Every Little Thing (16 page)

“Yeah. Bird biologists. Hot commodity. Right up there with tradespeople and chartered accountants.”

A quick shrug of her shoulders. It was a Friday night when she'd told him about the newest job. She'd picked him up from work, and they were too lazy to cook, so they got take-out. She wanted flowers for the table, so they stopped for Gerber daisies. He took the burgers out of the bag and set them on the table. He stuck the straws into the cups and watched her throw out the old, wilted flowers with hesitation. She stared at them in the bottom of the garbage can for a minute, like maybe they had a day or two left in them, and she'd been hasty.

“So, like, on these oh-so-important environmental missions you'll be travelling to. Will you be travelling alone or with handsome gentlemen?”

Setting the flowers on the table, sitting into her chair, “Yes. I will, from here onwards, be surrounded by dozens of dashing men. Many of them will make wild advances on me. Be advised that I won't be able to help myself, with these dozens of dashing men. I hope you understand?”

He threw his straw at her, like a dart, and she dodged it, laughing. She took another sip from the bucket-sized root beer. “I'm not going to work in a brothel, Cohen. What the hell?”

“Oprah says most affairs happen with co-workers.”

She laughed. “
Oprah
?”

“Yeah.”

Rolling her eyes, “I'll be traveling alone, or with Leslie, or with Keith, or, with both Leslie and Keith.”

“
Keith
?”

“What?”

“That's a boy's name!”

“A man's, actually.”

“A gay man, who in no way likes women? A gay man who is strikingly ugly. Is he hideous? So hideous cabs won't stop for him?”

She shook her head. “Keith's definitely not gay, but why are we having this—”

“Is he a happily married man, with an excessive number of framed photos of his wife on his desk? I hope so. I hope he's married and he calls his wife something sickeningly sweet. Like
My Princess
or something. And he talks about her too much. Does he talk about her too much?”

“Having an insecure partner in your thirties. What a turn on.”

“I hope Keith is an entirely unavailable
older
man. Like, tell me he's so old people don't know why he hasn't retired yet.

And they're trying to bump him out. Is he in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for being so terribly old. Does he have a walker? Emphysema? ”

She rolled her eyes, playfully, and reassured him. “Keith's a bit…cavemanish. He openly hits on waitresses and coffee shop girls. It's tacky when guys aren't funny in their flirtations. Keith is…predictable.” Her face looked more like she was thinking of Keith than the topic at hand. “He's one of those types of guys who's sweet, under a showy shell of wisecracks and stuff.” She was looking at a napkin in her hands, not at Cohen. He'd noticed how she couldn't talk about Keith and look up at the same time. Wondered how she knew so much about the guy. How he was with baristas.

“How'd you two even meet, anyway?”

“One of his current clients was a client of Berkley-Dempster's when I was there. Apparently they were name-dropping me and explaining how they liked my
meticulous
way of doing things. He told them maybe they'd hire me, as a joke, and well, he followed up.” She gave him a look like she was patting herself on the back. Punctuated it with a cute grin,
Ain't I Sumpthin'
?

“And you're confident some joke-cracker caveman is starting a firm good enough to leave your government job for?”He could feel his eyebrows bumping together.

“It's a pretty well established firm already. It's not
new
new. It's, like, I dunno, two or three years old now. I'mnot
dumb
,Cohen. I've met with him. And Leslie. A few times. For lunch and that.”

She'd been meeting people at lunch and not telling him. That's all he heard.

“...I asked to see details on their most recent projects, and you should see their current client roster, Cohen. This is a
great
opportunity. It's kind of a dream job, really. I'm not jumping into something here, you should know me better than that. It's been two months of back and forths. I even took a vacation day once, to go see their office—”

“A
vacation day
? You woke up one day, acting like you were going to work, and didn't tell me you had the day off, so you could—”

“I—I dunno, I—”

“I just—I don't know how you could be out there, meeting with some guy and not telling me about it. It's...weird.”

“I'm not meeting with
some guy
. It was about a job,Cohen.”

“I know it is. That's not my point. I'd have told
you
if
I
was interviewing for a new job—”

“At first it was nothing. Some email from a guy feeling me out about a job, just after Dad died. I mean
just
after he died. I...explained my situation, that my professional life was hardly a priority at the moment, but thanks for thinking of me and all that. You know?” She took a daisy out of the vase. Petting its petals, “But he turned out to be super sweet and understanding about it all—”

“Or he was just adamant about acquiring you.”

“No, Cohen,
Jesus
. And I'm just answering your questions here. He opened up to me, about how his own father died when he was young, and it was sweet and honest and open of him. He didn't need to do that. I don't care what you say, it was… nice. He sent me details about the job, said it was an open offer, and to get in touch with him when I was feeling ready to get back to work. Or, to think about the offer, or whatever.”She shrugged her shoulders. “So I back-burnered it and didn't think to mention it. It was the last thing on my mind at the time. You can understand that much, right?”She looked at him. “My father had just died.”

Neither of them spoke.

“But he emailed me again, a few days later. He sent me this totally useless and corny article on ways to grieve a loved one in a positive way. It even had a cheesy epigraph and a cheesy poem at the end of it. I thought it was sweet, so what? To be honest, it's why I agreed to meet with him. A small-staffed, family-feel of a work place might be nice for a change, you know?” She paused. “Why do you look mad at me? This is a good thing. It's a better job.”

“I'm weirded out. You're out there,” he threw a hand in the direction of a hypothetical location, “meeting some guy about a job, over the course of a few
weeks
, and this is the first I'm hearing about it? Are we really this detached from each other's lives now?”

