Every Little Thing (10 page)

There were two or three nights, when he hadn't even fallen asleep before the wake-up call, and his cell door slid open, to let him get in the line of men that would file him into the cafeteria. Human cattle, in orange jumpsuits, always tired and hungry, and always bored.

In jail, there was nothing to distinguish one day from another, except the arrival of a new inmate or spotting something or someone he'd never noticed before. Like the time, in line at the cafeteria, he saw a man with a red tray and got jealous of the contents. Those golden gluten-free English muffins and how they weren't burnt and how they came with a side of yogurt instead of papery, poorly cooked eggs. The man holding the tray looked too much like Allie's father. But with big, plastic-framed glasses. A hipper, younger Matt. Before the greying eyebrows and the cynicism and the bad decision that ultimately landed Cohen in jail.

Cohen stared at this new inmate, and it wasn't so much that the man looked like Matt because he didn't really. And he had an amazing caricature of Johnny Cash tattooed on his forearm with a quote Cohen couldn't make out. This man had a guitar-shaped scar on his left jaw, and he didn't bite his nails or make excessive eye contact when he spoke to someone like Matt had always done. But the guy whistled like Matt did. When idle, like waiting in line for food, this guy whistled without realizing he was whistling. Like Matt, he'd stop abruptly whenever he caught himself. A quick look around like,
I hope I wasn't annoying anyone.
Minutes later, his lips were pursing again.

When Cohen and Allie had gotten their first apartment, half the thrill of it was watered down by Allie worrying about her father, alone for the first time since her mother died. Matt was a warm and loving man, but in a way that made him prone to loneliness. He was like a kid that way: he needed people seeing what he was doing, and sharing in the joy of it, and if no one was there to share in the fun, the bottled-up joy festered into loneliness. He was the kind of man who'd laugh harder at a movie if there was someone sitting next to him. The kind of man who'd say,
Did you hear that?
And if there was no one there to say it to, he'd feel painfully alone.

Allie wished he could've admitted that. She wished he could've said,
I'm bored, visit more
. Or,
Don't leave me here
. Cohen had offered to move in there, with the two of them. For months he basically lived there anyway. Allie cooking for them as Cohen tried on the role of Matt's new best friend, in the yard, helping him build a new fence, at the Saturday matinée, sharing the combo #2 as if on a date:
Two root beers and a large popcorn.

What bothered Allie was Matt's bad acting and his over-eagerness to make comments about how okay he was. She phoned him to check in, the Sunday after she'd moved out, and Cohen overheard it all because she'd had him on speaker phone. “Hi, Dad, how's life? How's having the place to yourself?”

“Great!” he said, enthusiastically enough for her to hear the exclamation mark. “I've bought a build-it-yourself greenhouse package. Really looking forward to getting it up and running. It'll give me something to do, and you two are welcome to half my tomatoes!”

When they visited him a week later, the build-it-yourself greenhouse was still in a box. In the porch. In a shopping bag.

The day Cohen and Allie had moved into their apartment, he and Matt were walking boxes and furniture from Matt's house to a U-haul truck. Allie was in the back of the truck arranging things as they plunked them in to her.
Tetris-ing things into position
she'd said. She loved order, organizing things, labelling things. Each box had a letter scrolled on all six faces to indicate what room they were destined for: K for kitchen, NE for nonessential items. When he and Matt each laid a box down, labelled
Cam Gear
, with little drawings of cartoony cameras all over them, she said, “That's it, except for two boxes of photo mats in the storage closet.”A big smile like,
What's two more boxes?

“One each?”

“Sounds good.”

They were walking through the kitchen to the storage closet at the back of the house. Matt ran a finger along the handle of a pan filled with leftovers from supper, as he passed by. Some kind of stir fry: vegetables and chicken covered in a brown sauce and sesame seeds. “She sure can cook, that one. Almost as good as her mother.”

There was nothing accusatory about the statement, but it was in no way about Allie's culinary skills. It was about him having to dine alone now. Cook for himself. Lay one plate of food at an empty table. Every clink of a fork off a plate, every gulp of water, would be a sound that no one in the world would hear but him.

