Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  Jeremy reached out and lightly tapped the paper sitting between them. “Accept the offer. This one. Email Susan and say we’ll take it. Or I will tell her.”

  Stuart’s smile faltered. “You’re serious? Sorry, that’s . . . we haven’t really started, yet.”

  “Yes, we have. And we’re finishing. Say yes to this and get the money.”

  The lawyer stiffened, and sat up straight. He pointed at the paper. “This won’t cover what I’m owed. I was prepared to get a little burned on this, it’s the nature of the business, but I’m not losing it all just because you don’t feel like waiting.”

  “Okay then, get them to offer enough to cover whatever you need, then accept it. I don’t want a penny. Brian and Marie have their money back. My parents have their money back. Get these assholes to come up with enough so that you come out even, then pull the plug.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You want nothing.”

  Jeremy thought about it. “I want the bar,” he finally said.

  Stuart’s smile came back, more sad and indulgent. “I totally get it, Jeremy. Fuck, this has been a real pain in the ass for me, too, so I can’t even imagine what it’s been like for you. You built that place, and you gave it your best shot. And the last few months have been . . . It’s hard to let go.”

  “I just want the bar. I want to take it out before we hand it over.”

  “You mean the actual bar? The wood and everything?”

  “Exactly. I want it taken out.”

  “That kinda comes with the deal. They get everything inside the place.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “They’ll just tear it out to make space for more tables. They’ll put in a tiny stand-up bar, the exact same as in their millions of other locations. The one in the Shack is mine, I made it. I want to take it out of there before they can scrap it.”

  “I’ll see if they go for it. I’ll try. Is that it?”

  There was one more thing. Jeremy took a deep breath and made the request.

  * * *

  A day or two after the call from the OPP, Jeremy turned off the highway and onto the dirt road leading to his cottage, already feeling the dampness and cold in the tips of his fingers and his toes. He was half an hour early for the meeting with the officer. Here and there, he spotted ghostly kites of smoke hovering over hidden cabins in the trees. There were people around. A few dozen people on the lake were there all year. They had special tires on their trucks and ATVs in case the snow situation got really hairy. It was something Jeremy had once thought about doing: winterizing the cottage and spending the whole year out there, waking up to the sight of the lake frozen over and the sound of distant snowmobiles, testing the will of the Jeep on an unplowed road. He’d discussed the idea with Benny a few times, who only said that they’d probably have to dismantle the existing structure and build a new one from scratch.

  “Why can’t we do it with the old building?”

  “Same reason your first wife can’t fuck like your second: too old, no good.”

  Cresting the final hill before his cottage, Jeremy drove over the dull tip of an enormous boulder embedded in the ground in the middle of the road. The rain and run-off had exposed more of it than usual, which he noticed too late to steer around it. It gave the back bumper of the Jeep a final smack that almost sounded angry. He used to try and guess how big it was whenever he was out for a walk. No one he asked seemed to know. There was always talk of dynamiting it. Jeremy had once been a staunch dynamite supporter. Lately, however, he had changed his mind. The stone had likely been left there by retreating glaciers, dropped off as a parting gift by the same dying walls of ice that had scooped out the lake. He was taking the long view lately, about everything. He could look at anything now – a tree, a building, an old person – and he would see them as artifacts, with whole long stretches of time behind them, shaping them, forming them, harming them. As he walked down the path to the cottage, he didn’t see the broken glass and the beer cans, he saw a ridge of land shaped over centuries by water, wind, time, and weather.

  Taking the long view also made it easier to accept what had happened to the Chinese dragons: both had been reduced to sprays of broken plaster on either side of the front door, which was closed and sealed with yellow police tape. The dragons had only ever been temporary, artificial recreations of something ancient. Nothing fake lasted, no replicas endured. The missing dragons were a lesson in shattered plaster. He was hit with something that might’ve been grief when he saw the mess, but was able to choke it down. He had seen worse, and forgotten worse.

  He stepped carefully down to the water’s edge, using the dock – which he had dutifully remembered to pull out of the water before the freeze-up – as a handrail. There were more empty bottles on the ice near the shore, along with what looked like a used condom. With the toe of his boot, he broke the crusty edge of the ice that had been pushed up and out of the lake. As he did so, he worked his way through a mental inventory of everything that had been inside the cottage, trying to come up with anything that would be irreplaceable. There was nothing, except for the arrowhead stone, which he had left sitting on the TV. Chances were it had simply dropped to the floor, unnoticed, while the TV itself got smashed or stolen. That was the hope, anyway. He decided he ought to retrieve it before the officer arrived.

  Way out on the lake was a thin, grey hut. Someone was fishing.

  “THERE IS NO POWER IN THE WORLD GREATER THAN FORGIVENESS.”

