The girl hummed it in the back of the car, and Jeremy joked about a hundred times being enough, thanks. She always said sorry and gave the back of his head a look that he’d catch in the rear-view mirror. Within a minute, every time, the tune would start again, quietly.
“You’re doing it again.”
“I can’t help it!”
“Sure you can.”
He gave her mother a knowing look that wasn’t returned.
The only common ground he ever found with the girl was animated movies, which Jeremy usually enjoyed even more than she did, unless the movie involved the gauzy, sexless, aggravatingly delayed coupling of princes and princesses. He’d get restless waiting for the big wedding scenes to end, for the team of fat horses to pull the carriage away into the rising line of credits. The girl loved princesses and aspired to be one when she was older. “Pretty sure you have to be born one,” he told her, which confused the girl and angered the mother. For her eighth birthday he bought her a toy castle where all her doll princesses could live and entertain. Not a single princess ever set foot in the castle: it stayed in a closet, then came back to Jeremy’s house when he and Terry broke up. He put it at the end of his driveway and it disappeared overnight. Someone’s princesses were sleeping well in it, though they’d never know the whole story.
Terry always seemed to be looking at him as if through a two-way mirror, studying and observing him, never fully impressed with her findings. He could see it, and knew that look meant she found him inadequate in ways she wasn’t yet fully able to articulate but would soon crystallize in her mind.
“We’re doing alright, right?” He tried to make it sound like a statement. “You and me – it’s good. Right?”
“It’s good,” she’d say, and would repeat it: “No, it’s good.”
“Good.”
It wasn’t, and the crack that had appeared in the relationship finally became too wide to ignore.
There had been nothing serious since. Just a few dates now and then, and the occasional lucky strike that ended with him and some relative stranger going at it at home or in his office at the bar. Nothing lasted very long, which he told himself and everyone else was because he was so busy all the time keeping the Ice Shack going.
“This place is 24-7. I’m lucky if I get a second to breathe.”
* * *
Jeremy’s parents had heard about the relationship with Terry, though they never asked him directly about it – they hadn’t met any of the women he dated since he was in high school. His mother sometimes said things about how lucky it was he didn’t have any children, given the kind of work he did and the kinds of hours he kept. “You’d never see them,” she said. “But then, maybe we’d get to see them all the time!”
“We don’t have enough room here for kids running around,” his dad said.
It was his sister who had filled them in on the whole Terry situation. Marie was never convinced it could last, though she at least went so far as to call it a relationship, rather than a fling. She had a clearer perspective, she felt, living outside of the city with her husband and the three kids she carried around like trophies. Shortly before Terry, Jeremy had gone out with a waitress from Newfoundland who Marie thought was using him to get good shifts. Before that one, it was a travel agent who she predicted would drop him the minute she decided she wanted kids. She was right in both cases, but he was reluctant to give her the satisfaction. Marie was nearly a decade younger than Jeremy, but having kids had vaulted her over him, as far as she was concerned. And working in bars all the time was kind of childish to begin with. “You like it because it’s one long party,” Marie said.
“You don’t know what I do all day. I barely sit down, ever.”
Look: he showed her the scar on his wrist where it’d been sliced by a broken pint glass that had fallen into a sink full of ice. He’d reached to pluck it out, and it got him, turning the ice as pink as a snow cone. When that happened, you had to scoop out all the ice, then spray the sink down with hot water and bleach. It was a real operation – if you tried to just scoop out the bloody ice and leave the rest, someone would complain, and if the city ever heard about it, there’d be health inspectors coming in through the windows. Jeremy didn’t allow for that kind of corner-cutting, anyway. It happened on a Saturday night, and the floor staff was in the weeds, so he refused to go to the hospital, opting instead for an oversized bandage from the first aid kit, held on with duct tape.
“I don’t even want to know how much blood I lost that night.”
“Do you know what my insides looked like after Logan was born?” Marie demanded. Logan was her oldest. He’d come out of her as easily as a suitcase, ramming his way through her pelvis with a head like a bloody cannonball. The next two slipped out as clean and quick as silverfish. She said it was because her first had paved the way, as if her reproductive apparatus were a highway that’d been blasted through a cliff.
He was indignant. “I never said having kids was easy. It’s hard, I know! Terry was in labour for three whole days, she told me. The father had already fucked off by that point, too. Three days, all on her own. Can you imagine?”
“That’s what women have had to do forever.”
“Okay, but is that my fault?”
He got more sympathy from Charlene, the day waitress. She had the knack, he noticed, for taking care of her duties and seeing to whatever random customer was in the place while still looking engaged in the conversation. It was, frankly, a skill that some of his other staffers could’ve stood to work a little harder in developing. As Charlene listened to him, she would wipe silverware that had come back from the kitchen lightly braised with dirty water.
