Better Off

by Tanya Chris

  “No, not at all. That’s me being mad. I don’t think Hailey has the capacity to be mad at anyone for more than a minute.”

  “Stop already. He’s a paragon of virtue, I get it. Maybe I hate him because you won’t shut up about how great he is. Ever think of that?”

  Mac laughed. “All right, that’s fair. I’d probably hate someone who came with that much buildup too. Truth is, he’s mostly just a regular guy. Likes Star Trek better than Star Wars, reads romance novels and space operas, yells at the screen when the Red Sox fuck up, leaves his socks on the floor, and takes baths that are definitely not ecologically sound.”

  Mac held back on rhapsodizing about how adorable all of that was—Hailey turning into a water nymph in their short and narrow tub, Hailey curled up on the couch with a book or digging into a bowl of popcorn in front of a movie, Hailey leaving socks and underwear everywhere because he didn’t have to rinse them out to wear again tomorrow.

  “Why don’t you come by the apartment tonight after the store closes,” Mac suggested. “Get to know Hailey and check the place out. It’s not as bad as you’re imagining.”

  It was every bit as bad as Declan was imagining, Mac realized as he buzzed him through the security door, the prospect of Declan’s fresh eyes reawakening his own inner critic. The building was seedy and the apartment was small, untidy because there weren’t enough places to put things, and crowded with Mac’s furniture.

  Even collapsed to its smallest length, the table was a poor fit for the “dining area,” extending into the doorway to the kitchen, making it a nuisance they had to navigate around. There was a basket of laundry near the sofa, which Mac had been meaning to fold—to fold, for heaven’s sake, as if he’d ever expected folding laundry to be a part of his life—and a stack of boxes they hadn’t unpacked yet in the kitchen.

  The table was covered in the paperwork Hailey brought home rather than stay even later at the store, and Mac really needed to get out of the habit of kicking his shoes off next to the door. There’d been a rack by the front door of his loft, but his shoes were just clutter here.

  Catching Mac’s thoughts, Hailey grabbed the laundry basket and carted it off to the bedroom just as Declan knocked. Declan raised his hands in greeting when Mac opened the door to him. One of them held a six-pack, the other a bottle of wine.

  “Housewarming present. One for each of you.” He gave the bottle to Mac and handed the six-pack of Sapporo’s Space Barley to Hailey.

  “Ooh, I’ve heard of this.” Hailey rummaged through their single silverware drawer, stuffed beyond capacity by the contents of the three silverware drawers from Mac’s loft, and victoriously held up a bottle opener. “It went to space, right?”

  “The barley did, yeah.” Declan threw himself down on Mac’s leather couch, managing to take up most of it. Like everything else, the couch was too big for the apartment. It faced the windows, which were half-obscured by the television they hadn’t been able to find another spot for, and blocked the direct line between the front door and their bedroom.

  “I figured you were into space,” Declan said, raising his voice as though the kitchen were more than three steps away. “From the store and all. You know that’s not how Halley’s Comet is spelled, though, right?”

  “I do now.” Hailey handed around the uncapped beers and took a place next to Mac on the love seat wedged in next to the television. “Everyone has told me, most recently Pia, who’s ten and learned it in science.”

  “You seriously spelled your own name wrong when you renamed yourself?” Mac couldn’t help laughing even though he hadn’t caught the misspelling himself.

  “Hey, I may have had two majors, but astronomy wasn’t either of them.” Hailey clinked beers with him, and all three of them took a swallow.

  The beer tasted exactly like Sapporo that hadn’t been to space, but Mac knew Declan hadn’t spent a hundred dollars on a six-pack of beer because of the taste. He was trying to intimidate Hailey, but as usual, Hailey wasn’t intimidated. He drank the beer like it was a Coors Light without even a glimmer of concern that maybe they should have offered their guest a glass.

  “So now that you know the truth behind my major naming fail, tell me what C&G stands for.”

  “That’s a good one,” Declan said with an insider’s grin.