Matt opened the storage closet door and handed Cohen the lighter of the two boxes, the half-filled one. All day long, Matt was silently concerned about Cohen lifting things, because of his heart.
Careful now. Slow down. Let's take five, hey?
Matt could never wrap his head around the vagueness of Cohen's genetic heart disorder. It wasn't as easy to understand as diabetes or hemophilia—because those things were as simple as not feeding a man sugar or cutting him. So Cohen had fun with it: they were lifting a mattress down over the stairs, and Cohen laid his corner down. He clutched his heart and feigned a heart attack. Just for ten seconds, but long enough for Matt to panic.

Matt punched him on the shoulder and had a stern look on his face as he walked down over the stairs, shaking his head. When he turned around he was grinning too. “I'm laughing, Davies, but that joke's only funny once. The boy who cried wolf and all that.”

Cohen was scanning all the random stuff in the storage closet as he waited for Matt to grab the other box of mats. He saw a chess board on top of a Monopoly box. The chess board was all stone: granite. The white pieces were marble and the black pieces looked like onyx. Matt saw him looking at it.

“Nice board,hey?”He ran a finger over its smooth surface. A line parting dust. “I got it in Mexico, on my and Kristen's honeymoon. You play?”He flicked off the light and edged past Cohen.

“Well. I know how to play if that's what you mean. But no, haven't had a game in ten years. I could kick your ass, though, if that was a challenge.”

“I could beat you using all pawns, Davies!” He laughed before saying, “Doesn't work, does it? Chess and smack talk?”

Cohen, laughing a little in agreement, looking down at Allie's stir fry as they walked through the kitchen. “No. Not quite.”

“What's the point of a game where you can't smack talk your opponent? Ever play Scattergories or Balderdash? Allie and I,we love those two.”

And that's where it all started. Right there, in Matt's kitchen, talking chess like two budding best friends. It took Cohen ninety-something sleepless nights in a prison cell to trace it all back to where a fuse got lit. And it should've been something more caustic and explosive than a friendly, innocent competition, and how bonding over board games led to them spending so much time together.

If Cohen hadn't learned chess, off his crush in grade four, or if he'd never made that comment, that promise of a game of chess with Matt, his life might have gone differently. Matt wouldn't have come to trust him so much. Matt wouldn't have asked that favour.

Some nights, he'd think:
if I hadn't met Allie at all.
Or if his brother hadn't drowned, because what a fucked up thing to have brought two people together in the first place: death. His brother's, her mother's.

But things had gone the way they did, and the first Wednesday of every month, he and Allie would go eat supper with Matt. Play Scattergories. Matt would make homemade pasta with his new pasta maker. His house was filling with gadgets: palm pilots and telescopes and specific-use things like pasta makers and tomato dicers and plug-in apple peelers. He was becoming a shopping channel addict. Filling empty spaces. Filling time. Because an idle man is haunted and a busy man is not.

One night, Allie couldn't make it. A baby shower. And the phone rang that night. Two rings, Cohen answered, and someone hung up. Five minutes later it rang again. It was Matt.

“Cohen?”

“No, it's Allie.”

“
Har har
. Listen, what are you doing for supper? I know Allie is out, but I figure you gotta eat something anyway. I got the pasta maker out, and I have some Bocconcini, straight from Italy, the package says, for my tomato-basil salad. You'd have to be quite a fool to say no and miss out, but hey, some people are fools. And I thought we could crack out that chess board you admired that time?”

“I can be there in fifteen?”

“Take your time. I'll be another twenty minutes slaving over this. Bring some red wine, of course.”

“Okay.”

“Grab a...I dunno. Something Italian.”

“I'll go all out. I've had my eye on a pricy Barolo for some time now.”

“Yes. Yes that'll do it.”

FROM THAT NIGHT on, Cohen never declined an invite from Matt to a game of chess or a visit to check out a new gadget he'd ordered: a homemade ice-cream maker or a new digital camera.
There's no film. I don't even understand. Come over and check it out.

I read about them on Canon's website while I was looking for a new telescope. They're calling them digital cameras!
It was Canon's first model on the market. He was probably the first one to own one.

