Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “What do you mean? What’s your worst?”

  “You don’t even want to know.”

  They toasted his birthday, and then hers, which had happened a few months earlier. Then they toasted Glenn’s and Phil’s birthdays. Jeremy asked her what she had done for her own birthday, and she told him she and Kyle had simply stayed home and watched a seemingly endless movie about an ordinary kid growing up in small-town America. Or rather, she watched a movie about an ordinary kid growing up in small-town America, while he read about Mikhail Gorbachev on the couch next to her.

  “That’s pretty sad,” Jeremy said, then apologized.

  “No, it was pretty sad,” she said. “I go back and forth between thinking you should still get birthdays as an adult and thinking maybe you should just forget about them.”

  He raised his glass and waited for her to do the same.

  “You know what my mother does on her birthday? She visits her parents’ graves. And some of her aunts and uncles. By herself.”

  “Oh, fun,” Charlene said, and then covered her mouth in shock. “I’m so sorry – that was mean.”

  “No, you’re right: it’s friggin grim. My dad won’t go with her for that exact reason.”

  Having established a baseline for depressing birthdays, they began to goad each other into having a good time. Jeremy made the bartender line up shots in front of them – two each, plus one for the bartender – which they threw down without a hitch.

  “Glasnost,” he said, by way of a toast.

  “What does that mean? Oh, right – don’t remind me.”

  She told him about how she’d gone out with a bunch of friends a few weeks earlier to celebrate someone else’s birthday, and while they were out, the birthday girl announced she was engaged.

  “And you didn’t come to the Shack? It’s not like we need the business or anything.”

  “I didn’t pick the place, and it wasn’t fun.”

  The weird thing, she said, was that for years they’d all suspected this particular friend of being a lesbian, and either not ready to admit it, or not aware of it herself. And the guy was a real guy-guy, too, with a beer league hockey team, action movies on Blu-Ray, and everything. While everyone made a fuss, Charlene had turned to whoever was sitting next to her and asked, a lot louder than she’d intended: “You think he knows she’s a dyke?” That stopped the celebration cold. It was as though she’d hiked up her dress and peed on the floor. She had to leave quickly, but was so drunk she almost ended up going out the back, through the kitchen. She didn’t even remember getting home – some of her clothes were on the landing outside their door the next morning. None of her friends had spoken to her since, and they weren’t answering her texts.

  Jeremy could barely speak, he was laughing so hard. “What the hell, girl . . .”

  She sat up straight in her stool. “Part of me doesn’t care, to be honest. Kyle was mad at me for getting so drunk and for embarrassing myself, but whatever. Fuck off.” She swayed back in her chair to emphasize her dismissal, and almost fell off.

  “Kyle doesn’t ever have a few too many?”

  “The last time I saw him really drunk – really, really drunk – was maybe two or three years ago.” The two of them were at the wedding reception of one of his high school friends, someone he rarely saw anymore. He hadn’t wanted to go, but she’d convinced him that it would’ve been rude not to. The reception was at a fancy golf course, and Kyle had spent the entire time refilling his wine glass and muttering. During the speeches, which went on for over an hour, he made a point of loudly noting every cliché, at one point shouting out the punchline of a joke the father of the bride was struggling to tell. Charlene said she responded by getting horrifically drunk herself and turning the dance floor into a sweaty, spasmodic display of rhythmic aggression and clumsy simulated stripping. Had there been a vertical pole in the centre of the floor, she would’ve flung herself onto it and likely fractured a rib.

  Somehow, after the wedding, it was only her awful, drunken dancing that got remembered and ­commemorated on Facebook. No one ever mentioned his shouts and grumbling. She had to convince herself not to care.

  “Good for you – you can’t worry about that shit,” Jeremy said. “The minute you do, it’s over. Hard enough to keep focused on what you want to happen with your life. Worry about what someone else might think you should be doing? Fuck that. Seriously: fuck that.”

