God, Tina. He grabbed the beers from the beautiful barkeep and took a long swallow out of one of them. She snickered in disgust. “Eight bucks,” she yelled over the throbbing dance music. “It's eight bucks.” He remembered himself, and grabbed for his wallet, his upper lip wet with perspiration and beer. He pulled out a five and a handful of loonies and pushed them toward her. Then he grabbed the beers again, treated himself to another long swallow, and pushed off to find Johnny Parker.
The night Tina kicked him out it snowed like a bastard. And she had really kicked him out. None of this nice breaking up you hear so much about, where you talk for hours and hours trying to settle your differences, and when it becomes clear that you just don't want the same thing, you both cry, and you hold each other, and then you climb into bed for some intense farewell sex, and in the morning you start looking for an apartment. And you live together civilly, even having more sex on occasion, if that's what seems appropriate, until you find a new place to live, and you remain friends and have joint custody of the cat. None of that for his Tina. Oh no. She sent him out in a hail of broken crockery, in a shower of shouted insults, in a barrage of sneered accusations. There was no soft sentiment in that breakup that was certain. He went down under her violence and he was still waiting to surface.
And sure, he wasn't blameless. Sure, he'd egged her on, he hadn't listened to her half the time she'd bitched at him for whatever it was he was doing wrong. But he never thought it would come to this. Come to him rootless, owning not much more than the pile of clothes currently mouldering on James and Emily's bathroom floor and the guitar that never dealt a harsh or unkind word his way. Come to him not even having a permanent place to live, for chrissakes, but shacked up instead in James and Emily's place while James was away on tour,
dealing with signs of happy coupledom wherever he looked â the matching night stands in the bedroom, framed photos of the two of them throughout the house, their left behind toothbrushes leaning together in the glass on the bathroom shelf. There he was every day, taking in their mail, seeing none of his own. He was sure Tina was dumping his in a snowbank or burning it on the barbecue â she probably wouldn't even bring it in the house and burn it properly, in the fireplace â she hated him that much.
He couldn't figure it out. She was the one who had cheated on him. After all that time, and all her fear, and all her misguided accusations, in the end, it was she who could not be true. Henry had had plenty of opportunity, and had been plenty tempted. And to him it would have been just sex. But the thought of it made Tina insane, and he loved her, or thought he should, and so he never strayed. And finally, one night when he was in Moncton pinch-hitting for Johnny Parker in some Tragically Hip tribute band, Tina stepped out on him. When he got home, she was sitting there, thin-lipped, white-cheeked and she told him. Told him she'd slept with her art teacher, a great poncey old man she seemed to think was brilliance incarnate. And when Henry just nodded and sank down heavily into a kitchen chair and shook his head once or twice silently, she lost it. She started yelling and screaming and throwing things. She pulled him to his feet and hammered on his chest and raved at him, as if he were the one who had sold their relationship out. He took it, he took it all, and he never said a word. What was there to say? His silence only enraged her and she stood there in the kitchen, eyes awash in hatred and something else, something Henry couldn't place â disgust, maybe or despair â and she said in a voice so quiet that he almost didn't hear it: “I think you'd better go. I think you'd better get your fucking stuff and get out of my sight.” Henry started toward the bedroom without a word, but Tina got in front of him and he reared back, as if she were on fire. “On second thought,” she said evenly, “just get the fuck out now. You can come and get your stuff tomorrow when I'm at work, but if you don't leave right now, I think we'll both be sorry.”
He could see she wasn't fucking around, so he groped for his coat as quietly and subtly as he could, as if any sudden move could make her explode again. He carried it in one hand; it hung down like the
carcass of an animal he'd found in the woods. He looked longingly at his guitar as he passed it in the hallway, but he didn't dare grab for it. He could feel Tina's eyes on him from the kitchen, and for the first time in the five years he'd known her, he felt afraid. Real fear. And real pity, and a blend of other emotions with a rank bouquet, a blend he decided then and there to try as hard as he could to forget.
He took his leather jacket and let himself out into the night, then slid into its sleeves and zipped it up. He stood on South Street and wondered what the fuck to do. He went to the pay phone across the street and rang up Johnny Parker.