She groaned and got up from the table, bringing their trash to the garbage bin. Violently throwing it in there. “So what. He sent me some kind words after Dad died. It was more than you could muster at the time, wasn't it?” She turned to face him, leaning against the counter by the sink, arms folded in an accusatory stance. “You were a cold shoulder when I needed you the most. Do you know that? Do you know how that made me feel?The whole time I was mourning Dad, you were so weird and distant, all I could think about was how there for you I was, when your brother died! Can you really sit there and fault Keith for being kind when I needed kindness?”

“That's not what I'm doing.”

“I don't care what you're doing.”She walked out of the room. “I'm getting a bath and I've got nothing to apologize for.”

BUT SHE DID apologize, that night in bed. Cohen had gone to bed before her, and that was weird, rare, that they didn't go to sleep at the same time. He could kick a foot across the bed, leave it there, like he was in a hotel or another life. She'd slipped in at some point. Tapped him on the shoulder to see if he was awake or to wake him. “I think you might have been right.” A girlish warm grin on her face. She reached over him, grabbed her bedshirt off his nightstand and pulled it on. It was his green t-shirt she'd been sleeping in for a year. “So...I'm sorry. I am. You were right. We need to communicate more. We've been together long enough we need to remind each other of things like this. But please don't sour this exciting job opportunity, by being mad at me.”

She kissed his forehead. Pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose with a thumb knuckle. She wore glasses, hip plastic frames that slid down her nose, and he loved the way she'd push them back up with the back of her thumb. It was unique and kid-like. She'd smack them back into place with her thumb knuckle, not a forefinger like everyone else. It spoke to her lack of patience, because half the time she'd bonk her nose, say
Ah!

“And I didn't mean to talk like Keith, some stranger, was more there for me after Dad's death. I know you and my father were close. I know you were hurt too. I know you mourn, in your own withdrawn way, like you did with Ryan. And your relationship with Dad is a big part of why I love you so much.”

He had nothing to say, just a few things to mull over. The jolt of her father's death had given her pause and, with it, a chance to evaluate her life, her next steps, whether she was really happy with her job, her surroundings, the person she was with…and so goddamn used to it ached.

“You weren't wrong though, that I was distant, when you needed me.”

“Shh. Let's get some sleep.”

“Really. I got past Ryan's death...
through
you. I could've been more there for you.”

She was back on to him. Laughed like it had been a weird comment. “What do you mean you got through Ryan's death
through
me?What, like I was an escape route? And here I thought it was my pretty face that made you want me years ago.”Another laugh. “Goodnight. I'm dropping here.”

So he had his own conversation in his head. A prediction. Or a pragmatic rationale—the mystery of a stranger is the most potent pull anyone feels. The promise on the other end of those emails from Keith had to have been pulling on her. Some guy she hadn't figured out yet, the way she had Cohen figured out. She had no more questions about Cohen, for him, and he had none for her. To most people that's what being in love means: but Allie was a romantic, who'd rather be falling in love. Curious and exploring that curiosity.

She took the job. And it was nothing for her to be out of town a week a month. She'd started taking longer in the washroom in the mornings; she was wearing eye makeup now, there was a plastic case devoted entirely to housing eye makeup: liquids, powders, something that looked like a pencil. They were eating supper later so she could go to the gym after work. A choppy new haircut. A calculated wardrobe: there was a collared shirt she wore exclusively under a blue sweater vest and never alone. She was looking better than ever, but in a way that made her a different woman.

There were new priorities.

April 23rd was Keith's birthday and she'd asked Cohen to come to his party, but she'd asked like she
had
to ask him, with her eyes staring at the tips of her toes and muttering the words like it wasn't a big deal if he didn't come. And he said yes like a man who felt obligated to go.

Keith had been calling her at home more than Cohen felt he needed to be. It's natural for someone to answer the phone and take the call in private, in another room, so that never bothered him. What bothered him was that the paranoia felt warranted. Her muffled words would come through a door, or a genuine laugh would push through a wall, and it felt like Keith was in the house with them. And fighting to ignore it made him feel pathetic. Replaceable. The idea of being replaceable never bothered him, the
don't-take-it-personally
aspects of the dynamic. It was more the thought of waking up one Sunday morning, throwing an arm in her direction, and finding her missing. He imagined the weight of his arm falling from where her body should have been, to the empty mattress. That extra quarter-of-a-second drop of his arm would be the loneliest moment of his life.

His mind could roam, throughout his days. And did. He cut his finger with a scalpel at work one day because he wasn't paying attention. Cut it deep.

Allie was playing along with Keith's flirtatious nature, innocently, because it benefited her. Cohen would complain about Keith's forwardness, and she'd say something cute-ish, like “I'm an anchored boat, and you're the entire ocean,” kiss him on the forehead, say goodnight. But there was a wedge, and it was between them, and if Keith wasn't the wedge, he was at least hammering it into place.

In time, the sex was less vocal and more to the point, like she was doing him a favour. She may as well have been reading a magazine. And that made him not want it at all. A month rolled by, the longest they'd ever gone. And then six weeks. And then the sex was awkward again. There were suppers at the coffee table instead, in case something good was on TV.

Keith wanted to teach her golf and Cohen couldn't understand why. He was happy Allie declined his offer.

She shouted up over the stairs at him that night, from the porch. “You don't have to come to Keith's party, but if you are coming, we need to leave. We're late enough already.”

He was hauling on his jeans as he walked to the staircase. She looked up at him coming down the stairs like she wanted to say something.

“What?”

Hauling on her jacket, “Nothing.”

“What?”

“You're wearing jeans?”

“Dark denim is the new dress pant!”

She laughed. “C'mon then! Hustle hustle.” She swung her new purse towards the door, like Cohen was a fleet of school-age kids and she was a crossing guard. She fixed his collar as he walked past. “That shirt makes me proud to own you!”

“It was a gift. From my girlfriend.”

It was something they did: talk about each other, to each other, in third person.