Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “Is there anywhere I can quickly check my email? I’m not getting a signal on my phone.” He made her sit down in one of the Muskoka chairs by the firepit and brought her a glass of the sparkling wine he had chilling in the refrigerator.

  “Check out these crazy trees.” He put his arms around a fat trunk right next to the cottage. “How old do you think this sucker is? I’m guessing a hundred years at least.”

  She drank half the glass in one gulp.

  “It’s really nice. What’s the nearest town to here?”

  “One night,” he told Glenn and Phil when he got back. “We drive all the way out there, I have all this food and wine, and she stays one night. She didn’t even stay for breakfast – took off the second she woke up.”

  Phil looked sympathetic, at least until he could no longer resist Glenn’s laughter.

  Carla’s boss had called, of course, while they were walking along the road above the cottage.

  “Don’t answer it,” Jeremy had said. He was in the middle of pointing out where he’d seen a real, live fox run past the last time he’d been up there. “You’re allowed to go on vacation.”

  “It might be an emergency.”

  When she got off the phone, she said she needed to go back first thing in the morning. Jeremy protested, trying his best to sound reasonable, but felt like flinging her phone into the lake. The cottage was full of quickly fading possibilities – they could get drunk and go for a midnight swim. They could have sex on the dock. Chances at happiness didn’t come along all the time; throwing away the opportunity to have some fun seemed almost criminal. She didn’t eat much of the dinner he made for her. They had sex, though not on the dock, and she was distracted throughout, as if withholding the most intimate part of herself for someone else. When he finally came, which he hadn’t even been sure he’d be able to do, she didn’t seem to notice, and looked momentarily puzzled when he rolled over next to her, as if he had just appeared there.

  “Did you . . . ?” he asked her.

  She didn’t answer, and he didn’t ask again.

  After she left, Jeremy decided to stay another day. He swam, napped in the Muskoka chairs, then cooked the lamb he’d bought especially for that evening. As it sizzled, he debated driving into town and asking the young woman who worked at the little butcher shop to come join him for the evening. He could serve her the very lamb she’d cut and weighed for him, then show her around the property and then walk her down to the dock, where they’d sit and talk about her life in the butcher shop, and his life in Toronto and at the Shack. He would make her look at the night sky – truly look at it.

  Instead, he went for a swim, and as he tread water a few dozen feet out from the dock, a young couple appeared around the bend on a pair of floating water bicycles that moved over the surface of the lake slowly and silently. Jeremy submerged himself up to his eyes, like a crocodile, and watched them go by. The couple was not talking. They moved forward with slight, identical smiles on their faces, peddling their way to a bright new future on the other side. Jeremy felt as though he’d been visited by a pair of shy deer.

  * * *

  Whenever Jeremy spoke about the cottage in the bar, Patty would make a point of telling him how she and her husband used to rent a wonderful little place owned by one of her husband’s co-workers. It was a small one-bedroom cabin in a little cove that was buggy and humid and didn’t get a lot of sun, but they loved it. Shortly before Shawn retired, the co-worker died of cancer, and the wife, spurred on by her adult children, chose to sell the property for an astronomical amount of money. Patty knew she had no claim on the place, but she would have liked the chance to go there one last time, even just for the day, to say goodbye to a spot that had meant so much to them both.

  “We tried staying in other ones, but those rental places – some of them, you might as well be sleeping in a tent by the highway. There’s no privacy, and you get all kinds showing up. The last time we tried it, we had to pack our things and leave in the middle of the night because of the parties going on. Shawn nearly called the police. It broke my heart.”

  She sometimes remembered new things about the place they used to go to: how her husband had fallen asleep reading the paper in a chair by the edge of the water, and woke up with a turtle the size of a Frisbee right at his feet. Or how they’d opened the door one morning to find an old fox sitting and staring, just a few steps away. They threw it a burger patty that had fallen in the sand the night before, not knowing what else to give it, and it took the offering and tiptoed away on its soft paws. Or how they had sat at the fire eating fresh raspberries from a farmer’s roadside stall, throwing the mushy ones into the woods; the following year, there were baby raspberry bushes growing along the edge of the trees. Shawn, who cared nothing about gardening, had been especially impressed by that one, by how their mere presence had so effortlessly altered the landscape.

  Eventually, Jeremy told Patty that his cottage was hers whenever she wanted it; she just had to give him a little notice and maybe fill the propane tank when they were done. She nearly cried right there in the middle of the bar. Shawn came over to thank him the next time he picked her up after work.

  “This really means a lot. Pat’s been wanting to get out of town for a while. She’s probably told you about the place we used to go to.”

  “She did.”

  Shawn told him all about it again, anyway.

  “Your spot sounds just as good,” he said. “So thanks.”

  “It’s nothing. Make sure you get in there swimming.”

  The older man put his hands in his pockets as if rooting himself in place.

  “I’ll tell you something, Jeremy: I haven’t been in past my knees since I was a kid. You know what? My favourite thing is just sitting in my backyard with a newspaper and a beer. That’s all the vacation I need. But Pat loves going, so that’s that.”