  “It’s from the MacPherson motto,” Mac told Hailey. “Touch not the cat without a glove. Cat, glove. C&G.”

  “Touch not the cat without a glove,” Hailey repeated. “What does that even…?”

  “That’s the funny part,” Declan said. “No one knows. Some cat pissed off an ancient Scottish dude and got himself immortalized, that’s my theory.”

  Hailey shook his head. “I think it’s more like, ‘I’m cute but I also have claws.’ That’s so Greg.”

  “You think he’s cute?”

  “Of course I do.” Hailey chucked Mac’s chin like he was six. “Don’t you?”

  “Since the day I met him.”

  Mac frowned at Declan, who was insinuating they’d been intimate, but Hailey just continued the conversation as if he’d missed it.

  “You were in the same frat, right? I saw a picture at the loft.”

  “I’ve been displaced.” Declan waved at the walls, which were festooned with Hailey’s artwork, and suddenly Mac understood. It’d been jealousy all along—not because Declan wanted him romantically but because he’d stopped turning to Declan for the things he used to. Entertainment. Company. Guidance.

  “You’ll never be displaced,” Hailey said, getting it immediately. “You’re Greg’s best friend. He showed me your picture on our first date, and I was so looking forward to meeting you, but unfortunately it turned out not to be the best circumstances for it. I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” Declan scowled over his beer at Mac, and Mac raised his back to say “I told you so.”

  “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Hailey agreed. “Different people with different motives. Or the same motive really—to do the best thing for Ball’s End—just different ideas for how to go about it.”

  “C&G has a lot of experience revitalizing distressed neighborhoods.”

  “But not a lot of experience living in a distressed neighborhood. And I said we had the same goal—the best thing for Ball’s End—but maybe different understandings of what Ball’s End is? Like, to me Ball’s End is people. To C&G, it’s property.”

  “Property people live in.”

  “But which people?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I think so,” Hailey said, as though he might be wrong. “But I’ll admit it was personal for me, not hypothetical.”

  “I’m sorry about your store.”

  “Oh, the store.” Hailey waved it off. “It was going under anyway. I opened it with the goal of providing a service to the neighborhood, but it needed to turn a profit to stay open, and I never did figure out how to do that.”

  “Aha,” Declan pounced. “So the end can justify the means.”

  “Now I know why you’re a lawyer,” Hailey said with a smile. “I’m going to have to figure out something I can do that’s both useful and pays a little so I’m not just living off my rich boyfriend.” Hailey patted Mac’s thigh with a beer-cold hand.

  “Boyfriend?” Declan asked with a quirk of his eyebrow.

  “We haven’t decided on the best label yet,” Mac said.

  “Significant other?”

  “Too long,” Hailey complained. “I don’t know what’s wrong with boyfriend.”

  “That’s because you’re still in your twenties. When you’re my age, you’ll get it.”

  “Pookie,” Declan suggested. “He should definitely be your pookie.”

  Hailey laughed. “I wouldn’t mind, but he’d kill me. Come on, let’s find that photo of you and hang it up.” Hailey rose and stretched out his hand to Declan. With a glance that might’ve been sarcastic but might have been affectionate, Declan took it. />
  They hung the picture of Julia-Louise in the living room—where she doesn’t have to watch, Hailey said—and the picture of Declan in the bathroom—where he belongs, Mac insisted. The pictures of him shaking hands with various luminaries were thrown in a box, where they could spend the rest of eternity for all he cared.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There’d been one hell of a party on New Year’s Eve, involving violations of multiple building codes, which Mac had studiously ignored, but today’s ceremony was more solemn. A handful of people had gathered to watch Hailey take down the sign that was the last remnant of his store. The windows fronting Main Street had all been boarded over, so the haunting emptiness of the space that had once been Hailey’s Comic wasn’t visible—just sheets of naked plywood and the sign with its purple swirl of planets.