  – Awesome Love, Awesome Life, Theo and Dominique Hendra

  Charlene stood outside the coffee shop, hidden from the view of anyone sitting inside, for as long as she could stand it. It was only when she began to worry about passersby thinking she might be in trouble or having some kind of episode that she finally stepped out from behind the corner. She had also recently hit that stage, one of the many she’d been warned about, in which standing still for extended periods of time made her feel as though someone were hooking heavier and heavier weights into the flesh behind her bellybutton. She sometimes felt as though she were collapsing inside, the way stars did in dramatic computer simulations of celestial death. She’d thought she would feel like she was pushing out, ready to pop, and though there were days when she felt stretched, dangerous, and vulnerable, it was mostly this black-hole sensation, an overabundance of gravity. And she really had to pee. Again.

  The windows of the shop reflected the brightness of the day. She couldn’t see inside, couldn’t make out the faces of any customers. She knew Kyle was in there, though. Not a chance he’d be late, even by one minute, and it was more than a quarter of an hour past the time they’d agreed to meet. It wasn’t intentional, though he would likely assume that. She told herself to let him assume whatever he wanted, to allow him that moment of judgment, of superiority. But it wasn’t true that she had intended to leave him waiting. It was tougher to get around now, and she still wasn’t used to having to allow for extra time.

  As she approached the doors, someone pushed through from inside carrying a cardboard tray that, strangely, only held one tall cup. She worried for a moment that it might be Kyle, but it was a man built like a cinder block. He held the door open for her with his free hand. She thanked him, but still put out her own hand to ensure the door stayed put. She’d had a few scares where people, thinking she was already clear and not bumbling along like a fat old lady, let go of the door too soon. She wasn’t used to being so protective of herself. She used to take stairs two at a time, not in haste but out of childish sloppiness and greed. Now she stepped down slowly, one at a time, aware of each measured drop and careful not to put her entire weight on the lower foot until she was sure it had landed square in the middle of the stair. She stood on escalators like a toddler treating the moving staircase like a ride and wanting to make it last. She let commuters run up or down past her. She was more aware of things in h
er immediate vicinity, the corners of tables and the hard handles of doors.

  Her doctor had commended her for her carefulness, but said it wasn’t entirely necessary: that wasn’t a jug of nitroglycerine she was carrying. Women in much more precarious circumstances had been managing this vulnerable period for thousands of years, and it usually worked out okay. He knew a few women who’d been in car accidents even further on than she was. There was one who’d been in an actual plane crash – not the fiery kind where two jets tackled each other in mid-air, but a still-scary situation where one of the landing gear buckled, sending the plane sparking and sliding along the runway. No harm done. Mother and baby were fine.

  None of that mattered to Charlene or helped to overcome her fears. She stayed vigilant. It had been weeks since she’d gotten up too quickly out of a chair and been hit with a storm of dizziness and faintness. She came up slowly and carefully each time now, like a diver avoiding the bends. Her body had become a project, a building site she was sworn to protect. Way up at the top of that body, her mind still watched herself do these things, take these extra cautions. She watched herself shuffle around like an old dog and wanted to laugh and throw herself into a pile of leaves. If she were ever genuinely tempted to do just that, however, the thought would be quickly overruled. She had a job to do, simple as that. And that was to not be so stupid. Not like she had been for so long.

  Kyle was sitting in a corner at a table against the wall with a coffee in front of him and a plate with a tiny Danish in front of the empty seat. He was on his phone typing something fast, but didn’t seem angry. He smiled like a relative at a funeral when he saw her and rose from his seat to greet her.

  “I just have to use the girls’ room, sorry,” she said, halting him as he moved toward her.

  The women’s washroom was at the other end of the room. It was the kind with a lock on the door and room for just one person at a time, which she was thankful for. She hated dashing into a stall to the indulgent smiles of women checking their hair and reapplying lipstick. There was an overhead fan making a lot of noise, which made her feel even more safe and comfortable.

  Had Kyle really been about to hug her? After everything? Would he want to come into contact with the literally growing evidence of her total departure from his life? She doubted it, but the only other explanation was that he was getting ready to kick her in the stomach, which she doubted even more. So it must’ve been a hug. She’d heard, through mutual friends, the ones who were still talking to her, that he’d been in some kind of therapy, something he’d had to be talked into at first, but which he had apparently embraced with single-minded fervor, as if eager to prove he was not afraid of it, and was genuinely willing to change, if necessary. He looked as though he’d gained weight, though that might’ve been an illusion created in part by the thick beard he now sported. It made her smile: Kyle had always resisted facial hair. Even slightly shaggy sideburns were hateful. She wondered if he had a girlfriend who was telling him to grow it. There was an expected pang at the thought of it, but she still hoped it were true. For one thing, it would make talking to him so much easier if he were truly moving on with someone else.

  When she unfriended him on Facebook, he sent her a text demanding to know why, and accusing her of doing so as part of her efforts to make him feel as low as possible. So she deleted her Facebook account entirely, which was no loss: she could not effectively curate the visible evidence of her life. For so long she’d had no status to provide an update for, and now that she did, she had no interest in sharing it, in putting it out to be loudly approved of or silently criticized. She got enough of that in real life. Her last two posts, eight months apart, had been: “Rainy day – what happened to the sun?” which a few friends had liked and commented on, and then simply “Ugh,” which only her mother commented on, asking her if everything was okay. She never replied to Kyle’s text. She didn’t reply to any of his angry messages, only to strictly practical questions or requests. Had she spoken to a lawyer? Yes, she had; he would be in contact soon. Was she really planning to sign the document? Yes, she was. She didn’t bother asking him if he would, too – there was no way that he would not, even if everything inside him was against the idea. He would never let her get ahead of him like that.

