Every Little Thing (33 page)

It wasn't the right time to tell her about his job. “I'm tired, long week.”

“You're sure everything's fine?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Stop and pick up something for dessert, will you?”

“Some strawberry-chocolate Danishes from Deniro's?”

“Perfect.”

Allie had gotten back into town that morning too. An hour after he'd gotten off the phone with his mother, she'd burst through Lee's door like someone was chasing her. She came into the kitchen as he was peeling an orange.

“Say something nice about my dress!” She was tugging her jacket off, laying it over a chair.

“It's new?”

“Yeah. And it cost
way
too much money.” She swirled it a little: made a tornado of the dress. Did a curtsy to show it off.

“It's very…Montreal. Very nice.
Chic
. You are very easy on the eyes right now,
Mon Petit Bijoux
.”He feigned a laugh.

She looked at the barren kitchen table and said, “No microscope action today?”

“No.”He opened the cupboard door, the one under the sink, and threw his orange peels into the garbage.

“Why not?”

He didn't want to tell her why either. Not today. “It's Ryan's birthday…my brother. I can take the day off. Something came up at work, and I'm not in that big of a rush to finish the samples anymore.”

She went tender: not unlike she looked the day his family drove back from the cabin and found Allie and her father moving in next door. She scooped her dress behind her knees and sat at the kitchen table. She had her hair styled differently. Cover-girl-like. Purposefully messy. Hipster-ish. “You guys have lunch and go to the graveyard on his birthday, right?”

“Yeah.”

She waited a minute, like she was thinking about it. She had her heels up on the chair and her arms wrapped around her shins, hugging herself. He sat into the table, offered her a wedge of orange. She took one and said, “Can I come? Would that be… weird? I'd like to go with you. I don't have any reason to rush back to work today.”

“Okay.”

She seemed surprised he never hesitated in saying okay. “I mean, I used to go with you and your parents every year, and we're friends now. Your parents won't find that weird, right? I'd like to see them. Very much.”

“We're
friends
now, are we?”

She reached over and yanked the orange out of his hand. Tore off a wedge and handed it back to him. “I'm gonna pop in and say hello to Lee. How is he today? Nasty or super nasty?”

“Not bad. Earlier anyway. But be careful. I found an axe on his dresser last weekend.”

She laughed.

“I'm fucking
serious
,” and he laughed too. “I think he thinks someone's planning on breaking in. He keeps saying people want to steal his house, as if his house was like a purse someone could grab in the middle of the night and run off with. Foundation and all.”

“What time are you heading to your parents' house?”

He looked at his watch. Shrugged his shoulders. “I might leave here in twenty minutes?”

“Okay. I'm going to say hello to Lee and rush home to drop off my suitcase, and pick up a few things for work. So I can head into the office from town. Afterwards. I'll meet you at your parents' place for lunch.”

“You came right here from the airport?”

“Yeah, why not? I only live, like, three streets over.”

He liked that she'd come right over from the airport. He liked the way that dress tornado-ed around her knees as she spun and walked out of the room.

RYAN'S GRAVE WAS black marble, and light grey where the words were etched in. When someone mentioned Ryan's name now, Cohen pictured this gravestone instead of the flesh-and-blood kid who was his bother. That bothered him. When his mother talked about Ryan, he saw it in her eyes that she was seeing
him
in those recollected memories. And he was jealous of that. She could see the clothes he had on, what his hair was doing. Cohen saw the headstone. Or the pond that day. Or the guitar that sat in Ryan's bedroom, unplayed, so long the strings felt like saw blades the one time Cohen picked it up and strummed it.

There was a line etched into the gravestone. “Those who leave too soon are remembered the longest.” It bothered Cohen when his mother chose that line. The simplistic nonsense of it. It felt cheap; it wasn't visceral enough. It said nothing of Ryan himself.

As the years passed, the annual trips to Ryan's grave went from morose to an uplifting pleasantry. The conversations weren't even about Ryan, really, beyond a few
Remember whens
and one or two mentions of
How he always used to
. It was about not forgetting more than remembering.

