Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “Nazi whores.”

  She kept dancing in her seat.

  “Pretty much,” he muttered, then turned back to his argument.

  Another night, she came in after dinner and was still there when Jeremy was getting ready to go home, a little before closing time. As he was leaving, he went over to remind her she was on schedule for the next day, and to suggest she maybe call it a night. She was in the middle of trying to convince Phil of the fatal sexism of the Harry Potter books – something about how the girl wizard gets pushed aside all the time, despite being the only character who has her shit together. Though Phil seemed amenable, her voice kept getting louder and angrier, as if he were dismissing the idea outright. Jeremy put his hand on her shoulder in hopes of getting her to cool down a little.

  “Oh, fuck off,” she shouted at him.

  The bartender’s eyes went wide. Jeremy just smiled, shrugged, and walked away, too shocked to say more.

  The next morning, she called nearly an hour after she was supposed to have started her shift and left a message saying she would not be coming in, that she was sorry about the night before, and that she was done working at the Shack. He called her three times that day; she didn’t answer, except to send a text asking if he could drop her final paycheque in her mailbox.

  * * *

  The next time Jeremy’s birthday came around, he had to be reminded of it by Phil, who asked if they’d been doing their three-way thing with Glenn again.

  “Don’t call it that,” Jeremy said. “But sure, of course.”

  And so the three of them sat at the far corner of the bar, enjoying a bottle of expensive scotch that Jeremy brought up especially for the occasion. Even Glenn, who was normally reluctant to abandon beer, said it was a treat. He made a point of thanking Jeremy for the booze and for the free dinner he’d been treated to, as well.

  “I swear to God you’re getting mellower with age, buddy,” Jeremy said.

  “It happens.”

  “This is the first year that I haven’t been distracted by any of the female students in my classes,” Phil said.

  “That’s too mellow.”

  The three of them laughed like sad old gods.

  “SOMETIMES LIFE IS JUST TOO MUCH.”

  – Congratulations on Everything, Theo Hendra

  Right in the middle of interviewing new wait staff, Jeremy got a call telling him that Patty’s husband had died. It was a complete shock. It was also, as far as Jeremy was concerned, the absolute worst time for something like that to happen. Not that he blamed anyone: he made very clear, over and over, that he didn’t.

  “This is really sad. I feel terrible for Patty. What utterly shitty timing, though.”

  Worse, it had happened at the cottage. Patty and Shawn were there for a belated wedding anniversary, and on their very first night, when she came back from a short walk along the road – it was too cold for swimming – she found him dead on the ground, a few steps from the front door, roses scattered everywhere like blood. He still had two or three flowers in his hand. At first, she thought he’d tripped and banged his head against one of the dragons, but after the ambulance arrived and his body got swarmed by paramedics, it was quickly determined that he’d had a sudden and very severe heart attack, and was likely dead before he hit the ground. The paramedic who told her this was relatively inexperienced when it came to death, and thought the information would make her feel better.

  It was Patty’s sister Rebecca who called Jeremy with the news. She called again the next day to say that Patty was feeling bad about missing her shifts.

  “Tell her to not think about it for another second. How is she?”

  Rebecca let out a long sigh. “We’ll get through it. It’s all been such a shock. I know I won’t sleep tonight. I’ve been on my feet since I first got the call. You must be used to that, because of where you work, being on your feet all day, but not me.”

  She seemed to enjoy talking on the phone, even to a relative stranger, and told Jeremy about how her own husband had died over a decade earlier from a cold he’d picked up in Mexico that turned into pneumonia. He’d barely been sniffing on the flight home. Within two weeks, he was gone.

  “It feels like a thousand years ago now. Isn’t that strange? Something big like that, and now it’s so far off? I remember, though, that I had nobody helping me at all. I’m just glad I can be here for Patty so she doesn’t have to do what I did.”

  “Listen, tell Patty that if there’s anything I can do, that any of us can do . . .”

  “She’s sleeping right now,” she said tersely, as if Jeremy had demanded she go right away and shout the offer in her ear.

  Jeremy got the staff together at the end of the night to tell them what had happened. He made everyone put their drinks down and turn off their phones for a moment of silence. They all looked at the floor as they took in the news. The dishwasher kept asking people around him who Shawn was.

  “Losing someone you’ve spent your life with,” Jeremy said, “that’s just about the biggest boot to the balls there is.”

  Maybe because of the details about the wedding anniversary and the roses, the story of Shawn’s death got around. It made the local paper. People kept telling Jeremy they’d heard about it from someone else, with slightly different details. Some heard that he’d drowned, that he’d taken Patty out for a romantic canoe ride and gone over the side. His parents left a message, saying how awful they felt when they heard the news.

  Marie heard about it, too, and she called him at the bar.

  “Is that the Patty who was always very chatty?”

  “That’s her. We’re trying to give her some space right now.”

  “Brian says he heard it was at some kind of staff retreat. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “There’s a lot of nonsense flying around. I don’t even know why it’s such a big story, to be honest. Is there nothing else going on in people’s lives?”