  “Fuck that,” she replied, and drank down another glass.

  “I think it’s amazing that anybody finds anybody. But then there’s those weird things, like that married couple who found each other in a picture of themselves as kids at Disneyland. She’s standing there with Mickey Mouse ears or whatever, and there he is in a stroller going by in the background. And they don’t actually meet for another 30 years. That blows my mind. It’s a million to one.”

  “That’s why Kyle thinks it’s not a big deal. He said it’s a million or a billion-to-one odds, and so the one time it actually happens, that’s the one time in a billion. It happened as many times as it was ever going to happen.”

  “So it doesn’t matter because it only happened once?”

  “Basically, that’s it. That’s what he told me.”

  “I completely disagree – I think that’s why it’s so crazy. That’s when you start thinking maybe there is some kind of fate or pattern to things. That’s when you start wondering if that was always going to happen, those two together.”

  “I disagree,” she said, putting her glass down hard for emphasis. Then she corrected herself: “I mean I agree, with you. I can’t even talk tonight. The only depressing thing about it is that if you think they were supposed to meet later and fall in love and all the rest of it, what about the billions of other people who were not together at Disneyland or wherever when they were five years old? What about the rest of us?”

  “We have to work it out on our own. Simple as that. If your boat doesn’t have an engine, you get out the paddles. If there aren’t any paddles, you fucking swim for it.”

  At closing time, he offered to drive her home. She stumbled getting into the Jeep, so he came around to help her and buckle her seatbelt. It was tough, because she was laughing the whole time he was trying to make the buckle connect, saying he was tickling her. Taylor Swift came on mid-song when he started the car, and they both sang along as loud as they could. After that came Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” which she admitted used to scare her as a little kid whenever it came on the radio – it always sounded as though something bad was about to happen. “But listen to that guy play,” Jeremy said, turning the dashboard into an electric piano.

  “It’s still scary!”

  A few minutes into the drive, Jeremy had to admit he could barely focus on the road, and pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store.

  “Is it okay if I put you in a taxi from here? I think I’m past my limit. In fact I know I am.”

  “That’s fine,” Charlene said, though she was busy scan­ning through radio stations for another fun song. She landed in the middle of someone singing “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen. It was her mother’s favourite version, though she couldn’t for the life of her name the singer. He sounded German. They sat behind the grocery store with the engine running, back with the abandoned shopping carts, until the song was over. Instead of announcing the name of the performer, the station went straight to a commercial for discount furniture.

  “Happy birthday,” she said.

  “Hope this year’s a little easier. No, fuck that: I’m lucky.”

  She looked at him, smiling. “I love that! I love hearing someone say they’re lucky.”

  “You are lucky, too, even though you never act like it. You’re young and smart and beautiful – that’s three things most people don’t even have one of.”

  “I feel old and stupid.”

&nb
sp; “You’re stupid if you really feel that way, because neither of those are true, and you know it.”

  Someone came out of the back of the building to smoke a cigarette. He stood framed by the glare of the lights inside and stared across to where the Jeep was sitting, though it wasn’t clear the car was even visible from that far away. As if they really meant to conceal themselves, neither of them spoke while the man was there. When he went back inside and slammed the door behind him, Jeremy said, “Anger issues.”

  Charlene thought again about the wedding she’d gone to with Kyle where he’d heckled the speeches and she had danced like an idiot. When they got home that night, she had locked herself in the bathroom, worried that she might throw up – other than the million glasses of white wine she’d downed, she had also done vodka shots with the maid of honour, whom she’d never met before. Kyle banged on the door and demanded to be let in: he assumed she was angry with him, which she was, though that wasn’t her primary reason for shutting herself in there. He banged again.

  “This is childish,” he shouted.

  She said she agreed, but made no move to open the door. The room was still spinning.