“I don’t know if it was her kid or if it was her or me, or if it was all just bad timing,” he told her. “It never seemed to gel, you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“What really sucks is that now the girl is going to be wondering where I am.”
He knew this wasn’t true: if Terry’s daughter did wonder about him, it was only out of a worry he might show up in her life again. He wasn’t missing her, that’s for certain.
“It must be awful to be a kid in that situation,” he added. “I worry about her a bit. I hope she’s okay with everything. Sorry to be dumping this all on you.”
She told him it was okay, she was used to it. People always told her personal things.
“Obviously, I’ve had things where I just was in it for whatever, for fun, and didn’t really try,” Jeremy said. “I’m being totally honest here: I’ve been a shithead in my day. And I’ve been in things where I’ve been a total nice guy and she was the shithead. Or we were both shitheads. But with this, I don’t know. I thought this one was it.”
“It’s cool that you tried, though. It sucks that it didn’t work, but that just means maybe she wasn’t the right person.”
“But you never know until it’s too late, do you? You never really know if someone’s right or wrong until you’re deep in there and it all goes to shit.”
She said he was being too negative. He agreed, and was happy to be called on it.
“I’m usually the one telling people that. You’d make a good social worker.”
“MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHO YOU KNOW IS WHO KNOWS YOU.”
– The Winning Heart, Theo Hendra
Charlene occasionally stayed for dinner after her shift, and Jeremy would offer her a couple of drinks on the house. A reward, he said, for making it through the day, though most days were quiet, with only the slightest hint of a lunch rush – a lunch crawl, he called it – and few tips to be had. He rarely even scheduled a dishwasher. He sat with her while she ate. The other staff gave her sympathetic looks, but she didn’t mind. It wasn’t like she had better ways to spend her time. When Kyle, her husband, had to study for one of his veterinarian courses, he took over the entire living room, a
nd usually the kitchen, too, so she would get into bed and watch TV or read the whole night. Or else she just lay there saying, “You motherfucker, you fat fucking motherfucker,” over and over and very softly to their cat, Woody.
Jeremy liked to talk about the plans he had for the Shack’s future.
“I want to nab the pharmacy next door and knock out the wall between us. Maybe make a little lounge over there, with couches and different music and that kind of thing.”
“Like a chill room,” she said.
“A what?”
“A chill room, like at a rave.”
“You weren’t into all that, were you?”
“When I was younger, a bit.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
She tried to explain. She’d only been to two or three raves in her life – maybe four, if she counted the one that got raided less than an hour after she arrived – but each one glowed pink and friendly in her memory. She remembered walking through parking lots with her friends, the pills they’d all taken kicking in and obliterating whatever dark mood had been squatting on her all week. She’d feel cleansed and full of light. The music came through the walls like the heartbeat of a dragon, and right away it was as if anything could happen: she could walk through the doors of the building and into the mass of moving bodies, and her body would crumble into glittering dust that floated around the dancers’ heads. Or she might grow, like Alice, until she was 50 feet tall and unable to get back out of the building. She kissed people she’d never met, boys and girls, and sweated through every layer of clothing she had on. On the dawn subway, bus, or taxi ride home, she and her friends huddled together like puppies and drifted in and out of sleep, and she would crawl into her bed without taking off her sweaty underwear. Her mother, annoyed with her for being out all night, would pick that exact moment to vacuum the apartment, and would make sure to bang the nose of the howling machine against Charlene’s bedroom door over and over again.
All she could tell him was that the dancing was fun and she liked a lot of the music.
“Well, I’m not planning on building a chill room,” Jeremy said. “But it’ll be something. Anyway, that’s just one idea. I have all kinds of plans in my head. Just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Charlene said. “To change things, I mean. If it was already working okay. I’d be afraid of wrecking something.”
Jeremy was adamant that when he did finally expand the Shack, he would be smart about it. He’d worked at places that had tried too soon. Or too late. Or in all the wrong ways.
“That’s the whole trick,” he said. “Knowing when to make your move.”
He asked her if Kyle had gone to raves with her, which made her laugh so hard she felt white wine shunt up into her sinuses. He held out a napkin while she coughed.
* * *
Jeremy had to be careful when it came to Charlene’s husband. Kyle was the kind of person who gave too much weight to every little thing. It was impossible to joke around with him – he would demand that you back everything up with hard evidence, or clarify a position that you’d only taken for the sake of conversation or for the hell of it. What did you mean by that? Where did you hear it? Were you making a joke? He would stare at people’s mouths while they spoke as if studying them for clues. He was fundamentally incapable of shooting the shit.