  Life had both changed and not changed in the two weeks since New Year’s. Now when Mac raced home after work, he found Hailey at their apartment instead of at the store, but Edgar was still there, reading in the ratty armchair they’d brought in to replace Mac’s overlarge love seat. Around the table would be other familiar faces—Pia and Alexander, if Mac got home before six; the ESL guys or the book club ladies, if he got home later. Always someone.

  Mac didn’t mind, as long as there came a point in every evening when they went away, leaving him and Hailey to learn to live together in a compromise between Hailey’s simple ways and his own inbred expectations of luxury.

  Sometimes he got to spoil Hailey, and sometimes Hailey convinced him that more wasn’t necessarily better. If they had two cars, they’d have to figure out where to park two cars. If Hailey allowed Mac to buy him every fanciful piece of clothing that caught his eye, they’d be living in a walk-in closet. And it turned out that Mac didn’t need all those hair products. Hailey washed his hair in shampoo that cost less than ten dollars a bottle, and Hailey’s hair was gorgeous.

  As much as Mac loved his current life—and he loved it more than he’d imagined possible—he looked forward to an even better one once 983 Main Street had been reconstructed into affordable rentals capped by one very unaffordable penthouse just for them. The sign coming down today was an ending, but also a beginning.

  They’d only been expecting Yolanda and Miguel, the store’s two occasional employees, for the sad ceremony, but Miguel brought some friends and Yolanda brought Elisa and her kids, and Julia-Louise came to provide emotional support. There was nothing like a bunch of people standing on a sidewalk to attract yet more people, so by the time Hailey and Miguel finished maneuvering the two ladders Mac had borrowed from the construction crew into place, a sizable crowd had gathered.

  The ladies of the Wednesday-night book club huddled together on the sidewalk, while the staff of the beauty salon kibitzed across the street. Kids ran back and forth, throwing their voices up to the sky. Edgar stood, as always, a little off to the side, so Mac went over to stand with him. Mac didn’t deserve to be center stage anyway. It was Hailey’s business. He was only the one who’d brought it down.

  The empty shell of the store, shuttered off from the morning light by an ugly sheet of prosaic plywood, was a pretty good metaphor for Mac’s soul, and the fact that he was so happy as a result of his own nefarious actions only made his happiness hurt. Maybe once this ceremony was over, once the store was well and truly gone, he could forget what he’d done to get what he wanted. Maybe the ends could justify the means this one time.

  Miguel stepped in front of one of the ladders, and Yolanda got in place in front of the other. When Hailey stood between them, a dozen phones were raised to capture him beneath the sign that bore his name for the last time.

  “Speech!” someone yelled.

  “I don’t have a speech. I wasn’t expecting you all. But, um, thank you. That’s my speech. Thanks for welcoming me to your neighborhood. I know I stand out a little.” Hailey definitely had the whitest skin of anyone in the crowd, excepting Julia-Louise, who was winter-white. “Thanks for buying stuff from me and donating your used books to me and coming into the store to keep me company. Thanks for bringing me food and always looking out for me. Thanks for being my friend.”

  “Nah, you don’t gotta thank us for that,” Miguel said. “You’ve always been a part of us since you came, and you’re always going to be.” He gave Hailey a hug, all hundred and eighty pounds of teenage machismo, and then Hailey was swarmed by other people wanting to do the same, to touch him and tell him what Hailey’s Comic had meant to them, until Mac shook from the effort of holding back his tears.

  “What are you going to do next?” Yolanda asked when everyone had had a turn to hug the man of the moment.

  “The good news is, I’m not leaving the neighborhood. For those of you who don’t already know, which I realize is probably no one, Greg and I are living at Inez’s.”

  “In the murder house,” Alexander supplied.

  “I know that’s the only reason you want to hang out with me,” Hailey joked, which wasn’t far off from the truth. It was hard to corral—or bribe—Alexander into focusing on his homework when he was more interested in “looking for clues,” though there was no mystery about what had happened.

  “As for what I’m going to do next professionally,” Hailey went on, “I haven’t figured that out yet. Anyone have a job opening?”

  The crowd laughed. Mac was sure Hailey would get multiple offers, but he hoped he’d take the one he planned to extend himself.