  The next bang was so loud it made her squeak involun­tarily, and it took her a moment to realize he had kicked the door this time. Actually kicked it. The absurdity of it made her laugh, and she told him he was acting crazy.

  “Downstairs they probably think you’re trying to rape me. This is so ridiculous.”

  She didn’t hear him retreat to the bedroom, where she found him after she finally felt well enough to open the door and come looking for him. He was standing beside their bed, his dress shirt messily untucked, his jacket and tie off. His face was dark and he was shivering with rage.

  “Don’t you ever say that again.”

  “Say what?”

  “You called me a rapist.”

  She guffawed without meaning to, and immediately regretted it: he picked up his phone from the side table and flung it hard to the floor. She apologized, and he eventually accepted, but they had not been to a wedding together since, though they’d both gone to a few on their own.

  Charlene pressed a button to silence the stereo in Jeremy’s car.

  “It’s kind of nice here,” she said, which made him laugh.

  “Those dumpsters are lovely, it’s true.”

  “I was supposed to be doing a ton of laundry tonight, so this is an improvement.”

  “I spent the night trying to cheer up Glenn and Phil.”

  She unbuckled herself, put her seat back, and closed her eyes, as if they were on a long drive. He wondered if she were planning to go to sleep right there in the car, but after a moment she spoke up. “Did you think Phil was going to die that time?” she asked.

  “There’s a cheerful question.”

  “Did you?”

  “I did, actually. It was a surprise, but not really a shock, put it that way.”

  The weird thing was, he said, after being so certain that Phil was going to die, it was almost harder to accept that he wasn’t – in his mind, he’d already started the process of dealing with the loss.

  Charlene opened her eyes and turned to him with a look of surprise. “Me, too! And I felt awful about it.”

  “You shouldn’t. Anybody can go at any time, as fucked up as that is.”

  “And it could still happen,” she said, closing her eyes and settling in the seat again.

  “Don’t say that. Christ, I don’t need him dropping dead in the bar.”

  He said one of his biggest worries was what a bummer it would have been in the Shack if Phil had not made it. “I don’t mean in terms of people not buying drinks or coming in, just that it would be a little less fun from now on. I didn’t want people feeling bad about it all the time. That sounds really shallow, but I mean it. People have enough to feel bad about.”

  “You’re always worried about everybody being happy.”

  “Not everybody, just people in the bar. And not even happy.” He tried to think of a better word, but couldn’t. “Theo Hendra has this thing about how, in a disaster or an emergency, you see two different kinds of people. One fucks off and does whatever they can to survive, fuck everyone else. The other one tries to save as many people as possible, even though they’d probably have a better chance of making it if they just tried to save themselves. You get zombies walking around everywhere, and some people will barricade themselves in a house until it’s all over, others will go out to fight them.”

  Charlene burst out laughing. “Oh my God, that’s ridiculous . . .”

  “It is a little,” Jeremy admitted. “I sort of think it’s true, though. You can see it anywhere you look.”

  “And you’re the type who’d rescue everybody?”

  “I’d try, at least.”

  She sat up, leaned over, and pretended to pin a medal on his chest and salute him. He laughed and let himself be teased, and was unprepared for the sudden feeling of her mouth against his. Her hands left his face, slid down his side and along his thigh, and stopped at his knee. The other got his ear in a delicate grip. He shifted over so he was closer, and put a hand on the back of her neck, the other on her hip, then quickly removed them both.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I don’t think I am.”

  By the time a late-night delivery truck honked at them to move the car a few minutes later, one of his hands was creeping under her dress and up her thigh. Jeremy waved at the driver and moved the Jeep to a far corner of the parking lot. When the taxi arrived, they both got in without any discussion and headed to Jeremy’s house.

  “ONLY BABIES ARE TRULY HELPLESS; THE REST OF US HAVE OPTIONS.”