His parents were thrilled to see Allie that day at lunch. She'd shown up at their house before he had. He'd planned on explaining that Allie would be joining him when he got there, but he got there and Allie had already explained. No one seemed off put. He never did ask how she'd explained her presence. She was hypnotic: the kind of person people were happy to have around, and they didn't need a reason. They only had to hear her laugh.

He came in the front door and his mother greeted him, a kiss on his cheek, and she took the box of strawberry Danishes from his hand so he could pluck off his shoes. On his swoop back up from taking his shoes off, his mother said, “Allie's here.” She said it with a smile on her face,
I'm so happy for you guys
. But his father was wary. They ate their lunch and laughed and reminisced, but all the while Cohen's father would stare at Allie's engagement ring and then stare at Cohen. To prove a point.

After lunch, at the grave, Allie and his mother were still catching up. Cohen was looking down at their feet, at how close they were standing together, and how the grass was long and needed to be cut. It came up over their shoes in limp green spikes. His mother, smoothing Allie's shoulders, said, “I love your dress.”

“Thanks.”

“And your hair.”She ran a hand through it. His mother had always needed to touch something to trust her eyes about it. Letting go of Allie's hair, “How's work?”

“Work's work. How's
retirement
?”She'd said retirement as if it was the same as winning the lottery.

Cohen and his father scurried away, towards a bench, and sat down. His father said, “I saw this coming—you and Allie getting all tangled up like this—when you said you were going out to Grayon to look after Lee.” Shifting his weight, settling into the bench, he looked up at Allie and said, “So, how serious is this?”

“It's a weird topic. Let's leave it for now. I don't know, to be honest.”

“She's married, isn't she?”

“No, not yet.”

Allie's cellphone rang and they stopped talking to look at her, eavesdropping before they realized it.

Muffled,
Oh my God
s. A sharply toned,
I'm leaving now.
Doesn't matter where I am
. An irritable,
I'll explain later.

She hung up. “I'm supposed to be in a meeting. I entirely forgot about it. I've got to run. I'm
very
sorry! It was
so
nice seeing you both,” and his mother kissed Allie's cheek, twice, carried away with the enthusiasm of seeing her again. She'd held Allie's shoulders in her hands and looked at her adoringly, and Allie shot Cohen a look of flattery over it. “Gorgeous,” she said. “You just keep getting more gorgeous. You'll have to tell me how you do it one day soon, when we have more time?”

Allie came over to his father on the bench and hugged him goodbye too. She stood in front of Cohen then, and they looked around, not sure how to physically express their goodbye. She said, “I'll call you later” and tapped his knee a few times with her fingertips. He nodded.

His father called out as she was walking away. “Yes, it was nice seeing you too, Allie.” She turned and smiled and waved again, her eyes fighting off a finger of sunlight, her keys jingling as she waved. Under his breath, his father whispered, “Her fiancé, that's her boss too, right?”

“Yeah.”

His mother bent over to straighten the flowers she'd brought to the grave. She said, “I just love these yellow ones Allie brought along. They're soft as ears.” She bunched them all together: the flowers she'd brought and the ones Allie had brought.

Cohen's cellphone beeped in his pocket. A text message. He took it out and read it.
Keith's PISSED. I told him where I was today.
Why I missed the meeting. We need to talk. He's losing it for real this time. I'll call you later.

His father peered at his cellphone. But he didn't see the message. He didn't have to.

PULLED
THREADS

HE RE-READ ALLIE'S text message as he sat in his car,
He's losing it for real this time. I'll call you later.
But she never did get a chance to call. Or she just didn't call.

Back at home, he read it again as he took his phone from his pocket and laid it on the kitchen table, and later still, after he signed Clarence's generous severance package from The Avian-Dome. He waited for his phone to ring, and every minute ticked by like a separate blast of anxiety.

