Every Little Thing (8 page)

She was side-on to him as they peered down at another stack of photos, their hips locked into each other. A breast at his elbow. She was too liberal with her body against his. It was just her nature, he knew that by now, but it flared desire in him. And there was a bed, right there behind them.

“It's why I live with my father, still, by the way, if you're wondering. I moved back in with him to help him care for her. And to be with her. And I just...didn't move back out. Yet. We both wanted to move into town here. And your lonely dad makes for a good enough roommate when you don't know anyone in town.” She shrugged her shoulders,
that's that
.

“What's weird about living with you father?”

“When you're pushing thirty? Nothing, I guess. Just making sure you know I'm not a weirdo. This stack of photos is less depressing,”she said, pointing to a pile of glossy pictures. The way the light was bouncing off them, he couldn't see the image until he tilted his head. “They're the ones for the photo frames. Photos of touristy landmarks that sell pretty well.”

They were vibrant images, obviously colour-manipulated in Photoshop, but confidently composed. Interesting angles, subjects, and ways of framing things. “These are great. Really great. This one's my favourite, though. The abandoned house, with the goat in the window.”

She plucked two cans of paint from a bag in her closet. “Thanks. FYI: this is fancy paint. It says it only needs sixty minutes between coats. I think we can have it done by midnight. You don't have to stay for all three coats, though, okay?”

But he did. They watched a movie between coats. They shared popcorn; two hands, one bowl. Quick little fights, like
Go ahead, no you go ahead
, until they found a rhythm and stopped reaching for the popcorn at the same time. Cohen sat on one end of the couch, and Allie lay sprawled on the remaining two cushions. Sometimes her toes rested against his leg or she'd plunk a heel down on his knee and rock her foot back and forth, like there was nothing to it. Like she didn't know what her body did to his. Or like maybe she did.

Matt joined them for the second movie, after the second coat of paint, and said sad things like,
Meryl is your mother's favourite actress
. Matt said
is
not
was
when talking about Kristen. Cohen knew Allie wouldn't leave her father alone in that house until he could say
was
. There was something profoundly empathetic about Allie. He'd noticed it in her right away. How she could suffocate in sadness, so she took steps to eradicate it wherever she detected it. As much out of her own need for a copacetic equilibrium than out of compassion alone.

MEN IN JAIL could be divided into men who took pride in what they'd gotten caught for, and men who were ashamed to admit to what they'd done. He'd expected more people claiming innocence. Or to have the kind of convoluted, fucked-up story he did, about how he got six months in jail—a slim sentence for a man pegged as being a
conspirator to murder
in the initial police reports. But it all made for a good story, and that, somehow, got him respect in there.
You could write a movie about all that, and get rich! Won't have been for nothing then!
It was almost like they were jealous of all the twists and turns and characters involved in his story, versus their more commonplace ones: attempted burglary, drunk driving, aggravated assault after too many drinks in a shady bar.

Cohen's story ended with an accomplice being locked away in a place much darker than where they all were, and that was a nice detail in the eyes of inmates who loved a good
So, what'd you do?
story. As one inmate told another about Cohen's story, and then another, each person exaggerated or changed a detail, until one version of the story had Cohen's name, and Cohen's part in the story, swapped with Lee's.

Lee Brown had been a close friend of Allie's. An atypical friend: he was an elderly, American war vet turned sidewalk vendor. And Cohen couldn't hear his name now without thinking about the trajectory of it all. He thought about what domino had struck what domino first, to set things in motion: how he wouldn't have known Lee Brown, if he hadn't fallen in love with Allie, and how he'd fallen in love with Allie, partly, vaguely, as a reaction to Ryan's death, and how his brother never would have drowned if his mother hadn't of insisted on a trip to the cabin, and how she wouldn't have insisted on the trip to the cabin if his family hadn't gotten plagued by a genetic heart disorder. And even that trickled back decades, to how his grandfather's DNA took on ARVC, against its will, almost a hundred years ago. Because his father choose to marry a
Candice Heffernan
instead of a million other women. Screwy genes and all.