  – Recharge Forward, Theo Hendra

  In the middle of everything, the Shack’s bookkeeper came to tell Jeremy that, for the first time ever, the bar might not be able to cover payroll. The accounts had dropped below the safety line, and she’d already used almost all of their credit to top things up over the past few months. He would not believe it at first; he was certain they were doing better. He’d been seeing weekend lineups again at the front door, just like when they’d first opened. And some of the lunches had been busy enough to require both Charlene and Patty on the floor. She showed him the spreadsheets she’d been working on, which he spent a long time reading over.

  “How did we not see this coming?”

  He was careful to say we, not you. Though he meant you.

  She pointed out there’d been a lot of unexpected expenditures lately, like the new chairs he’d bought for the bar without telling her. He hadn’t even tried to sell the old ones, but had given them away instead. Benny stacked nearly a dozen in the back of this truck, and Phil now had two with him in the basement of his sister’s house. The rest Jeremy dropped off at the Salvation Army.

  He had also – and this was likely a larger cause of the problem – quietly handed out raises to a few, select employ­ees. Tyler got one, though he hadn’t asked for it. A couple of the better bartenders got a bump up. He’d thought about giving one to Charlene, too, but decided against it – he worried a gesture like that might be taken the wrong way.

  “I knew it was going to be tight,” he told the bookkeeper, “but it was the right thing to do.”

  “Okay, but things like that need to be accounted for and planned for. You should’ve let me know.”

  “Would you have told me to go ahead?”

  “Probably not.”

  “There you go – I saved us a pointless conversation. Not having to listen to anyone else is one of the privileges of being the boss.”

  “You have to have something to be the boss of, though.”

  He felt the first prickles of a panic attack move across him in a slow wave.

  “I really don’t need to hear that kind of thing right now.”

 
“Could you maybe tell people not to cash their cheques right away?” she asked.

  He straightened up and put his hands flat on the table between them. “Whenever I hire someone,” he said, “I make them a promise. And that promise is this: I tell them that as long as they act like adults, show up on time, do their jobs, and don’t act like assholes and keep the fucking around to a bare minimum, I will not make their lives more miserable than I have to. And I will never, ever fuck them around on their paycheques. Once you start that, there’s no going back.”

  Jeremy had already burned through his own line of credit, and had remortgaged the house the year before. He called around to his suppliers: could they hang off on invoicing him, just for a couple of weeks? He told the kitchen to order only the absolute essentials, to use up the contents of the freezer before bringing in anything new. And if they had to shrink the menu for a bit, they would. He’d field the complaints. Whatever could be done to stretch things, they should do it. He asked Tyler if he could handle the kitchen alone during the day, dishes and all.

  “You can keep your raise either way – one has nothing to do with the other. Well, not nothing, obviously: I wouldn’t have given you that boost if I didn’t think you were capable of being a rock star when the time comes.”

  Tyler said he could do it.

  Jeremy told the bartenders to keep people on the house brands as much as possible, since the markup was so much better for those, and to cool it with the comp’d drinks.

  “I don’t really care if it’s someone’s birthday – let their friends buy the drinks. And if they have no friends, too bad. And speaking of friends, I want all of you bringing people in here. At least five each. Minimum. And don’t be going somewhere else to meet up with people. No more feeding the competition.”

  He thought seriously about letting Patty go, and spent an entire day working out how he’d do it – he knew that if he didn’t frame it just right, the disappointed look on her face would crush his will and he wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Or worse, he’d have to lay off Charlene instead, which would’ve been punishingly awkward. They hadn’t spoken much since the night of his birthday. Mostly she avoided him while she was working and went home immediately after her shifts. After a few failed attempts to talk things over with her, he started staying away from the bar for big chunks of the day, wandering the aisles at hardware stores and at Costco. One time when he was at Costco, he turned a corner and nearly walked into Kyle from behind. He had no idea the guy would ever be caught dead in that place, yet there he was, standing still in the centre of an aisle, staring down large buckets of black olives. Jeremy backed away as quietly as he could.