He'd pour himself a cup of tea every night at eight, and Allie knew that. She'd join him sometimes, stopping by with something from DeNiro's Bakery. He'd miss her on the nights she didn't show up, smiling, cutting her piece of cake in half, as if anything chopped in two isn't bad for you. But there was no knock at the door that night, until after nine. And it was an urgent banging. Allie, she wouldn't knock.

He walked towards the porch and saw Keith there, distorted by the stained glass window: pounding on the door, trying the handle, pounding on the door. The sight of his face broke Cohen's stride, but he got to the door, pulled it open.

“Where's that crazy old man?”

“Lee?”

“Yeah.”

“He's in his room. He doesn't leave his room anymore—”

“Good. You could nail his door shut as far as I'm concerned. He's hit her, you know? He's punched Allie.” Keith brushed past Cohen into the living room, looking around to make sure Lee really was in his bedroom. “That crazy fuck threw potted plants at me last time I was here. Did Allie tell you that?”

“Yeah, she did, so keep your voice down or he'll come out throwing more.”

Keith turned his neck, quick and hawk-like. “You think that's funny? The senile old fuck.”

“No, I'm just saying. Keep your voice down. Unless you want more pots thrown at you.” He laughed to make it seem like friendly advice.

Keith walked into the kitchen, so Cohen followed him. Put the kettle on. It was a long and narrow kitchen with a staircase at one end and the appliances on the other. Keith leaned into the counter near the staircase-end of the kitchen, arms folded. His head was nodding in all directions like someone was shaking him, and his mouth was getting ahead of itself, or he didn't know what order to let the words out in. “It's not you she wants. This isn't about whatever you two had before. Me and her are having a hard time, that's all that's happening here. You need to understand that and back off. For starters, let's not forget you killed her father. Or have you forgotten that?”

“I remember it a little differently than that.”

“You could be anyone. That's all I mean. A guy from her gym. A client, whatever.”He shrugged his angry shoulders. “This isn't an
Allie and Cohen
thing. Allie and I, we're in a rut, and you're preying on it. Do you understand what I'm saying? You two aren't having some kind of end-of-a-movie moment where you end up back together.”

Cohen wanted to say,
You're talking in circles, like she does.

“You're some kind of pathetic shit, who's been hung up on a girl for, what, more than five years?”He looked at his watch as if it were a calendar. “Six years?”

“I came to Grayton because of Lee, Keith. Lee and I have a history separate from Allie. What happened after that, well, I dunno what to say. It's beyond me.”

Keith wanted Cohen's retorts to be longer, bolder. He wanted words to bite into. Or a reason to get physical. It was dark in the kitchen, but Cohen could see how adrenaline-soaked Keith's posturing was. He was a marionette in shaky hands.

“You need to pack up here and go back to your sad little life.

Check Lee into a fucking home somewhere and forget all about this fantasy blast from the past you're living. And stop acting like you're here for Lee!The man belongs in a straightjacket in a dark room, and if he lays his hands on her again, it's where I'll be putting him. That's what a real man does, for the record.”

“The man's sick, is what he is. Binswanger Disease. Maybe you should read the fuckin pamphlet. He's got some neurological issues, impairing his personality, and that's what slapped Allie. Not Lee. I'm smart enough to know we're all a few chemical imbalances short of being just like the guy. And Lee's been there for me more than this one time I'm trying to be here for him.”

“Fucking hero card, man. You play it so well, don't you? You've got yourself convinced you're a great guy.
Hey, sure Matt. I'll help you kill yourself. Right after I get my kid brother drunk on a boat!”

Cohen leaned off the counter to pick the hissing kettle up off the stove. “Do you want a cup of tea or coffee or something?”

“No, man, I don't. I don't want a
fucking coffee or something
. I want you to realize you're not some kind of saviour and I'm not some kind of asshole you're saving Allie from.”

“What do you want me to say, Keith? It's not up to me or you what Allie wants. And this bullshit showdown isn't going to change what she wants.”

“
That's
my issue! You're acting like it's me versus you.”