Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “Same thing: teenage boy. That’s like the dictionary definition.”

  “He wanted to do a threesome.”

  She said it quickly, getting it out before she could think twice. Jeremy’s eyes widened, and he lifted a finger in the air as if assigning her a point in the game of Bad Boyfriend Tennis.

  “How much wanted? Asked? Talked about? Brought someone along?”

  “Brought someone along. Without asking.”

  His finger went up again: another point.

  “And you were not into it.”

  “I hadn’t done a real onesome, yet – or a twosome. You know what I mean.”

  She took a big drink of her wine, as if the things she was telling him were nothing. Not even Kyle knew about that time Matthew brought Miranda Clapperton along. Black hair like oil. The first in their grade to get boobs. The first to go most of the way with a boy, then the first to go all the way. Miranda had probably done anal by the time Charlene finally winced her way through the loss of her virginity. So she felt outclassed, sitting in the back seat with a Coke bottle half-filled with stolen rye. The other two just stinking of booze.

  Jeremy asked if she’d gone through with it.

  “No. And he was pissed at me for a long time.”

  “So you dumped him.”

  She closed her eyes and flinched.

  “Oh no . . .” He started laughing. Her expression fell apart and she laughed, too.

  “Don’t say that! I thought we were going to be married someday – I told you I was pathetic. I think I thought I deserved it.”

  Jeremy shook his head, though the few girlfriends he’d managed to get in high school he’d treated like shit, too. For a while he’d hung around with a bunch of guys – mostly jocks who’d hit the ceiling on their athletic abilities at 16 or 17 – who treated girls like game pieces. And not even pieces for a sophisticated game like Risk or Monopoly, but something more brutal, like Hungry Hungry Hippos. That’s exactly what they were: hungry, hungry hippos. There was one guy who bragged about talking a girl into doing something the rest of them had only ever read about, something they’d always suspected was partly myth. It was never independently verified and the girl never said a word, but all the same they started calling him Mr. Brown.

  “Kyle asked me out after Matthew dumped me,” Charlene said. “I guess he had a crush on me the whole time. I was such a loser back then. I was miserable. Kyle was so sweet.”

  “I bet.” Jeremy couldn’t hide the slight curl of sarcasm.

  “He was!” she said. “He totally was – he is. He can be so super sweet, he just has a hard time doing the things people expect you to do. He always has to be going the other way.”

  “I can respect that.”

  Kyle, she said, didn’t like that she worked in a bar.

  “What’s wrong with working in a bar?”

  She tried to condense all the things Kyle had said to her about it into a single sentence, one that wouldn’t offend her boss. She couldn’t. “He just doesn’t like it,” she said. “He thinks I’m surrounded by old drunks all the time. I tell him it’s not like that, and he’s been in here before, so he knows it’s not like that, but whatever.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “He’s just being a little overprotective, that’s all.”

  “He thinks I should go back to school, and I know he’s right, but I just can’t make myself do it. What would I even go for at this point?”

  “You’re talking like your life is over. I’m older than you, and I’d go back to school in a second if there was something I wanted to go back for. ‘School is proof we’re an intelligent species, because it shows we know we’re not as smart as we like to think we are’ – that’s Theo Hendra, by the way. What are you interested in?”

  “What I should really do,” she said, “is go back to Grade 1, start over. I could be like a total cougar.”

  He thought about this. “Don’t be so hard on Kyle. He’s a good guy.”

  * * *

  Kyle sometimes said things to Charlene about Jeremy. About all the keys he carried around with him, about the self-help books he swore by. About how he clearly believed the bar was the most important thing in the world. A film crew once came to the area to shoot an episode of a cop show called Enforcement, and there’d been talk about them shooting some scenes at the Shack. For a week, Jeremy went on and on about it. He even promised staff and some of the regulars parts as extras. Ultimately, the crew packed up and went on to the next location without getting in touch, leaving Jeremy to denounce the entire television industry as being filled with liars and vultures. He refused on principle to watch the show when it finally aired, even after some of the regulars said they had spotted the Shack in the background of scenes ostensibly taking place in Baltimore.