But if he stacked those dominos back up and knocked them back down in the reverse order, it's the same series of events that had led him to Allie. Minus Lee. And how Lee fit into Allie's life was simple happenstance.

Three mornings after the night Cohen had helped Allie paint her room, he met Lee for the first time. There was a knock on his bedroom window. His room was below ground, and his window was behind his headboard, so he had to look at the window upside down; his body awkwardly held in a backwards-crab posture. It was Allie, awake, showered, wearing a black skirt and a bright purple tank top. The sun barely up.

He'd notice something new about her every time he saw her. The way she blinked slower than most. The way some words caught in her mouth; an over-lingering on the letter F.
Fffine. Fffuck.

She was knelt at the window, her legs pressed together, and she plunked a framed photo against the glass. “Look! For you, for helping me paint the other night!” She said, “It's the one with the goat, in the abandoned house,” as if he couldn't see for himself. “You said you liked that one, right?” She nodded her head, widened eyes. “Right?”

“Yes, thanks.”He laughed as he looked at his alarm clock.

“So...like...you knock on people's windows before eight in the morning, hey?”

“Well. Not everyone's. I have to know the person.”

“And what if that person valued sleeping in on Saturdays or sleeping naked?”

“Well, yeah. Okay. I never thought of that. But you're not naked, are you? And you're under a comforter. And I don't judge.” A wink, a shy smile. “I'll put the goat picture down by your back door, where you smoke. I have some errands to run. Sort of. I'll be back by one or two, if...if you want to do something this afternoon? It's nice out. I don't really know anyone else around here to call, but you'll do, for now, until I meet some other people!”She laughed at herself so easily. It was a different kind of laugh, less graceful than when she laughed at someone else. She was like Ryan that way. And they both had dart-hole dimples in their cheeks when they smirked at their own wisecracks.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Nice! Okay. I'll meet you out front. Two o'clock sharp?”

He laughed at her in a way that said
Yes
, and she waved before spinning and walking away; her skirt tornado-ing around her legs. A flash of orange panties.

“Allie!”

She was back at the window. “Yeah?”

“Where...where are you off to at eight in the morning? And do you want some company?”

She smiled. “Sure.”

“Give me twenty minutes to shower and that?”

“Okay!”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. So where are we going?”

“I have to drop my photos off somewhere. About an hour away. Hour and a bit. Out in Grayton, where me and Dad just moved from. Know it?”

“Of course,” he said, kicking off his bedsheets. “It's nice out there.”

“I thought you slept naked,” she said, nodding at his pajama pants.

“What?”

“Never mind. Twenty minutes. I'll be out front with the car running. And I'm driving. I don't like being driven. I'm a...very paranoid driver. And I don't know you well enough to be all backseat driver on you, yet.”

Yet
she'd said. And they both paused at the utterance of it. Yet. The implication.

“And, Cohen?”

“Yeah?”

“Nice pajamas. Very manly.”

She winked and walked away.
Who winks?

He looked down at his pajama pants like maybe real men don't wear pajama pants.

ALLIE REALLY WAS a paranoid driver.
Did you see that! That son of a bitch just cut me off!
She'd slap the wheel and swear even though a school bus could have fit in between her car and the man who'd passed her with ample berth. Her driving anxiety was something a long-term partner, a husband, might grow sick of, but he loved it. Found it endearing: her so harmless, but uttering such well-articulated threats.

“Someone needs to tie his hands to his feet and roll him down a mountain!”

“What?”He laughed. “They need to do
what
to him?”

“You heard me. A mountain!”

She drove as if driving a fighter jet, and all the other cars were missiles. Even in the city, she imagined a moose might just jump out of anywhere. And kids, she'd told him,were
death-wish fearless.
She reduced her speed by 50% if she even
thought
she saw one.

“The problem is, kids think they're invincible. But a quick game of Car Versus Kneecap would prove otherwise, am I right?”