  It had been nearly two years since they’d even seen each other face to face. That was a disaster, the memory of which prompted her to let out a small groan that was covered up by the bathroom fan. People had been urging her to do it, to not let the lawyers take over where it had once been just the two of them, two humans. Even her mother, who had spent those first few months in a heightened state of confusion – smug that she had seen through to the unworkable nature of the relationship, yet scornful of her daughter for finding herself in the middle of this mess – had come around to the idea that Charlene owed Kyle an explanation. She told her that if Kyle wanted to meet, away from lawyers or anyone else, she would have to agree to it.

  “You said exactly the opposite before,” Charlene said.

  “Don’t try to make this about me – you can’t blame me for this.”

  No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t blame Kyle, either. The whole process was pointless, irrelevant, a waste of energy. She tried to convince Kyle of this at their first meeting. They met in a secluded corner of the park down the street from their apartment. His apartment. Meeting there had been his idea, and she had not said a word of protest, though she knew he had picked the spot so that strangers could not witness the two of them together. She felt like a co-conspirator. They were plotting the end of their marriage. It didn’t matter how this all happened, she told him. They should both focus on not making things harder and more painful than they already were. The damage was done, etc.

  He had not been ready to accept that kind of no-fault approach. In fact, the question of where the fault lay was the very one he’d been most interested in exploring, and he did so, at the top of his lungs, until she had no choice but to walk away from him, with tears falling all over the front of her coat. He stayed where he was and did not follow. Angry texts took over from his voice before she reached the park entrance.

  Since then, all of their communication had been done through the lawyers. And then, about a month ago, he had sent her a message, saying he’d heard the news. She ignored it for a day or two, and then he sent another, saying he was happy for her and hoped she was okay. It had been her idea to meet. She could meet him on whatever weekend day worked for him – she finally had her driver’s licence, she told him. Shocking, no? She was still working through the week, and always felt like shit at the end of the day and too tired to go anywhere. Once she finally got inside their place on a weekday evening, she would not budge. Their condo was on the eighth floor, and although there was an elevator, you had to walk up a half-flight of stairs to get to it. The building had been erected a half-century ago, before anyone gave a shit about pregnant ladies or people in wheelchairs. From the living room couch, she could see the CN Tower pointing brightly into the sky. Jesse liked to turn out the lights in the apartment whenever the tower was blinking red and blue. He called it the cheapest show in the city. They would sit there and stare at it until his little girl – who still couldn’t pronounce Charlene’s name properly and hadn’t worked out exactly how she fit into her and her dad’s life – began to complain about the dark.

  “I pee like a dog now – every 10 minutes,” Charlene said when she came back from the washroom. Kyle nodded. Lowering herself into the empty seat, she tried not to call attention to the state of herself, but it was impossible even for a non-pregnant person to get in and out of those hard chairs with any kind of grace or dignity.

  “You’re okay?”

  “I think so. I’m not sick all the time anymore, which is nice. My feet have been hurting more, and I have to sleep on my back now because of this ol’ thing.”

  She put a hand on her belly, then regretted doing so. She was being too ca
sual, as if she were talking to a friend from work. She wished she hadn’t mentioned anything about how she slept, too, as it would only serve to remind him that she wasn’t doing it alone.

  “Sorry, is that too much information? Bottom line is I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”

  “No problem.”

  It may have been partly an effect of the beard, which she found always made men’s faces seem more haggard and toughened, but it seemed there were dark lines under Kyle’s eyes. She wondered if he was sleeping properly. Having talked about her own sleep problems, she had a perfect segue to asking him about his, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had to admit: she didn’t want to think about who else might be in the bed with him, either. That realization reinforced the decision she’d made to accept whatever anger he was planning to throw at her. Not accept, that was too passive: she would simply not try and match it. She didn’t want to have come all that way, only to end up screaming across a Tim Hortons table. He was wearing what looked like a new shirt, buttoned right to the top. She decided that was a sign of hope: if he’d been planning to let fly the full force of his righteous anger and hurt, he likely wouldn’t have gotten dressed up. Unless he was working right after their meeting. Maybe she was going to get yelled at, anyway. Maybe there was simply no way to avoid it. She’d just have to sit there and wait until the fire died down inside him a little.

  “How’s Woody?”

  “He’s okay. Older.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t take him – his daughter is super-allergic to cats.”

  “Whose daughter? Oh.”

  “I like that shirt, it looks good on you.”

  He looked down to see what he was wearing, and pinched lightly at the material.

  “This is for work,” he said, partly to deny ownership, and partly to dismiss her interest.