  Or the time the mayor of Toronto came to the Shack for a business lunch with two other men. They sat in a booth – the mayor, a big guy, on the end – and Jeremy served them himself. He still had a photo from the occasion on the wall behind the bar: Jeremy and the mayor standing side by side, both smiling and giving the thumbs up. “He had the club sandwich special, drank two beers and a coffee, and paid with a hundred dollar bill,” Jeremy said when he showed people the photo. “I tried to tell him it was on the house, but one of his assistants gave me the cash after he left and wouldn’t take it back. I was going to frame it. He sat right there, the mayor of the entire city.”

  “Of the entire city,” Kyle said to Charlene, in a voice that was nothing like Jeremy’s.

  She told him he was being unfair. What Kyle didn’t get about Jeremy was that he was at least always trying to make things better. He always made an effort to keep people going, to brighten things up.

  “Like one of those clowns who perform for sick kids in hospitals,” Kyle suggested.

  That was really unfair. But she laughed, anyway.

  She could see how tired Jeremy was most of the time, how overburdened. She would never say it to his face, but he often looked as though he were about to collapse. He had dark smears beneath his eyes like smudged mascara. He sometimes disappeared into his office in the afternoon to take a nap, and would emerge an hour later looking even worse. But he rarely took it out on the staff or let his mood foul the air in the place. She had worked for people whose emotions were like unfixed pets, always being set free to torment the staff and cause havoc. Like Mr. Mathewson, the director of the library where she had worked weekends in school, whose wife was cheating on him with a cop, and who took it out on the volunteers. Or like Ron, the head counsellor at the camp where she’d worked for most of one summer. Ron got dumped by his girlfriend and spent most of the time in his cabin, filling it with heartache and pot smoke. The rest of the counsellors were forced to try and keep the place running. Charlene put together a disastrous overnight trip for the campers that resulted in a sprained ankle, two pairs of lost glasses, a few near-drownings, and something dangerously close to pre-teen gang rape. (She let the victim sleep in the counsellors’ cabin for the rest of the week; the young perpetrators got sent home, complaining the whole time that it was no big deal since they’d only used their fingers.)

  Jeremy, by contrast, seemed to Charlene to be carrying the whole bar uphill on his shoulders. He fought to keep everyone happy, to give everyone working there every­thing they needed. He remembered the smallest details: the birthdays tucked into the most miserable corners of the calendar, the ailing parents or pets, the vicious ex who was to be chased out the front doors on sight. The way he moved among the customers, doling out attention like soup, which Kyle found so pathetic and fraudulent – Jeremy lived for it. He could wade into a tableful of first-timers, or connect two strangers sitting at the bar and leave them chatting together happily. More than once, he had pointed out a couple whom he’d first introduced to each other, right there in the bar. In one case, the two were sitting, having a beer, and planning thei
r wedding.

  “One day their kids will be coming in here with fake ID. That’s the circle of life, right?”

  And yet, people had no trouble going after him. They did it behind his back, when he was out getting something for the bar, or on one of the rare nights when he would go home early. Or they did it openly, which was somehow worse, because he would laugh right along – sometimes genuinely, but Charlene could tell when he was only laughing to be a good sport, the joke having cut a little deep. One of the cooks, who was notorious for having had sex with his girlfriend in the walk-in fridge during a slow night, did an impression of Jeremy that consisted of tucking in his shirt, sticking out his gut, and slapping everybody on the back with one hand while spilling an imaginary drink with the other. He even nailed the stumbling walk. There’d been a plan to buy Jeremy vanity license plates that said MR HAPPY as a Christmas gift. They never went through with it. Charlene wished they’d had, just so he could’ve turned the tables on them: he would’ve put them on his car. Or else he would’ve nailed the plates up behind in the bar and pointed them out to everyone who came in for a beer, killing the joke with enthusiasm. She sometimes saw him walk around the bar, taking an obvious delight in the spread of tables and chairs, looking into every corner. He did the same behind the bar, staring at the draft taps and sinks with an expression on his face that was boyishly erotic. He was endlessly impressed by the shape of the Shack, by its twists and corners and hidden features. Every Monday morning, when the beer delivery arrived, Jeremy would walk out to meet the truck backing slowly across the lot, holding his hands up in the air and smiling, looking like a village chieftain greeting the white men on horses.

