Running on Empty

by Don Aker

Ethan began pulling the coins out of his pockets, placing them on the counter between him and the teller. “I have a hundred ninety-six bucks that I—”

  “Sorry,” interrupted the teller, “I can’t take all those loose coins.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bank policy. That many coins have to be rolled.” The teller reached into a drawer and pulled out several paper tubes. “These here are for your two-dollar coins, these are for loonies, and these ones are for quarters. Doesn’t look like you’ve got enough of anything else there to roll.”

  Ethan tried to hide his impatience. “Can I do that here or do I need to come back?”

  “There’s a table in the reception area you can use if you don’t mind doing it out in the open but, if I were you, I’d use the one over there.” He pointed to a table behind a large pillar that held a display of banking pamphlets and brochures.

  And if I were you, thought Ethan, I’d cutback on the Cinnabons. “Thanks. I’ll just be a minute.”

  The teller had grinned at this and, fifteen minutes later, Ethan understood why. Getting coins into those paper tubes wasn’t as easy as it looked. More than once he’d dropped a handful of toonies on the floor, and they’d rolled in all directions. He had just dived again after a bunch of quarters when he heard a voice he recognized.

  “I need to see the bank manager, please.”

  “Certainly, Ms. Fontaine. He’s with another client at the moment, but he shouldn’t be too long. Would you care to take a seat?”

  Ethan looked up from beneath his table and saw Allie’s mother standing at the end of a counter separating this part of the bank from two offices with signs on their doors: Manager and Assistant Manager and names below them. An attractive woman in a grey suit stood on the other side of the counter.

  Christ, thought Ethan. Of all the times—

  “Do you know how long he’ll be?” asked Allie’s mother.

  “I can check for you,” the woman said.

  Ethan glanced around the space and saw that the only empty chair was directly across from where he was working. Shit!

  Allie’s mother put her hand to her throat, her fingers toying with the necklace Ethan recognized as the one Allie and Bethany had given her for her birthday. He knew that gesture well. He’d seen it when he’d been at the Fontaines’ house the day Bethany had strep throat and she and Allie’s dad had debated taking her to the doctor again. He’d seen it when she was attending one of Allie’s dance recitals just before Allie and her partner executed a particularly challenging move. He’d seen it the night he’d dropped Allie off after a movie, the streets slick with freezing rain that hadn’t been forecasted. The woman was nervous or upset. Or both.

  “No, that’s okay,” she said. “It’s probably better if I make an appointment.”

  “I know he’s free at one o’clock,” said the woman behind the counter. “Would you like to come back then?”

  Ethan watched Allie’s mom tug at her necklace again. “I think it’d be better if I called him.”

  The woman nodded. “By all means. Would you like his card?”

  But Mrs. Fontaine was already moving past Ethan’s table on her way toward the exit.

  Relieved, Ethan crawled out from under the table and slid the last errant coins into the sleeve for quarters. Standing up, he collected the filled tubes and remaining loose change and headed back to the lineup.

  The Martingale system served him well after he returned from the bank … for the first hour.

  At one point, Ethan had won back all the money he’d borrowed from Raye the previous night and was up a hundred eighty-five bucks—and that didn’t include the cash he’d taken from Juanita that morning, which he still had. He’d lost some along the way, of course—five bucks here, ten there, and a string of bad hands had cost him forty bucks on one bet and eighty on another—but he’d kept his head and stayed the course, waiting for the law of averages to kick in when he needed it. And it had.

  Until the second hour.

  At one point, he considered stopping, almost clicked the End Game button, but then he slid the cursor over to Hit Me. Again and again, like his brain had separated itself from everything but the job of creating the electrical impulse that travelled down his arm into his index finger.

  Ten minutes into the second hour, it was all over.

  Sitting on his bed now, Ethan looked at the screen in disbelief, staring at the zero in his Your Total Winnings window.

  He flung his laptop across the room.

  “Hey, buddy,” said Ethan.

  Standing in the open doorway of his parents’ kitchen, Pete looked first at his feet and then at Ethan on his back step. “Hey,” he said.