He laughed. “Yeah, you're right all right.”He paused. “Have you...been in a bad accident or something?”

“No, why?”She had the wheel gripped so hard her knuckles were popping through her skin.

“Just wondering.”

“So what, I'm a melodramatic driver. We all have our flaws. There are worse things, Cohen, like halitosis and...I dunno. Gambling addictions!”

“Okkkaaay…”He put up his hands like,
Don't shoot!

“And I hate this stretch of the drive. It's the worst. I mean, why have an
undivided
highway? That's just
asking
for trouble. Some dipshit in the other lane nods off or speeds and hydroplanes, and ka-bam, it's all over for
me
!” She shook her head at the injustice of it. “You've got to wonder about a world that builds undivided highways.”

“Absolutely. You do. I mean, what kind of world!”

“Are you mocking me! I'm serious, think about it. Chunks of metal, flying past each other, going more than a hundred clicks an hour!”

He was still smirking. “What?” she said. “What?”

“You should've seen your eyes when that squirrel ran across the road. It was like your brain slingshot your eyes from your skull.”

She slapped his knee,
Shut up!
, and he was shocked she'd taken a hand out of the 10 and 2 position.

They'd made it to Grayton, and the town was in a state of evolution, and Allie hated it. Densely packed subdivisions were being built; the kind where you could see into a neighbour's window through your own, and they made the more traditional saltbox houses look cheap, not practical or quaint. The old, abandoned, unbountiful farmland now housed a Walmart, and an old merchant's house was, as of that summer, a two-theatre cinema. “One that doesn't even play good movies,” she'd added as they drove past it.

Her eyes followed a ballet of litter blowing in the wind. “It's the litter—the McDonald's burger wrappers and Tim Hortons'cups—that bothers me the most. I mean,” she pointed to a sidewalk, “it's everywhere.”

She was scanning the street for fearless children and other potential driving hazards as she spoke. She'd swerve from potholes like they were land mines and look at him with her cheeks puffed out like they'd just dodged an explosion. Allie had definitely gotten her license on the first try.

Downtown Grayton was one main street, called Main Street, with a strip of restaurants and retail stores on one side and a stony beach on the other. When she pulled up at the curb of Main Street, she told him to wait in the car. That she'd only be a second. So he did. He could see the wharf, stretching out from the beach like a strip of brown carpet, and he could hear boats knocking off of it like wooden wind chimes. She was pumping some change into a parking meter when Cohen noticed an older man sat at a collapsible vendor's table on the sidewalk. The old man had been eyeing Allie from the moment she'd stepped out of the car. He wore thin black dress pants and a white V-neck shirt: his chest hair visible and grey. White really. Cotton-white. Fluffy like a cloud. He'd been carving wood, with a tool-like knife, into what looked like a lighthouse; his hands almost too shaky to get the job done. He laid down the block of wood, but kept his fist tight around the knife, and he stepped toward Allie.

Something was off about him. He was skinny, and yet his skin sagged from bones: there was a lizard-like flap hanging down from his chin and droops of flesh flapping off his elbows. Both jiggled when he moved, like a rooster's throat wattle. His body looked frail, finished, but his bright blue eyes and animated facial expressions were full of life. When he started walking towards Allie with that knife still in his hands, Cohen got out of the car, defensively. He felt like a fool when he saw Allie walking towards him; her arms thrown wide open for a hug. She held him close, it was a
been-too-long
kind of hug. She was rubbing his back and calling him Lee.

“Little Allie Crosbie! Don't tell me you braved that big ol' highway just to visit me?”

After a few good-natured insults back and forth, the man fell into his seat as if standing too long had weakened every bone in his body. He wore black combat boots, scuffed white in places. His cheap black dress pants were tucked into his boots.

“Cohen, this is Lee.”

Lee. Casual, yet formal enough an introduction to rule out grandfather.

“Nice to meet you, Lee.”

A handshake, and Lee cracked a joke about her driving. “So, how many near-accidents did she have on the way out?”