  “A LOT OF SMART PEOPLE SAY THERE IS NO WAY NOAH COULD HAVE BUILT THE ARK. BUT HE BUILT IT ANYWAY, AND HERE WE ARE.”

  – Big Ideas, Small Miracles, Theo Hendra

  The space that eventually became the Shack had originally been a Chinese restaurant, one in which an old couple served meals to a dozen or so senior citizens who didn’t care about the ethnicity of the food, just as long as it came with lots of sauce. Jeremy used to go there with his parents when he was a kid, and always got sick from stuffing himself with chicken balls. What he’d loved most were the red plaster dragons sitting on their haunches in the entranceway. He would stand in front of the dragons, which he was only slightly taller than, and try to stare them down. He always gave up with a shiver after less than a minute. By the time he came to scout the location, the dragons were chipped and fading, their ferociousness softened by age and neglect. He toyed with the idea of keeping them there, then decided they’d just attract drunken vandals and jokers. Plus he didn’t want anyone thinking the place was still Chinese.

  Converting the old restaurant took a lot longer than Jeremy had planned for, and almost longer than he could afford. The work was done mostly by a group of young guys who had dirt and grease rubbed right into their skin, as if they’d been dipped in dark oil. At lunchtime, they would all sit on the bare wooded floor, eating submarine sandwiches and drinking big jugs of Pepsi. Jeremy felt soft around these young men. Soft and vulnerable, as if they might at any moment decide to pick him up, carry him to the edge of the unfinished deck, and hurl him down into the ravine.

  When they were finally, miraculously, close to done, one of the guys told him he thought the place was turning out really well.

  “Honestly? When we first started, I was like, Whatever, buddy. Good luck. But now it looks really fucking nice.”

  The other guys agreed: Totally. Really nice.

  Jeremy, overwhelmed, had to look away.

  In charge of the whole operation was Benny, whom Jeremy knew from way back, and who had worked on his parents’ new house and on his sister’s house – though she said she would never hire him again after coming out of the bathroom from an afternoon shower wearing a towel to find him standing and grinning in the hallway, holding a beer from her fridge and getting a good long look at her. He had skin like beef jerky, with white scars all down his arms. He told stories about falling off roofs and through windows, being shocked by bad wiring, and getting hit square in the back with a sledgehammer. He was missing a thumbnail on his right hand, taken decades ago by a stack of cinder blocks that had shifted suddenly and caught his fingers. Another time, some idiot dropped a whole cup of nails on his head from about four stories up. Some of the nails had stuck out from his scalp like lightning rods.

  Before they did anything to the place, Jeremy and Benny had walked through it, worrying about the size of the kitchen, frowning at the state of the bathrooms. The fact that it had been a Chinese restaurant spurred Benny into long monologues about the fundamental dirtiness of Asians. As proof of his belief, Benny told Jeremy about a truck he’d bought from a Korean couple who owned a pet store: he spent an entire day pulling layer after layer of rotten, soggy cardboard out of the back of that thing, gagging the whole time. Just to top things off, the truck had the brass outline of a fish stuck to the back. He had left it there, thinking it had something to do with sport fishing, until someone finally told him it was a Jesus fish, the one people put on their cars to show they are born-again Christians. Soon as he heard that, he went out with a screwdriver and yanked the thing clean. “When Jesus starts advertising my business, I’ll start advertising his.”