If Cohen had plans with someone on a day Matt called, they'd always understood why Cohen would break those plans, to fill Matt's loneliest moments. Especially Allie. Cohen had adopted Matt's interests, one by one, to spend time with him. He'd feigned the interest, as a rule—golf, Scrabble,Roman Polan-ski films—but more than once he'd actually come to like some of Matt's hobbies, like astronomy.

Through Matt's casual, backyard lectures about astronomy, the night sky was becoming a nightly show. Most people looked up and saw the same thing every night—a moon, stars—but it only took a couple of nights with Matt to see something more. That the world looked like a different place every couple of days. And a man like Matt needed to see that, and feel that way. To separate the days. Matt thought maybe he was teaching Cohen about astronomy, but Matt was really teaching him about love. That love was the dent you'd put in someone's life if you left them behind. And Cohen could only hope, in thirty years, that he'd miss Allie, the way Matt missed Kristen, if Allie died of cancer too, thirty years from now.

They'd sip beers and chat, and Cohen got it now, astronomy, and why people gave a shit about the stars. How every night was different if you'd just look up. So they'd look up at named patterns in the sky, constellations that were there some nights and not there others.

“The stars are like a million bright mysteries, you know, because no one agrees on how the things even form. Some nights I come out here,”he'd told Cohen one night, “and I can get so lost in the stars that I forget I'm even rooted in the world. Does that sound crazy? A grown man like me, lying on his picnic table and looking up at the sky?”

“No. That's what a hobby is, isn't it?”

“No. A hobby is an interest; a way to waste time or relax. This is something more. For people like me, it's an exercise in longing. Or proof there's…something more.”

For people like me?

“Some of the stories behind these constellations are half-interesting,” he'd told Cohen one night, drunk, lying on that picnic table. “The Greeks say that Gaia sent a scorpion to kill Orion, after Orion tried to force himself on her, and now, at the times when the Scorpio constellation shines the brightest in the sky, the Orion constellation is the dimmest it gets. It shines less brightly. Like Scorpio is jabbing the bastard full of poison.”

Cohen pulled the lever on his lawn chair. Leaned back. Took the sky in. “So, what else we got up there tonight, Matt?”

“Cancer. And Lynx too. But those are harder to see. Especially Lynx. It's one of the faintest constellations. Hevelius named it. He named it Lynx because you'd need a lynx's eye to see it.”

“Well, bring on the Cancer then, point it out!”And Cohen's enthusiasm snagged on that word. Cancer. Kristen had been dead for years now, but Matt clearly had no intention of replacing her absence with another woman—just stars and telescopes and gadgets he didn't need.

“Cancer means crab, in Latin or Greek or whatever, right?” Cohen stepped up to the telescope. “Am I looking for a crab?”

“Well, no, just pincers, actually. Just the crab's claw. And it's more like a tuning fork, really.”

“Oh, c'mon!” he teased, “first Leo looks more like a lollipop than a lion, and now this? All these constellations a rip-off?” and Matt threw an astronomy book at him, both of them laughing.

He liked Matt right from the start. Right from the day Matt had turned that reporter away, the week Ryan had drowned.

A
BROKEN WING

THE DAY OF Cohen and Allie's fifth-year anniversary, Cohen's parents had him, Allie, and Matt over for an afternoon barbecue. Matt saw it as the right time to try out the mesquite he'd ordered from channel four one night. He showed up waving the bag of mesquite, a big grin on his face,
I thought we'd try this, to spice up the chicken?

He'd not read the directions and threw too many sticks in the grill. A cloud of smoke, too thick to see through, billowed up from the barbecue and clawed at his eyes. He ran from the thing like it was an angry beehive, and his eyes were red as boiled lobsters. They were spilling water, like cracked aquariums.

The smell was too much for Cohen's mother. She excused herself, breathing only through her mouth, so that the pitch of her voice was weird, claiming that she had to add a few dressings to the salads. Her salads were restaurant quality. They always were. She had a thing forThai cuisine—peanut sauces, sesame seeds, and the texture that coconut milk imparted on meats. Allie had always left with her recipes. His mother loved that. As they'd put on their shoes before leaving, she'd ask,
You got your recipes, Allie?
and Allie would tap her pocket, say yes, and Cohen would watch his mother nod, beaming a smile.
See how much she likes my cooking?