  “I bet she can be pretty hard to say no to sometimes.”

  Shawn considered the idea for so long that Jeremy wondered if he ought to make clear he’d only been joking.

  “We both like to get our way.”

  “Well, I hope the weather stays good for you,” he said. “Try not to think about all of us stuck here working.”

  “You know what, Jeremy? And I know you’re not supposed to say this, but I don’t miss working. I really don’t. I put in a lot of hours, and a lot of days, and a lot of years. I worked a lot of hours that I will never get back. So you know what? I don’t mind this.”

  Patty and Shawn always left the cottage in an immaculate state – even the dragons got wiped down. And there was always a note from Patty on the fridge door telling him how much the weekend meant to them, and letting him know there was a gift for him in the bottom of the closet. Under a folded beach towel he’d find a bottle of some expensive wine, which he’d open right away and have with his dinner. Afterward, he would drift off in one of the chairs while the firepit glowed and clicked just beyond his feet, and the first thing he’d see when he opened his eyes a few hours later was a bat crossing the sky above him, as fast and slippery as if it were greased, or the moon, looking as though it had been watching over him while he slept. He tried to think when he had ever in his life felt so relaxed, and could not. He had done the work, he had built his success with sharp eyes, a willing mind, and an open heart, and at long last he was being rewarded. The deer had dropped dead at his feet, the fish had leapt into his boat. He was sleeping in the golden bowl of his trophy.

  * * *

  As expected, the bookkeeper made a fuss when Jeremy let slip that he’d bought the cottage – or rather, that the Shack had bought it, since that was the only way he could afford it. “It only looks bad now because the place is still new,” he said. “Have you ever seen a snake swallowing a rabbit? The snake lies there with this big rabbit-shaped lump in its body. After a while, the lump goes away and the poor thing gets digested
. We just have to wait it out.”

  She said she was worried the snake might choke on the rabbit before he had a chance to digest it, which Jeremy thought was a very strange thing to say.

  “You haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “To be honest, I consider it a mental health expense.”

  There was one small thing: he asked her to conceal all the cottage expenses in the reports she made up each month for Stuart and Brian. Even if she had to fudge things a little, he didn’t want to have them all over him because of it.

  “What if they want to see the books?” she asked.

  They could cross that bridge when they came to it. For the moment, everything was going fine, that’s all they needed to know. He wanted to have things really humming before he told them – which he would do eventually, of course. Though he was unlikely to mention that the money he’d used was supposed to have gone to his parents.

  Did it matter? Did it matter that he had diverted the money? Sitting in his kitchen at home, or driving in the Jeep on the way to the Shack, he spun the question in his head, waiting for the answer to drop down like a bingo ball. Yes, the money had been earmarked for his mother and father, but it was money they had never asked for directly – at least had never asked him directly. And the way he had used it – to buy this lakeside cottage, this escape hatch, this glittering prize – would ultimately benefit them, too, once he told them, as he definitely would, as soon as he felt the information would be received in the open-hearted and generous manner in which it was given. That time would come, but for the moment, there were too many conflicting emotions and too much unnecessary tension twisted up in the issue. He needed all those green stems of conflict to yellow, wither, and snap, leaving things clean and clear again. That day would come. He wanted to help his parents down the hill to the place, wanted to surprise them with the lake, shock them with the dragons, and then leave them alone to drink in the sunshine and air and all the rest of it. They would thank him, he was sure of it. Everyone would.

  For the moment at least, things were going well. Stuart and Brian were pleased with some of the improvements he’d made to the Shack. Just in the past few months, he’d had the interior and exterior of the place repainted, taken out a few ads, and helped sponsor a neighbourhood charity run, all of which brought new people in. It also helped get the Shack included in a Toronto Life list of bars that were “off the beaten track,” and though he didn’t agree the patio was “vertigo-inducing,” or that the typical stereo selections were “a classic rock time capsule,” the write-up was mostly positive, and so he had it photocopied, laminated, and posted in the window.

  “I think we’re looking good,” Stuart told him. “We’re definitely headed in the right direction.”

  “We’re more than headed in the right direction – we’re starting to really cook here.”

  Brian said he’d heard from friends about the Toronto Life thing. They were interested in coming to check the place out. “And these are real food people,” he made clear.

  Jeremy could not hide his smile. “I may need to revise the wine list.”

  “Not a bad idea, actually,” Stuart said. “Get some higher-end bottles on there, bump everything else up a few dollars.”

  “Worth a try, sure.”

  “Could probably do something like that right across the board. Adjust the price points, maybe switch out some of the more budget items for things that are a little more special. It all helps with branding.”

  “As long as we’re smart about it and it’s not too much of a pain for the staff, I’m all for trying whatever.”

  “That’s a question, though,” Stuart said. “The whole staffing issue. Let’s say the kitchen – do you think they can handle a menu with a little more polish to it?”

