Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “Well, I like it.”

  “Sure.”

  Aha, she thought: she was going to get yelled at, after all. Now that she knew, she could prepare herself. It’s not as though she’d left him with many other options. Throughout everything, he had merely been himself. He was damningly consistent. She, on the other hand, had brought in something new, had slashed at their life together in ways he couldn’t have predicted. She was the villain – not as much as some people would like to believe, and not to the extent that she ought to spend her life wracked with guilt, which she had no intention of doing, but a villain, all the same.

  “So, how long?”

  She was confused for a moment, thinking he wanted to know how long their meeting would last. She only clued in when his eyes dropped down to her belly.

  “Oh, three more months. More like two and a half. I’m at the point where I’m starting to wish I could get it over with.” Kyle made a puzzled and slightly shocked expression, which she quickly tried to counter: “To have it, I mean. To get over the finish line. At first, you don’t even think that you’re going to have to actually deliver this thing. You just get told it’s in there and growing, and everybody’s all happy about it. But then the truth starts to kick in: this is gonna hurt. Ha.”

  She was babbling. She made herself pry off a corner of the Danish on the plate in front of her and put it in her mouth. She hadn’t planned on eating anything, though she was starving.

  “Thanks,” she said through a mouth of crumbs.

  “Did you get my note about the books?”

  “I did, thanks. You can throw them all out, or recycle them. There’s only one I want: that picture book that was in the bedroom.”

  “Bunny Talk.”

  She smiled. It had been a gift from her father, sent to her for her third birthday. Her mother had always hated the sight of it, but its cloud-blue colours were an occasional reminder that her existence extended beyond whatever four walls she was penned in by at the moment. Lately, she’d been wondering if she were a shithead like her father, and had been all along: one of those leering foxes that pops its head up out of the bushes every time a chatty bunny gets curious about the darker parts of the woods.

  “That’s the one.”

  “It’s not in the bedroom, anymore.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  He touched the side of his coffee cup but didn’t pick it up, as if quietly checking off one order of business.

  “There’s also a box of your makeup and things like that. I put it all with the books.”

  “That’s okay, I don’t need any of it.” She didn’t have room for anything from her old life, anyway. She was living in an apartment with a man and a small child in it, and was determined not to infect it with the germs of her old life anymore than she had to.

  “There’s not a lot.”

  “Kyle, I really don’t need any of it. You can throw everything out. Honestly. I just want that one book. You can send it to my work – I’ll give you the address.”

  He went quiet. After a while, he said, “I guess you and Jeremy got most of it when you came over.”

  “Yes, we did. Whatever I could grab.” She was annoyed, and didn’t try to spare his feelings. The meeting could not become a hostage negotiation, because the hostages were already dead. She had made sure of it.

  Kyle stared at the table between them, seeming to memorize the whorls of the fake wood.

  “Have you seen Jeremy lately?”

  It wasn’t a question she was expecting. “No. Not in a long time. Have you?”

  The question came out before she could stop it. She’d only been trying to make conversation. She braced herself for a flash of anger, but instead he told her he had.

  “A few months ago. Someone from work was leaving, and the going-away party was at Crane’s. The one that had been . . .”

  “I know which one you mean.”

  Kyle seemed almost apologetic. “Right. Anyway, so we went there, and there was some problem with the reservation. We’d booked the private room they have there now, but another group was already in it. Jeremy came out and got us all to sit at the bar while he cleared the other group out.”

  “And he recognized you?”

  “Not at first, I guess because of the –” Kyle reached up and touched the tip of his beard, smiling guiltily like a little boy. “He did eventually, though. Because I saw him looking at me when we all went in. Honestly, I was thinking I might just go home. I got up at some point to use the washroom, and on my way back, he came up to me and said hi.”

  “He said hi.” Charlene had to stop herself from laughing. It was the craziest thing she’d ever heard. As if two warring gods, who’d been hurling stones and planets and fire bolts at each other throughout eternity, finally met in line at a movie. According to Kyle, Jeremy asked if everything was going alright with his group. Kyle said it was, and then Jeremy apologized for the mix-up. He said they had some new staff on the floor that night, and were operating in a state of barely controlled chaos.

  Charlene smiled: at the Shack, new staff members were inevitably the source of all trouble and problems, even when no such staff existed.

  That was it for most of the night, Kyle said. He went back to the going-away party. At the end of the night, when they were leaving, Jeremy was there by the door saying goodbye to everyone. When Kyle, who’d gone back to find his gloves and scarf, finally came out, Jeremy was standing there, waiting for him. He asked again if everything had gone alright with the party, and Kyle told him yes. Jeremy said he was glad, and told him to tell the rest of the group they were welcome back anytime.

  “You’re sure he recognized you?” It all sounded so strange.

  “He did. He asked me about you. I was getting my scarf on and he asked if I’d heard from you, and how you were doing.”

  Charlene’s breath started to come faster, and she felt a prickle of sweat break out on her back and on her neck.

  “What did you say?”