  “All right,” Hailey said with a sigh. “Let’s do this.”

  Yolanda and Miguel went up the ladders and came down with the sign.

  “I guess that’s it,” Hailey said, eyeing it mournfully.

  There was supposed to be a second half to this ceremony, though Hailey didn’t know it, and if Declan didn’t show up fast, they were going to lose the crowd, but Declan loped into view with perfect timing.

  “Did I miss it? Sorry, parking’s a bitch.”

  “No worries.” Hailey accepted Declan’s handshake with a warm smile. “We were just taking a sign down.”

  “I never even saw the store open. I should’ve.” Declan found a sliver between the sheets of plywood and cupped his hand against it to peer into the dark space, as if he’d be able to understand anything about Hailey’s Comic from a dusty floor and a lonely curtain. “Gonna open a new one, or are you gonna do Mac’s thing?”

  “Mac hasn’t told him about his thing yet,” Mac said with a frown at Declan’s back. “He was waiting for you.”

  “Not sure we should be talking about your thing,” Hailey joked. “Your sister’s right over there.”

  “Nah, we’re going to talk about his thing. This is what I came for.” With Mac’s help, Declan unfurled the banner he’d brought, and the two of them tacked it up where the Hailey’s Comic sign had been.

  “Future home of Hailey’s Community Center?” Hailey read.

  “I know Hailey’s Community Center isn’t very catchy,” Mac said as he hopped off the ladder, “but I’m more of a numbers guy than a creative one. Call it whatever you want as long as your name’s in there somewhere. You inspired it, after all.”

  “Tell him the rest,” Declan nudged.

  “It’s going to be located here. As part of Phase I. We’ve allocated half the first floor for it, and I’m hoping you’ll run it.”

  “Run it?” Hailey was still admiring the sign. “Like a….”

  “A job. We’ve got some funding—”

  “Tell him from where.”

  Mac gave Declan a silencing glare. “That’s not important right now. What’s important is that this will be a space for whatever the community needs. After-school programs, meeting space—”

  “We could have a little lending library,” Hailey said. “And computers for people to apply for jobs. And we could stock the forms everyone needs—like for visa renewals and SSI. We should totally do a painting and wine class. And for the kids, I could— How big did you say it’s going to be? When will it be ready?”
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  “I’ve got all the details at home. Does that mean you’ll take the job?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s my dream job. Wait, am I qualified?”

  “Hailey,” Yolanda said with a firm hand on his back. “No one is more qualified. Take the job.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Hailey threw himself at Mac, almost knocking him over with the force of his hug. He was wearing the jeans with the rips down the front, the ones that made him seem very young, his hair held up by a rainbow scrunchie. He sparkled in the sunlight the way he sparkled everywhere, and his laugh sent happy chills down Mac’s spine.

  He ought to be glad Hailey was so happy, but the closer he got to having everything arranged the way he wanted it, the more he realized that Julia-Louise was right. Until he told Hailey the truth about how they’d gotten here, he wouldn’t be able to enjoy being here.

  Mac finished hanging the Hailey’s Comic sign in its new spot over their bed and turned to find Hailey watching him.

  “I think you’d better talk to me.”

  “About what?” He’d wanted to make sure the sign was exactly level. That didn’t mean he was trying to avoid something.

  “I won’t know about what until you tell me. Come here.” Hailey led him to Edgar’s armchair. He settled Mac on it, then climbed into his lap. “I’m going to sit on top of you until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “As if that’s an incentive.”

  “What if I add kisses? I’m going to keep kissing you until you tell me what’s going on.” Hailey started kissing him, which was even less of an incentive, but the tactic worked, because every kiss made him wish he could enjoy it without a secret hanging over his head.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “I know. That’s why we’re both in the same chair. So spill.”

  Mac took a deep breath and spilled. “The reason the legal department knew you were living in the back room is because I told them. By mistake. But when the eviction proceedings started, I didn’t stop them. And I could’ve. It’s my fault the store’s closed.”