  Stuart called to say his office would be sending flowers.

  “Is there anything else we need to do around this? Is the bar doing anything that I need to know about?”

  “Not that I know of. Not yet, anyway. We’ll probably have something here after the funeral, but I haven’t heard any details about that yet.”

  “Where did it happen? At a cabin somewhere?”

  “Something like that. I haven’t spoken to Patty yet. What an awful thing, though, eh?”

  Within a day or two, the truth about the cottage came out, and Jeremy started getting calls from Stuart, all of which he ignored. Having figured out that the place existed, Stuart quickly worked out how it had been paid for. The bookkeeper called him to say the lawyer had been on the phone with her for an hour, demanding that she send him, right away, the bar’s complete and authentic financial details, including all of the details concerning the purchase of the cottage, and that failure to do so would result in him putting in motion charges of professional fraud. As it was, he told her, she was fired, effective immediately.

  “We’ll see about that,” Jeremy said, though he knew there was not much he could do about it at that point. “He’s not the boss, whatever he thinks.”

  She was in tears, and barely able to speak, though she mustered enough anger to call Stuart a goddamned queer.

  Jeremy sighed. “Come on, now. There’s enough trouble going on here without you bringing more ugliness into it.”

  She began screaming at him over the phone, calling him a drunk and an asshole and suggesting he was probably a goddamned queer, too. With some relief over the fact that she had provided him with the perfect excuse for not trying to save her job, he hung up on her shouting voice.

  He got a few angry calls from his father, and ignored those, too. The voice mails gave him the gist: Gord wanted all of the money they had ever put into the bar returned to them immediately. All of it. H
e could hear his mother yelling in the background. He decided to wait a few days before calling back – he figured that once they’d calmed down a little, he could probably convince them to accept a part-ownership in the cottage, instead of cash. After all, land up there would ultimately be worth more in the end, and in the meantime, they’d have a place to go in the summer whenever they felt like it, free of charge. If he could just wait out their anger, he was sure he could work everything out so that everyone benefitted. There was no point in going into panic mode.

  Marie and Brian were trickier. His sister called him to demand the same thing: the immediate return of all the money that had been put into the bar. She knew he could not be trusted, she said. She knew it, and now Brian knew it, too.

  “I can’t believe you two were pulling this shit behind my back. I’m actually shaking. That money isn’t yours. This is theft, pure and simple.”

  If he did not return the money, she said, Stuart had already offered to buy out their share of the bar. In fact, she might just go ahead and let him do that – she honestly didn’t want to have anything to do with Jeremy for a while.

  “Oh, and by the way, we’re finally having someone come in – someone who actually knows what he’s doing – to fix some of the mess made by your good friend Benny, that pig.”

  She said she felt like making Jeremy pay for the work, too, since he’d been the one who recommended the dirty old creep in the first place.

  Right away, he sent her a series of texts saying that he was preparing an invoice for all of the free meals and free drinks she and her fucking husband had enjoyed at the bar, and for the wages of the floor staff who’d spent countless fucking hours scraping clean their tables after they’d been smeared and scratched by her fucking kids. They’d need to pay that before she could expect one penny from him. In addition, he wrote, since Brian clearly had the balls of a lamb, she probably should’ve gone ahead and fucked Benny when she had the chance. Might’ve been a learning experience.

  He could not think of single scenario where sending the messages made things better, but he felt happy for having done so.

  The first thing he did was go to the bank to talk to one of the account managers. They couldn’t quite understand what it was he was asking: he wanted to change, not the account, but the account number? Same details as before, just a new account, technically at least? “And only I have access to it,” he said. To him, it was as simple as switching the number on a door. The account manager didn’t see it that way, and brought in her manager, a short man who asked Jeremy to explain it all to him again.

  “Are you trying to hide the account?” the account manager’s manager asked. “This is a business account?”

  Not hide it, Jeremy explained. Just make it so only he had access again, just like it had been when he’d first opened the account. It wasn’t hiding if he’d done nothing wrong. The manager’s manager did not agree. And so Jeremy left, saying he’d be shutting down the account altogether, in that case – not right away, because he didn’t have the goddamned time, but soon.

  The next thing he did was send his mother an email with a photo of the cottage in the fall, surrounded by painted leaves and with the late sun hitting it like it’d been placed there by the photographer. At the very least, they’d have to acknowledge what a beautiful spot it was.

  “The rats are circling,” he told Glenn that night at the bar, and raised his glass.

  “They always are.”

  Jeremy bought Glenn a beer, then gave him a quick overview of some of the bar’s current business troubles, omitting the details about the money that had been intended for his parents and the fact that the cottage was in the Shack’s name. Then he came to the point: he needed people who knew and loved the place to come in with some support, and the first person he’d thought of was Glenn. They could work out the details in terms of partnerships or co-ownerships or whatever they chose to call it – these things were all just words, convenient labels – but the basic idea would be for Glenn to put a little skin in the game.

  “Think about it this way: you’ll drink for free here from now on.”

