allie Fontaine all his life.

  Sitting across from him in the booth at Irene’s, Allie had remarked how the number of flavours handwritten on the board above the freezer—Irene’s Top 19—matched that day’s date on the photocopied calendar pages that served as placemats. Ethan had teased her gently about being a number nerd, but afterwards he wondered if maybe that had been some kind of sign, if maybe they’d been meant to be there together that night. He’d thought of that coincidence many times later as he passed the ice cream shop, thought of that nineteenth day and how, even after only a few hours together, he’d known she was the one for him.

  But he hadn’t gone by Irene’s since he’d begun working at The Chow Down.

  “I’m sorry for both, Al. Really.”

  Her next words lacked the hard edges of her first. “I thought you were going to surprise me.” Turning to face him, she smiled sadly. “Well, you certainly did that.”

  “Look,” he said, his voice husky, “I can’t feel worse than I already do. I’ll make it up to you, okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, but he could still hear the hurt in her voice as she looked away.

  The bell rang and everyone began moving toward their seats. Ethan had no choice but to do the same. When he turned to sit down, he found on his desk a small gift-wrapped box, the tag bearing his name in Allie’s beautiful cursive. Regret stabbed him again. He glanced over at her, but she was rummaging through her purse, making a point not to look in his direction.

  A secretary’s voice came over the PA reading the morning announcements, but her words were just meaningless sounds filling the room as he stared at the box. He didn’t have to open it to know what was inside. He recognized the store name, Fond Memories, on the gift wrap—it was a small antique shop on Barrington. He and Allie had walked by just after it opened in August, and she’d dragged him—complaining—inside to look around. Allie had seen nothing much that interested her, but Ethan had found an old silver belt buckle bearing the original Mustang logo and “1964” engraved beneath it, commemorating the first year Ford had produced the car. He’d felt like such a geek admiring it—who would wear a silver buckle as big as your fist?—but there was something about it that appealed to him, made him ask the store owner to take it out of the case so he could see it up close. When he turned it over and saw the price tag, though, he handed it back. He’d been saving to buy his own Mustang, and he couldn’t afford to spend so much on something he really didn’t need.

  And now it sat carefully boxed and wrapped on the desk in front of him.

  This was so like Allie. Observant, thoughtful, generous, she was exactly the kind of person to have saved her money, gone back to the shop on her own and bought the expensive buckle, then secreted it away until the time was perfect. Until the nineteenth.

  And not only had Ethan forgotten to get her anything, including the Ragged Ending CD he’d intended to pick up, he hadn’t even gotten around to calling her until after ten o’clock. Happy anniversary, all right. He picked up the box and, looking across the aisle again, he caught Allie’s eye. Thank you, he mouthed while the school secretary listed the cafeteria specials, and this time she didn’t look away.

  “So what’s your big news?” Allie asked him at recess. She was holding the note he’d passed her in physics class right after Beaker had returned another round of tests, and he was glad she wasn’t pissed anymore. He could tell she was still a little hurt, but at least she wasn’t mad. “Did you ace it?” she asked.

  Ethan flushed. “Not exactly.” That, of course, was an understatement. At least he’d passed, which was more than he could say for Pete. “I’m taking you to Carruthers for dinner tonight,” he said. “I made a reservation when Moore-or-Less let me leave English class.”

  Allie’s eyes lit up. “Carruthers? Ethan, that’s the most expensive place in the city.” She frowned. “I don’t want you spending money on me because you feel guilty.”

  “You haven’t heard my news,” he said.

  “Wasn’t that it?”

  Ethan pulled out his wallet. Opening it, he fanned a thick wad of bills inside, some of them fifties.

  Allie’s eyes were sudden saucers. A couple of students passing by in the hallway eyeballed the money and whistled.

  Ethan returned the wallet to his jeans. “Nine hundred bucks,” he said.

  She gaped at him. “You shouldn’t be carrying that much on you, Ethan.”

  “I was planning on taking a chunk to the bank during my free period.”

  “But where did you—”

  “I won it.”

  “How?”

  He told her about Boots McLaughlin leaving him another lottery ticket and how he checked it on the way home from work. Grinning sheepishly, he said, “Almost threw it away. I’m sure glad I didn’t.”

  “So how’d you get the money? Ticket sellers can get into serious trouble cashing them for people under age.”

  “Got somebody to do it for me.”

  “Who?”

  “A guy I served at The Chow Down.”

  Allie’s eyes grew wide again. “You asked a customer to break the law for you?”

  Ethan shrugged. “He didn’t do me any favour, Al. I paid him a hundred bucks.”

  A bell warned they had three minutes to get to their next class. Lockers on both sides of Ethan and Allie swung open, books either flew in or flew out, metal doors clanged shut once more, and locks threaded through hasps and clicked into place, their combination dials spun for good measure. Everything and everyone around them was in motion, but Allie appeared frozen to the spot, her only movement a slow shake of her head.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Ethan, I’m happy for you. Really. It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  She shrugged. “It’s nothing.” She put her hand on his arm. “You’re sure about Carruthers? We can go somewhere cheaper. Like Irene’s.”

  He draped an arm over her shoulder. “I was a jerk for forgetting our anniversary. I want to do this, okay?”

  She looked up at him, her eyes like dark mirrors, and he wondered what was wrong, wondered why she wasn’t more excited for him. After all, it was nine hundred bucks
, right? Who didn’t get excited over something like that? He got the impression that there was something still between them, something more she wanted to say, but then she smiled. “What should I wear?”

  Chapter 16

  Carruthers was every bit as expensive as they’d heard it was. And it had a waiting list for reservations a month long. Fortunately for Ethan, he’d remembered Raye telling him that Jazz’s sister, Sapphire, worked there, and he’d mentioned her name when he’d called that morning to book a table. It was as if the stars had aligned in his favour, because Sapphire didn’t have classes that morning and was at the restaurant setting up for lunch. “Raye’s brother?” she’d asked when she’d come to the phone. “Your sister’s cool. I’ll get you a table.” And she had.

  Looking at the menu now, Ethan didn’t see a single appetizer under twenty-five bucks and many of the entrees ran three figures, but the restaurant’s decor more than matched the prices. According to the server who seated them, the floor was Italian marble, the gleaming cypress tables were imported from Africa, and three of the dining room’s four walls were hand-painted by well-known Maritime artists, so each was its own unique, vibrant canvas. A fourteen-foot-high burnished copper ceiling dazzled with soft light from exquisite crystal chandeliers, but the most spectacular feature was the fourth wall: a single floor-to-ceiling expanse of glass overlooking the harbour. Although the glass at nighttime mirrored the dining area where they sat, beyond their reflections they could see lights from boats and buildings across the harbour winking on the water’s surface, and a nearly full moon hung just above the horizon. If the food’s even half as good as the atmosphere, thought Ethan, dinner’ll be worth whatever it costs me.

  Allie seemed to think otherwise. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and Ethan almost grinned at the awe in her voice, “but I don’t feel good about you spending so much money.”