  Kyle looked at her, briefly regaining the upper hand he’d lost so utterly when he came home to their apartment that night to find most of her things gone, and the front door still ajar. She guessed that the door was probably the worst part for him: for a while he must have believed she’d left it like that to make clear how little she valued the things she was leaving behind, the life she was leaving behind. She didn’t care if anything got stolen. It was one of the things he accused her of when they had met in the park that time.

  She could see the sense of victory going out of him in an instant. “I said I hadn’t seen you for a long time, but that we’d emailed each other, and you sounded okay. Which was true.”

  “Okay.”

  “You haven’t talked to him at all?”

  “No. I figured he was mad at me. Everybody’s mad at me.”

  She looked at him, hoping he would smile.

  “I gave him your email address,” he said.

  “He already has it.”

  “He said he didn’t.”

  “He does.”

  She hadn’t replied to any of Jeremy’s emails. Many times, she had written a long message that tried to explain what had happened, why she had acted the way she did, why she had suddenly left, why she had lied to him. She deleted them all unsent. There were no explanations to be made.

  “I’ll send him a message,” she said. Kyle nodded, clearly not all that interested in what she planned to do with regard to that part of her life. For most of their meeting, he had kept himself open and had not locked up with anger – it was something he must have trained himself to do. He had mentioned in one of his messages that he was seeing someone new; learning to not lock up could very well have been one of the conditions of them continuing to see each other. But anger was like eczema: it would be with him forever. Seeing his ex-wife across the table from him, with
her enormous belly glowing sickly between them, was clearly too much.

  “So everything is good for you now?” he asked her. It sounded like an accusation.

  Charlene could tell what was happening; she could see the stoniness creeping into his face.

  “I’m a mess, but yeah, things are going okay.”

  “Well, that’s good. That’s great that things are okay for you.”

  “Kyle.”

  “They’re not okay for me, but thanks for asking.”

  “I’m sorry – how are you?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Sorry for not being interesting enough for you. I know it’s really boring to be around someone who goes to school and has a career and doesn’t cheat on people and doesn’t have kids with people and leave them.”

  “Please, Kyle. I really don’t want to fight. I can’t do this anymore.”

  He sat back in his chair. “Oh okay. My apologies. You’re going to be a mom, and so everything is forgiven.”

  “I’m not asking you to forgive me,” she said quietly.

  “Good, because I don’t.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t forgive you and I don’t care that you’re having a baby. I really don’t. I know the whole world’s supposed to be all happy for you, but I’m not. I think it’s the biggest cop-out in the world: you can’t get your shit together, so you go and get pregnant, and then you’re suddenly not responsible for anything anymore. You don’t have to figure anything out, because now it’s all about being the best mom in the world.”

  She put her head down. “I didn’t plan this.”

  “No, because you can’t plan anything. You can’t plan for shit. You worked in a bar because you can’t plan for shit.” Some of the people behind the counter were looking over, so he brought his voice down until he was almost hissing at her. “Don’t you see what a cop-out this is? You fuck me around, you fuck your boss around, but now I’m supposed to act like you’re a saint because you have a baby. As if that’s some big accomplishment. Am I supposed to congratulate you for getting knocked up? Oh, congratulations on doing the easiest thing in the world! Congratulations on solving all your problems by having a kid! Congratulations on being a total cliché! And I get to look like the asshole because I knew what I was doing and I took care of shit. And I never fucked around on you. Never. Not once.”

  “Stop it, Kyle. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Oh, fuck off – yes, you did. You wanted to hurt me and you did.”

  She knew right away that he was right. It wasn’t enough to get away from him, it wasn’t enough to break apart what they had built, as pathetic as it was. She had to crush him in the process. She’d wanted to humiliate him as revenge for how humiliated she had felt for so long. It didn’t even matter that it wasn’t his fault she felt that way – or not entirely his fault. She needed to cut him. Lying in her new bed, in her new home, in the middle of her new life, unable to sleep because of the new life shifting around painfully within her, she burned at the memory of having wished, more than once, that he had drowned in that lake.

  Kyle stood up, not looking at her, and put his coat on. He stood still for a moment, looking down at the table between them, then spoke in the voice of someone merely passing on some neutral information.

  “You’re a coward and a liar, and you better hope your new guy doesn’t figure that out.”

  * * *

  After Kyle left, Charlene sat and cried for so long that one of the counter clerks got sent over by the shift manager to see if she needed help. She told him she was fine, which came as a relief to the clerk, it being too late in his shift to get involved in any pregnant-woman-crying drama. She tried to pull herself together. There was almost no one left in the place, and she was aware of having become, by default, the most visibly troubled customer – not a good category to be at the top of. The pastry Kyle had bought her was still half-eaten on the plate, and she made herself swallow a few more flaky bites. Her back was hurting from sitting so long in that hard chair, and she felt utterly drained.