  Glenn said he liked that part, but there was no way he could do it. He was already having to tread water as hard as he could to keep his own business afloat, he wasn’t about to take on another one. Not to mention – and this was really the deciding factor – he’d discovered long ago that mixing business and pleasure was exactly as bad a plan as people always said.

  “You believe that?”

  “Some things are a cliché for a reason.”

  Jeremy said he understood, and told the bartender to give Glenn another beer on the house. Then he went back into the kitchen, and almost gave the dishwasher a heart attack by kicking a box of industrial detergent across the room, rupturing the jugs inside.

  * * *

  Patty appeared in the bar a few days later. Jeremy had to will himself not to react to the way she looked. She had lost weight, her skin sagged over her skeleton. She wore jeans and a black sweatshirt, and her face was devoid of make-up. Her hair was everywhere. As soon as she walked in, he got up from where he was sitting, going through overdue invoices. He gave her a long hug, directed her to a table, and brought her coffee and a glass of water.

  “I feel like all I do now is thank people,” she said. “There’s been so much going on, I can barely put two thoughts together. When I got in the car just now, it took me a moment to remember where everything was. Seat belt, steering wheel, gas pedal, brake, turn signal – okay, got it. Now how do I actually start the darned thing?”

  “I bet you drove like a champ.”

  “My sister wanted to drive me here herself. Actually, she didn’t want me to come at all, but I can’t sit at home anymore. I keep waking up in the morning and wondering where Shawn is. I’ll think, What’s he doing up so early? And then I remember, and I have to get up and out of the bed right away.”

  She sounded cheerful, as though she were only relating how she’d fared during a power outage. She looked undeniably older. It wasn’t just her hair or her skin: she seemed disconnected from the present. One eye was trained on some invisible past. Jeremy had watched this happen with his grandmother a decade earlier, just before she died. Eventually, both eyes became focused on the invisible, and it was almost impossible to talk to her. Then it was over.

  “I feel like I haven’t been here for months,” she said. “I miss this place! I really do. Has Charlene come back? I was hoping to see her.”

  “She pulled the cord for good, I think. She’ll be fine, though, whatever she does. I left her a message to tell her what happened.”

  “I worry about her.”

  “She’ll be fine. You worry about yourself.”

  Patty became frustrated, and sadness began to seep out through her face. “That’s all I’ve been doing, Jeremy!” She recovered quickly, and smiled at him. “I’m so sorry. You must think I’m such a mess. I should get going before I fall apart completely like some old crazy lady.”

  “Don’t even think about it. Seriously. To be honest, I should be the one apologizing.”

  “What for?”

  “Because . . . the cottage. The whole thing.”

  She slapped his hand. “Jeremy! Absolutely not! Letting us go out there was one of the nicest things anyone has done for us. We felt just wonderful whenever we went. My Shawn is about as good at relaxing as he is at speaking Chinese, but when he gets out there, he’s a different person. He bought me flowers – he never buys me flowers.”

  “I bet that’s not true.”

  “Oh, what was he thinking sneaking around in the dark getting roses? He must’ve hidden them in the car. I had no idea! You know what I was thinking the other day? I was thinking that I should’ve grabbed one of those roses – they all got trampled and left behind, the poor dears. If I’d only thought to grab one and take it with me. Just one. I cou
ld’ve put it in a vase at home.”

  “I’m imagining you riding in the ambulance, holding a rose.”

  “Oh, true. I would’ve looked completely bonkers.”

  Before she left, she insisted on ducking into the kitchen to say hello to Tyler. They found him chopping celery furiously enough to make them both recoil a little at the sight of the bright blade coming down so close to his bandaged hand. He stopped when he saw Patty, then disappeared into the back of the kitchen. When he returned, he was carrying a heavy uncooked lasagna in a glass casserole dish.

  “You just have to put it in the oven,” he said, and held it out for Patty, who broke down and was unable to speak. Jeremy took the dish and led her to the back door of the kitchen and around to the parking lot. By the time she got to the car, she had recovered, and asked him to thank Tyler for her, and to apologize for being so rude as to not do so herself.

  “He picks his moments, doesn’t he?” Jeremy said.

  “I feel so stupid.”

  “Then you’re in the right place.”

  “He must think I’ve gone crazy,” she said brightly as she wiped her eyes. “I think I have, too, almost. There’s been so much running around, so many people coming and going – I know this sounds wrong, but it’s almost like planning a wedding. Isn’t that crazy? It won’t be as expensive as one, at least.”

  She laughed, and Jeremy made himself laugh, too, though he began to wonder if finding her husband dead on the ground had cracked something inside her. He put the lasagna on the back seat of the car, and covered it with a jacket that was sitting there.

  “Listen, if you need any money, or if things get tight, just let me know. There were a few people here talking about raising some money to help you get through the next little while or pay for anything that comes up.”

  She shook her head. “Tell everyone thank you, but I would feel terrible taking money for something like this, especially when there’s the insurance. It’s worth quite a bit, apparently. That’s according to Rebecca, anyway. Knock on wood. My Shawn always made sure he had everything covered, and that I would be taken care of.”