  “Can I come in?”

  Pete glanced behind him and Ethan could see Pete’s mother making a pie at the counter. Ethan nodded to her—”Hi, Mrs. Hennessey”—and she waved back, her hand covered with flour.

  “Maybe I’d better come out,” Pete said. He stepped inside for a moment and then reappeared, slipping on his jacket as he closed the door behind him.

  Ethan moved down the steps into the driveway. Behind him, Pete grabbed the railing with one hand and nimbly swung his legs over the wrought iron and landed on the concrete beside his friend.

  “You weren’t in school today,” said Ethan. He wanted to ask, So, you and Seth hanging out now? but that would’ve just complicated things.

  “I drove Ma to Bridgewater. Doctor’s appointment.”

  Ethan blinked, embarrassed. “She okay?”

  Pete nodded. “Eye checkup. They put drops in and she couldn’t drive herself home. No big deal.”

  “Good to hear.”

  The two stood looking at each other, an awkwardness settling around them like wet sand.

  “I bet you’re surprised to see me,” offered Ethan finally.

  Pete looked at his feet. “Not really. No.”

  Another moment passed. Then both began speaking at the same time: “Look, I’m sorry—”

  They stopped, then chorused, “Jinx!” Like they were nine years old again. Ethan laughed self-consciously, and Pete joined him. Their laughter lasted longer than it needed to, as if they were delaying an uncomfortable inevitability.

  “You first,” said Pete, finally.

  Ethan nodded, ran a hand through his hair, cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for what I said on the phone about options. I didn’t mean it. You’ve got plenty.”

  Pete shrugged. “I don’t know about plenty,” he said, “but thanks, man.”

  “I was a jerk,” continued Ethan. “I was pissed over what you said about Allie, but that was no excuse to take it out on you.”

  Pete looked away. “Yeah. About that.”

  Ethan glanced at his watch. The day was disappearing. “Look, Pete, I gotta ask a favour.”

  “Favour?” Pete’s voice seemed to come from farther away than where he stood in the driveway.

  Ethan didn’t know how to ask what he’d come for so it wouldn’t sound like the only reason he was there. But he asked anyway. “Can I borrow some cash? Fifty, a hundred, whatever.” He paused, then added, “Two hundred, if you got it.”

  Pete turned to him. “You came here for money?”

  Ethan flushed. “Yeah, look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  Pete stared at him for a moment, a series of expressions flickering across his face. Finally, “I got maybe twenty bucks.”

  “Twenty’s good.” Ethan hated the eagerness in his voice, but he plunged on. “I’ll pay you back soon as I can. It’s just—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Pete. He reached into his back pocket, took out his wallet, then hesitated. “Ethan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s really why you came here? To borrow money?”

  “Not just that,” Ethan replied. “To apologize, too, right? But I’m in kind of a rush. Do you think you can—”

  Pete held up his hand. “There’s something I gotta say.” He to
ok a deep breath, released it. “I’m sorry.”

  Ethan felt a wave of impatience surge through him. “Look, it’s not for long. I’ll get the twenty back to you tomorrow. Or the next day for sure.”

  Pete shook his head. “It’s not about the money.” A car came down the street, and he followed it with his eyes until it passed. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “What?”

  “You’re my buddy. My best friend. Friends don’t do something like that. They don’t plan to, anyway.”

  Ethan frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  Pete looked toward the street again. “It wasn’t Allie’s fault.”

  Ethan could feel his impatience become annoyance. “What’s Allie got to do with it?”

  Pete turned to him. “She really didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what? She wasn’t in school this morning.”

  Pete shrugged. “Yeah. I was up half the night myself.” Now it was his turn to run his hands through his hair, and he kicked at a piece of concrete crumbling from the driveway’s edge. “I like Allie, Ethan.”

  “I know you do. Who doesn’t?”

  “No.” He took another deep breath. “I mean I really like her.”

  Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”

  Pete looked at his feet. “You know what I’m saying.”

  Ethan tried to make sense of what he was hearing. “But how could you?”