  She’d lied to Kyle: she had seen Jeremy, less than a month ago. Though he had not seen her. She was in the condo, stretched out on the couch and watching TV. No one else was home, and she couldn’t make herself do any more baby proofing. The whole morning had been spent putting guards on cupboard doors and sealing unused electrical outlets with hard plastic caps. There were still many, many ways for the baby to die there, and no way to eliminate them all. So she lay herself out on the couch and turned to the all-day news station, the only thing her ravaged attention span could absorb. A story came on about a contest held by a car dealership in North York in which six people vied for a brand new minivan by sitting together inside it for an entire hot weekend. One by one, contestants dropped out until it was down to two men – one was a retired soldier who said he planned to give the van to his daughter, and the other was Jeremy. Charlene felt something shift within her at the sight of him, and was not sure if it was the baby or her own stomach. There he was, wearing a Crane’s golf T-shirt soaked to a dark maroon with sweat and a pair of cargo shorts with pockets the size of saddlebags.

  “Oh my God,” Charlene said out loud, and laughed. “Oh my God!”

  He had come in second, taking home five years of free oil changes. But he looked happy. That was the first thing Charlene noticed, once the initial shock wore off: he was beaming. He looked thinner, too. Climbing out of the van with the help of two models who wore the dealership’s logo on their T-shirts, he smiled weakly and gave the thumbs-up to the cheering from the crowd in the parking lot, like an astronaut returning from a long stay on the International Space Station or a miner freed from a collapsed pit. Jeremy was handed a large bottle of water and a towel, and a man with a big Red Cross symbol on his hat gave him a quick checkup and asked him some questions she could not hear. She could see new lines on his face, new damage. For a moment, he looked a decade older, and the exhaustion he must’ve been feeling seemed to creep over him like a poison. She worried he might collapse right as they were filming, but the camera cut away to the van again, where the victor – looking as red as raw beef – was emerging, triumphant. He stumbled a little stepping down, and needed more substantial aid than the models in the tight T-shirts were able to offer, so two other men in Red Cross caps ran up to grab his elbows and walk him into the first-aid tent, where more people in caps were ready with melon slices and water and a list of questions designed to determine just how badly his brain had been baked while sweating it out inside the van for the past 48 hours.

  When the camera turned back to Jeremy, he was smiling again, and a pretty young woman with a microphone was with him. He seemed renewed. He had the towel around his shoulders, and looked as though he’d done nothing more strenuous than an hour of hot yoga. It took her a moment to realize he was wearing a fresh Crane’s shirt – someone must’ve had one at the ready.

  The woman with the microphone asked how he was feeling.

  “There were moments there when things got a little hairy, for sure, but I’m totally fine now. I’m used to some pretty tough situations.”

  He waved at the crowd again, and she briefly caught sight of the purple welt in the centre of his palm.

  “It must be a little disappointing to have stuck it out this long and not win the van, though,” the interviewer said.

  He set his face in an earnest expression and told her that he was not disappointed, not at all.

  “Obviously, a brand new van would be great, but it sounds like my new friend is planning to give it to his daughter, which is amazing. Good for him. He deserves it, a hundred percent. I’m not disappointed because I didn’t really do this for a van, or even to win a prize. Seriously. I’ll take the oil changes, but I did this because I wanted to test myself, to see if I could find my limits and push past them. I really think you need to do that every once in a while, just so you know
you still have room to grow and learn. If you don’t push yourself, you never know what you’re capable of. I took a shot, and second is pretty close to first.”

  “Wow. I think if I did something like this, I’d give up after an hour. How did you do it?”

  Jeremy smiled and reached up to touch his temple. As he did so, the surge of adrenaline that had been sustaining him eventually subsided, his face collapsed into confusion, and he slumped sideways. Hands reached out to steady him and draw him off-screen as the woman with the microphone threw back to the woman in the newsroom. They both agreed they would not say no to a free minivan, but could never have stuck it out that long. The next story was about a dog in Etobicoke that had befriended a duck.

  In the Tim Hortons, Charlene prepared herself for the ordeal of standing up and walking the two blocks back to where she’d parked. She checked the time on her phone: she’d told her mother she’d come by for a visit. There was a voice mail message waiting, which she hoped was from Jesse. She sometimes got nervous when her phone buzzed, and would right away start worrying that something bad had happened to his little girl. The worst, most gruesome scenarios filled her head, images that would not dissipate until she heard his voice, and he reassured her.

  She had never worried about that kind of thing before.

  She took this as a good sign.

  From Power Tools: The Expanded Edition by Theo Hendra

  “My friends in Canada don’t wait for spring to go fishing: they will drag a little shack onto a frozen lake, and put it on top of a hole they’ve drilled right through the ice. I’ve been lucky enough to do it with them, and it’s amazing. Does it get cold? It sure does! Especially for a kid from California like me. But when a fish finally tugs at your line, you instantly forget how cold you are. You want to jump up and down and yell, but that would scare all the other fish away, and it would ruin the fishing for the people who were nice enough to bring you along. So you quietly put your fish in the cooler, bait your hook again, drop your line back through the hole, and wait. Only this time, you know that you will catch another fish. Because you used your Hard Work Tool, your Social Tool, and your Patience Tool, you have reached a Success Stage and are filled with Power. Congratulations.”