Kyle didn’t know when to let things go. He got into stupid fights with people. He’d almost lost his job when the head of the animal shelter tried to shift some of his duties around. Kyle raised a stink about it, and was sent home for the afternoon. He later admitted to Charlene that he didn’t mind doing different work, he just wanted it acknowledged that he was voluntarily agreeing to the changes, and was under no obligation to do so. She screamed in frustration. His nickname at work was Stalin, because of the fat biography of the Soviet leader he was often seen reading during his first year there. At home, they were stuck in a drawn-out, low-level war with their downstairs neighbours that had begun when Kyle demanded they quit parking their car so that it blocked the rusted Honda Civic behind the building. The Civic, which belonged to Kyle’s mother, almost never got driven – as the neighbours pointed out, it had a grey coat of dust on it and was often feathered with dead leaves or snow – but he banged on the door downstairs every time he came home to find the laneway plugged by their plum-coloured minivan. That led to fights about the recycling bins, about bicycles in the hallway, about mail placement, about the use of the laundry room in the basement. Charlene, desperate to escape the hate coming up through the floor, begged Kyle to let them move, but he insisted they were in the right, so they stayed put. If anyone ought to leave, it was those assholes downstairs.
Jeremy had encountered all kinds of people like that in his day: guys who would fight it out over a dollar extra on their bill, who treated any mistake in their order as proof of contempt or total incompetence. It was almost always easier to just smile, comp the bill, get the pricks out of the place as quickly as possible, and hope they had a brain aneurysm on the drive home.
It was hard with Kyle, because you never knew what he might latch on to. The most innocent joke would ignite a long, tense argument. One summer the parking lot in front of the Shack was getting repaved. Jeremy had been assured the whole job would be done in a couple of weeks, but after a promising start, the work site began to resemble an elaborate funeral, with everyone moving slowly as if struck down by grief. Jeremy would watch them through the window of the bar, grinding his teeth in frustration. He was watching this slow spectacle when Kyle dropped Charlene off before her shift. It was pouring rain, and they were both soaked.
“You two look like drowned rats. Grab some of the clean bar towels. There’s coffee – I just made it.”
Charlene pulled off her raincoat and groaned at the sight of herself in the mirror.
“I look like such a man when my hair’s wet.”
As she struggled, Jeremy watched her with a benign smile, like a father watching his daughter walk down the aisle. “You look fine,” he said quietly. Kyle stood just inside the doorway, dripping. He accepted the mug of hot coffee Charlene brought him, but did not thank her – or Jeremy, for that matter.
“Check this out,” Jeremy said, nodding toward the men in hard hats standing under a tarp. “It’s like they’re afraid they’re going to melt, the poor babies.”
“You’re obsessed with them,” Charlene said. “Just don’t look.”
“There’s probably not much they can do when it’s this wet, is there?” Kyle asked.
“In China, they can throw a highway together in a month. A whole highway, with overpasses and underpasses and all the rest of it. For fuck’s sake, there are army engineers who can build a bridge over a flooded river in less than an hour. These guys are just dog fuckers.”
“Why don’t you go ask what’s going on?”
Jeremy gave a snort. “They’d use that as an excuse for taking twice as long.”
“I don’t understand, though. If you’re angry at them . . .”
“I’m not angry!” Jeremy protested, still smiling. “It just pisses me off to see them waste all this time.”
“Kyle, it doesn’t matter.” There was a note of warning in Charlene’s voice. She could sense her husband was getting his teeth into something.
“They’ll be here for another week, I know it.”
“Well, how long was it supposed to take?”
“Who knows? However long they feel like taking.”
“You could ask them. Ask the foreman or whoever it is.”
“Getting a straight answer from these guys? I might as well talk to the chair.”
“Well, look: if you’re not even going to talk to them . . .”
“Kyle . . .” Charlene said.
He turned on her: “He’s the one who is so mad about it,”
he said. “I’m just saying it doesn’t make sense to stand here and get angry if you’re not going to even go out and ask what’s going on.”
Jeremy put his hands up in surrender and smiled. “You know what? Charlene’s right: I shouldn’t even be looking. It just makes me crazy. I know it will, so I shouldn’t do it.”
Charlene told Jeremy how long she and Kyle had been together, and it nearly made him dizzy, the idea of two people being in each other’s pockets all that time.
“He lived right near me when I was in kindergarten, actually,” she said, “though I don’t really remember ever talking to him until we were in high school. I went out with this guy Matthew in Grade 11, my first real boyfriend, who was a friend of Kyle’s and a complete asshole. He treated me like shit.”
“What would he do? Give me an example. Or don’t, if it’s too personal.”
“Oh God.” She pretended to think about it. There were lots of things, and none of them had ever lost their power in her memory, or their sting. “He would forget to pick me up, and I’d be stuck at home all night. He’d say sorry, and I’d have to pretend it wasn’t a big deal.”
“That just means he was a teenage boy.”
“He sometimes drove really fast, just to scare me. I’d be crying, and he still wouldn’t stop. Racing along with me screaming.”
Congratulations On Everything Page 4