  “That’s a good policy.”

  Jeremy indulged these rants because of the pile of cash he knew Benny had squirrelled away somewhere. There’d been a rough job, a long time ago, in a government building: Benny got hurt when a wall fell on him. He was offered a huge settlement, enough to let him sit on his ass for a few months while his body mended, and he took it. He spent two weeks on his couch watching TV and getting drunk, and then was right back at it, putting in furnaces and wheeling fridges up people’s driveways with only a slight limp and the occasional wince as evidence that anything had happened.

  Jeremy took Benny out for lunch while they were working on the Shack, away from all the sawdust and lumber. They grabbed a table in the corner of a noisy sports bar. He ordered a pitcher of beer, and they clinked glasses across the table. They talked about nothing for a while before Jeremy steered the conversation around to the Shack. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “You and me, we know how to watch and wait for the right moment. We see everyone else fucking up huge, and we learn from it.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “We’ve been around enough of these places to know: the biggest mistake people make is trying to do it all on the cheap. You’ve got to be ready to lose it for a while before you start making it.”

  “I don’t like losing it, that’s for sure.”

  “Me neither. I’d rather be making it. Cheers to that.”

  Jeremy came to the point: he had enough money to get to the starting line and beyond, but once things were up and running it was always smart to have some extra cash on hand in case things got a little rough while people were still finding the place.

  “You know how this shit works, how this business works. You know you can’t just drop your line through a hole in the ice and expect a fish to come jumping out right away.”

  “I’ve never gone ice fishing in my goddamned life.”

  “I mean like how you have to wait and be patient.”

  “The people who freeze their nuts off trying to catch one goddamn fish, they’re just asking for trouble. I seen trucks go right through the ice because some idiot didn’t know when it was time to friggin pack up and go home.”

  “I’m totally with you on that. You have to know when it’s time to get the fuck out of Dodge. What I’m talking about is this: what would you say to putting some money in the bar?”

  Benny frowned harder than he already was, as if he’d found within himself a vein of displeasure even more deep and rich than the one he normally worked.

  “What do you mean – put my money in your bar?”

  “More like: invest
your money in our bar. We can work out whatever terms work for you. I’m totally flexible on this. Think about it.”

  He put his glass down. “Don’t need to. Not interested.” He did the work, he got paid, and he went home, same as his guys. He would come in and buy a beer or two once the place was open, but that was as much money as he was willing to give. The stuff didn’t grow on trees, and he didn’t believe in handing over cash he wasn’t sure he was going to get back.

  “Obviously you’d get it back,” Jeremy said. “And more.”

  “Oh sure. Free money – all I gotta do is pay for it first. No thanks. No such thing as a free lunch.”

  When Jeremy pointed out, with a little more heat than he intended, that he’d just had one, Benny pulled out a $20 bill and laid it flat on the table.

  “I don’t like to owe anybody anything,”

  “Come on, I’m totally joking. Your money’s no good here.”

  “Then how come you’re after it?”

  Benny sulked quietly for a few minutes before taking another gulp of beer. Slowly, as if confessing a crime, he began to tell Jeremy about a friend he’d had when he was a lot younger, back when he was just out of school. The two of them made money by painting houses together – they were good at it. At the end of the day, they’d get a few big bags of potato chips, take them back to Benny’s little apartment, smear the chips with ketchup, and bake them in the oven. Sometimes they’d have a six of beer with it, and that was their dinner.

  “Not really following your point here, Benny.”

  “Point is, we invented ketchup chips – there was no such thing before. Swear to God, you can look it up. So this so-called friend of mine starts talking about selling them, and asks me to give him some money to set things up. He kept talking about us being millionaires, so I gave him half my paycheque, three or four months in a row. Anyways, he ends up fucking off with the money. So I don’t get involved in any of that nonsense anymore, thank you very much.”