He moved now through the crowd at the Booze Barn, a crowd that seemed to undulate with one mind, or, more properly, he thought, with one crotch. He held the beers aloft and looked for Johnny Parker in the fray. Finally he saw him, his friend's six-foot-four frame towering above a group of â what else? â pretty girls. Johnny's blond curls were like a beacon in that room, and girls were floating his way, dashing themselves on his rocks. He leaned down conspiratorially and flirted with three girls who were probably in first year pharmacy, or maybe kinesiology. There was a sameness about girls like that, and on nights such as these, Henry thought, it's a sameness that comforts to no end. He came up on the group and handed Johnny Parker the Keith's he hadn't started to drink. They clinked bottles and Johnny Parker smiled a half smile at Henry, who raised his eyebrows back. The girls tossed their hair and Henry could feel them evaluating him. He did a mental inventory; did he feel air on his cock, meaning his zipper was down? Could he feel anything hanging out of his nose? When was the last time he'd actually seen his hair? And could they tell he really, really didn't care which one of them he went home with, as long as he went home with one of them? Did it matter if they could tell? Probably not. In fact, it would probably help. Oh, sure, they'd make it difficult for him, there'd be a hint of humiliation in it, but he realised he actually didn't give a fuck, as long as he could find himself, within a few hours, being led up the stairs to some two-bedroom flat, having to be quiet so as not to wake the roommate, snickering quietly and pushing his hands up some accommodating girl's sweater, as long as he could peel her clothes off and shed his own like a skin he'd grown
out of, as long as he could climb atop some living, breathing, laughing, fucking girl and just move. That's all. Just move on her, move in her, move her, move the bed. As long as he could fuck and fuck until she cried out and then he did, until he could collapse, sweaty, spent, satisfied and fall into sleep and forget for a few miserable hours just who he was and how things had gone so very very wrong for him. Was it too much to ask one of these pretty young girls to take him home and let him disappear from himself for awhile?
Sometimes, Henry worried himself. Tonight, however, he was determined to ignore the nagging feeling that he was becoming deeply weird. He smiled at the brown-haired girl Johnny didn't have an arm around and said, “Wanna dance?”
* * *
Charlotte leaned back, her elbows propping her up against the bar.
“Can I buy you a drink?” asked the guy in the chequered shirt who'd been staring at her ever since her neat dismount from the mechanical bull. She'd landed on her feet in a cloud of straw on the floor, wiped her palms on her jeans, let out a lungful of breath and sauntered coolly across the room. The guy, however, had not been quite as cool. Now he was standing in front of her, nervous and red-faced. Charlotte looked him up and down. He wasn't exactly setting her on fire, but she was willing to try anything once. “Sure. Jack Daniels, neat,” she said, twisting over her shoulder to deliver her order to the barkeep.
“Jack Daniels, neat,” the nervous guy repeated. He swallowed hard. “Make that two.”
Charlotte barely tipped her cowboy hat in his direction, smiled at him with her mouth.
“Come here often?” the guy asked. At least he was consistent in his approach, Charlotte thought.
“No,” she told him. “Never, in fact.”
The bartender set two glasses up on the bar, poured the shots, said to the nervous guy, “Six bucks.”
The guy pulled out his money, slid it across the bar. He handed a glass to Charlotte, kept the other one for himself.
“L'chaim,” Charlotte said, raising her glass a moment.
“Gezundheit.”
She laughed once, while confusion rippled across his face. She knocked the JD back and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Nervous Guy took a big gulp of his drink, coughed and sputtered.
“Need a pat?” Charlotte asked, lifting her arm.
He flinched away then remembered himself, coughed and sputtered anew, and finally said, “No, no, I'm good. I'm good.”
“Good,” Charlotte said. She twisted over her shoulder again, held up her empty glass, caught the barkeep's eye, and said, “'Nother one, please.” She looked at Nervous Guy. “You?”
He gestured to his drink, barely depleted. “No, uh, no thanks. I'm uh â “
“Good?” Charlotte said.
“Yeah,” Nervous Guy said, nervously. “I'm good.”