  Pete looked up, his face lined with misery. “I didn’t want to. Honest. It just—”

  “But you’re gay!”

  Pete gaped at him. “What? I’m not gay. Where’d you get that idea?”

  Ethan ran over everything in his head, trying to sort it all out. “You’ve never been serious with a girl. And you haven’t dated anyone for months. You don’t even look at girls. I saw you at—” He thought back to their lunch at Perk Up Your Day, how Pete had ignored the server’s big breasts, looked through her as she’d leaned over him, collecting their dishes while he—

  While he chatted with Allie.

  And when had Pete stopped dating?

  After Allie arrived at John C. Miles.

  And the questions: What’s Allie doing tonight? Does Allie know? How do you think Allie’ll feel?

  He even knew about Ragged Ending, Allie’s favourite band.

  “I’m not gay,” Pete said simply.

  Ethan looked at the crumbling concrete that Pete was poking with his toe, began to feel the driveway vibrate under his feet. A tractor-trailer churned up the street, the sound growing as it approached then washing away as it passed. It left a smell of something heavy in the air. Oil? Rubber? Transmission fluid just before the gears seize? Everything connected in some way. Allie and Ethan, Ethan and Pete.

  And now Allie and Pete.

  “What didn’t Allie tell me?” asked Ethan. He was surprised to hear his voice sound so normal. Not at all like the tractor-trailer that churned in his chest right now.

  Pete didn’t look up, just kept staring at the concrete. “It wasn’t her fault, man. It was all me.”

  “What—didn’t—Allie—tell—me?” Ethan repeated. Hearing the question a second time didn’t make it more real. Nothing about this moment was real. A “zero winnings” message flashed in his brain.

  “I kissed her, Ethan.”

  Ethan saw his knuckles connect with Pete’s face before he knew he’d made a fist. Pete staggered backward, blood already beginning to flow from his nose. But he said nothing, made no move to raise his own fists.

  “You kissed Allie,” said Ethan. He might just as well have said You dissed Allie or You pissed Allie. Neither of those would have made less sense.

  Pete nodded, the blood now dripping onto his jacket. He spat, drops of blood flecking the concrete, then wiped at his nose with the back of his hand, smearing red to his wrist. “It just happened, Ethan. I didn’t plan it. I would never have planned—”

  “What happened?” Ethan’s words were a guttural growl.

  Pete wiped at his nose again, took another breath. “We were working on that profile assignment, leaning over one of the monitors in the library. She’d just thought of this great idea about how we could frame the whole thing, and she looked up to tell me. And I couldn’t stop myself. I kissed her.”

  “You kissed Allie.” Repeating it was perhaps the only thing that kept Ethan from swinging again. Forming words with his lips gave his brain and his body something else to do. Some small thing that kept him from forming fists with his hands and lashing out, drawing more blood. There was too much of that already. Pete wiped at his nose with the back of his other hand now and then the sleeve of his jacket.

  “I’ve had a thing for Allie from the moment I first saw her,” continued Pete, “but I never did anything about it. I wouldn’t. I knew how you felt about her, man.”

  “But you kissed her.”

  “I never meant for it to happen, Ethan. It just did.”

  “And Allie—?” Ethan couldn’t finish the question, couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

  He didn’t have to. “She was real upset. She started apologizing for maybe giving me the wrong impression. But she hadn’t. I told her so, told her it was just me. All me.”

  Ethan looked down at his hand, saw two of his knuckles were bleeding where they must have grazed Pete’s teeth. “She didn’t tell me.”

  “You said you haven’t seen her.”

  “She didn’t call.”

  “She’s got some things on her mind—”

  “No shit.”

  Pete shook his head. “Not that. Other things.”

  Ethan raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean, ‘other things’? She’s been telling you stuff? Personal stuff?” The anger he’d felt earlier threatened to erupt again.

  “You were busy at the diner and with that project you’re working on. She hadn’t seen much of you lately.”

  “And you just happened to be around to listen,” said Ethan, his voice a razor. “Convenient.”