  “It’s a big room, we’ve got all the equipment.”

  Brian gave Stuart a quick, meaningful look, and Jeremy had the feeling he was witnessing a routine that had been worked out in advance.

  “I meant more with the actual kitchen staff itself,” Stuart said. “They’re a solid bunch of guys for what we’re doing right now, but can they take it up a notch? Are they the right people going forward? I honestly don’t know. Your lunch guy, what’s his name? The Killer?”

  “Tyler,” Jeremy said. “Tyler is a bit of a pet project of mine. He’s a character, sure, but he’s not a creep, which is worth more than you think. I’m working on him – he’s a work-in-progress, let’s call it.”

  “Is that the best use of your time, though? Trying to get a lunch cook into shape? This isn’t an internship.”

  “Oh, I think Tyler will surprise you. Even some of the floor staff who were down on him at first have come around. He and Charlene work well together.”

  Stuart and Brian looked at each other again.

  “Well, the floor staff is a whole other question we should talk about some other time,” Stuart said.

  “I’ve got time right now.”

  Stuart looked uncomfortable, then became as direct as a lawyer laying out the grim facts to a client at the centre of a slim-hope case. The day shifts, he said, were an anchor, dragging everything else down. From his research, a lot of places lost money on lunches, or barely broke even, but kept doing them as a kind of loss leader, just to get people in the place and maybe convert them to nighttime customers. He wasn’t sure that was the best strategy to pursue.

  “I never expected the days to make a ton of cash,” Jeremy said. “But they’re not a total disaster, not anymore.”

  “I don’t know if not being a total disaster is really the standard we should be using to evaluate this kind of thing. We have to be realistic, and we can’t be sentimental.”

  “What am I being sentimental about?”

  “I’m just saying there might be emotions at play here that are confusing the issue a little.”

  “If you’re saying I care too much about my business, then guilty as charged.”

  “That’s good to hear – you have a perspective we don’t, and your passion for this place is what we’re counting on, frankly. But that’s not really what I meant.”

  Brian, unexpectedly, spoke up to say they’d heard about a possible romantic connection between Jeremy and Charlene. It had come up more than once.

  “This is absolutely none of our business,” Stuart said, jumping in. “We’re all adults, this has nothing to do with us – except insofar as it maybe makes it just a little harder for you to have a clear perspective about certain aspects of the business. No one is judging here, it’s just that we want to be sure you have the focus you need and the clarity you need. We would never make these decisions for you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. And I can tell you that I am more focused now than I have ever been. What the fuck – if there is anything that is going to be a distraction to me, it’s having meetings like this that don’t accomplish anything and just throw a lot of useless smoke in the air.” Stuart seemed about to object, but Jeremy continued. “Just a second, here,” he said. “Just so we’re clear here – and I have no secrets to hide, you can ask anyone: I’m not fucking my staff. I have a rule, and that rule is you don’t shit . . . well, it’s never the smart thing to do, put it that way. I’ve seen it mess things up right fucking good and completely throw a place off balance. I’m a little shocked that I have to even talk about this kind of bullshit, to be honest. Honestly: what the fuck.”

  Brian and Stuart looked suitably chastened, so Jeremy smiled and softened his tone.

  “Look: this is a bar, a bar full of overgrown children. I love them all, and I trust them all – mostly – but that’s the reality of it. All bars are the same – some are worse. The Shack is actually pretty good as far as these things go. But in the end, the people here are good at their jobs because they’re still kinda like kids. That works when the place is busting at the seams and everyone’s in the weeds. That’s when you
see some real action happening and that’s when it gets fun, but the downside is that you get a lot of stupid shit, too. And all the gossip and chatter, that’s the stupidest shit of all. There is always all kinds of stories going around, about everybody. You’re not used to hearing it, maybe, so here’s my advice: ignore it. You’ll just get sucked in so bad you’ll have no idea what’s really going on after a while.”

  “This is why you’re the boss,” Stuart said. “I think we had some legitimate concerns there, but I’m not even going to try to justify them, so let me just apologize. We screwed up and stepped in it.”

  “This is what happens. You have no idea the kinds of things I hear in a week. If I believed even half of it, I’d have to close the place down. And anyways,” he continued, in a lower voice, “I think if I was going to bang a waitress, I would probably pick one without a ring on her finger.”

  The other two men chuckled, and finished their drinks. Brian went outside to answer a call while Stuart put his coat on.

  “Hey, Jeremy – I was trying to get in touch last week, but your phone wasn’t picking up. I called here and talked to someone who said you were out of town. You on vacation?”

  Jeremy laughed and said he had no time for vacations. He must’ve had his phone off, or else the battery died. It hap­pened. In reality, he’d spent most of the day in the middle of the lake with one of his cottage neighbours, who’d wanted to show him some of the best fishing spots. He had stashed his phone in a drawer in the cottage kitchen, and when he got back, burned and happy and more than a little drunk, he had left it there, untouched. There was nothing it could tell him that he needed to know right away.