* * *
Henry wrapped his left arm around the girl â what was her name again? Amanda? Alicia? Alison? Fuck, he'd forgotten her name already. No, no, he had it. It was Amanda. Amanda kiss'n'hug, he thought, and laughed into her hair.
“What?” she shouted, over the pounding music.
“What?” he shouted back.
She shrugged her shoulders at him, raised her eyebrows.
“I couldn't hear you,” he yelled.
She smiled up at him, squirmed a little in his arms. He smiled back. Who cares about conversation, he thought, when you've got a smiley, squirmy girl in your arms. He looked over at Johnny Parker who was making the two blondes laugh and toss their hair. Maybe it was going to be a good night. Maybe it already was.
* * *
Leah put the last of the clean glasses back into the hoosier. She sank into the rocking chair and wondered if she felt tired enough to sleep. Neil came padding into the kitchen stopped in front of her and meowed. “Hey bubba,” she said. She leaned down to scratch the top of his head. He liked a good hard head scratching that cat. He purred a guttural purr, his ears flattening out to either side of his head. She
bent down in the chair, hooked her hands under his armpits and lifted Neil onto her lap. He squirmed a bit, but when she went back to scratching his head, he smoothed himself out and submitted to being a lap cat, his little cat lips stretched around his little cat teeth in a rictus of pleasure, a Cheshire Cat grin.
Maybe this was the closest Leah would get to the perfect man she'd been promised by Psychic Sue. The perfect man who was supposedly just around the corner with his Cheshire Cat grin ready to give Leah everything she'd ever wanted. Psychic Sue had pestered Leah for years. Sue wanted to read Leah but something about Sue gave Leah the willies. Sometimes, when they ran into each other at, say, the flea market or out for brunch, Sue would let slip something she'd intuited about Leah's life or motivations or personality, and it seemed so invasive and show-offy. Sue was intense in a beyond-disarming way, and Leah could barely meet her eyes in public; she shuddered to think what it would be like when it was just the two of them alone in a room together, Sue focusing, psychically, on Leah.
And then Nathan died, and six months later, whipsawed by confusion, Leah called Sue and begged her to come over. She just couldn't stand it anymore, the wondering and not knowing, the lack of any reliable non-extra-sensory authority. And so Psychic Sue came. She set up a little alarm clock on the kitchen table, and asked for a piece of Leah's jewelry. Leah handed over the ring her parents had given her when she graduated from high school, a chunky silver band with cut out suns and moons, engraved with the words
carpe diem
. In the lamplight, Sue had offered a vision of the afterlife as a health spa, where all Leah's dearly departed hung out together by the pool, having raucous family get-togethers with good Italian food, playing Rummoli far into the night. The specifics were perhaps not quite so detailed, now that Leah thought about it. But Sue had told her that Nathan had had to recover when he got there â that he was sick when admitted to the afterlife, but that the attendants were able to do what their earthly counterparts had been unable to â they'd somehow stopped the rot that had eaten Nathan to death in this world, leaving him whole and healed and gloriously able to stay up all night, plate of cannolis at his elbow, steadily losing his heavenly pennies to his fellow dead, but feeling much better, thanks. Their grandfather's bone cancer in
permanent remission, their grandmother's too-big heart beating on track again, their aunt's MS-shaking hands able once again to hold a flourish of cards, to deftly flick pennies onto the mat, their other grandfather's litany of complaints â what had he died of, in the end? â now all meliorated.
Leah didn't ask questions about this, because she couldn't think of what to ask. This seemed as reasonable a vision of heaven as any she'd ever had in her head, from her earliest understanding of angels as pudgy babies with wings made of white feathers, to her fervent hope that once she brooked those pearly gates herself, she'd be privy to all the information that eluded her on earth, like how to solve math problems, with trains departing Montréal and Winnipeg and meeting somewhere around London, Ontario, and whether she should have kept dating Timothy, who always made her take her shoes off soon as she set foot inside his apartment, and who never called her anything but dear, which was entirely too avuncular an endearment to be sexy. Of course, it'd be too late then for that kind of information to be much help. But she was looking forward to the hindsight part of it, at least.