  “That’s not how it was at all, Eth—”

  “You must’ve just been waiting for something like this, huh?” Ethan snarled. “Your timing was perfect. And here I said you didn’t have options. You make your options, don’t you, buddy?”

  Pete reached out and gripped Ethan’s shoulder. “It wasn’t like that—”

  Ethan flung Pete’s hand aside. “Stay away from me,” he breathed. “And stay away from Allie, too.”

  “Ethan!”

  But Ethan ignored him. He was running before he reached the street.

  Chapter 26

  “How much can you give me for it?”

  The woman behind the counter at Delta’s Estate Jewellers and Pawnshop looked again at the object in her hand. “Seventy-five.”

  “She paid over two hundred for it!”

  “Look, kid, it’s a specialty item. Not a lot ‘a people around here are gonna wear a buckle like this. Maybe in Alberta, all those cowboys.” She shrugged. “Hundred. Take it or leave it.”

  Ethan took it.

  His smashed laptop still on the floor of his room, Ethan sat at the computer in his old man’s study staring at the “zero winnings” message blinking on the screen. It had taken him less than five minutes to lose the money he’d gotten at the pawnshop. In fact, the timer at the bottom of the screen read four minutes and thirteen seconds. He’d lost every hand, doubling each successive bet so he was down seventy-five dollars after the first four. The Martingale system called for a fifth bet of eighty bucks, but he only had twenty-five left in his account. Brains, balls, and bankrolls. Why did it always come down to the third?

  He bet the twenty-five, then drew a jack of diamonds after his three of hearts and nine of spades.

  Sitting there at his old man’s double-pedestal desk, he heard himself make a sound, something between a sigh and a sob.

  He leaned forward, resting his head on its cool, glass-topped surface, his mind moving through moments of the las
t few weeks. He’d gambled away all of his cash and lost his job. He’d stolen money from his sister. His girlfriend had made out with his best friend, for Christ’s sake. Everything was ruined. He felt broken inside, like the tree a windstorm had brought down in the yard behind their house in Herring Cove. He slammed his fist on the desk, scattering papers and envelopes onto the gleaming oak floor. He cursed as he bent down to collect them, the words piling up in the silence, then sat up, rolled the plush leather office chair backward, and got to his feet. That’s when he saw them: pieces of torn newsprint in the wastebasket by the desk, a cardinal sin in their Waste not, want not household. Even as a child, his father had been anal about recycling—”When you have next to nothing, you find uses for what others throw away,” he was fond of saying—yet Mr. Perfect had broken his own rule. Ethan forced himself to grin, trying to fill up that hollowness for a moment, trying hard to feel something besides empty. It didn’t work.

  Most of the papers in his hands were unopened mail. On top of the pile was an envelope addressed to his father, bearing the emblem of a financial institution that Ethan had overheard the investment adviser talking about. The envelope was thick, and through the paper beneath his fingers Ethan thought he could feel the raised numbers of a bank card. Or a credit card.

  Sudden hope kindled itself inside that emptiness as an idea sparked in his head, thoughts flashing like wildfire through his brain, but then common sense gripped him. He laid the papers and the mail on the desk, boxed their edges to neaten the pile, then turned to the computer and cleared the Web browser’s history, deleting the sites he had visited. One site, really: MyDigitalVegas.com.

  He left the study. Glancing at his watch, he saw Raye wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. No, he realized, longer than that. Today was Thursday, the day she took guitar lessons from Winnipeg Joe. Ethan was relieved. More time to consider what to do about Juanita. Funny, he thought, how easy it was to focus on a ceramic pig. Better than letting his mind wander to Allie. And Pete.

  Although he hadn’t eaten since the night before, he wasn’t hungry. But he found himself thirsty and went to the kitchen to draw himself a glass of water from the fridge dispenser. Manufacturers didn’t sell refrigerators bigger than the model his old man had purchased unless they were custom built, and Ethan often wondered why his father hadn’t chosen to have one made to order—something else Jack could have complained about when it didn’t turn out the way he expected. Like his son.