Every Little Thing Page 21

  “Dragonfly larvae.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Cordulia,mostly.”

  She laid the bag down, grabbed the kettle off the stove, and started filling it. “Cup of tea, Cohen? So you can catch me up on Lee before you go?”

  He turned in his chair to face her, “That’s the thing. I’mall set up here, and I don’t mind staying for another while. I love it out here in Grayton. Fuck the city. Next door to me now, there’s a dozen obnoxious kids. Theymust’ve pooled their mommies’money and bought the house next door. They’re out on their patio ‘til two or three every night. There’s crushed beer cans in my yard half the time, and they’ve got horrible taste in music. I’m happier here, and Clarence is more than fine with me staying on this project, working out of here, until I’m done counting these dead bugs.”

  “Oh my God, really?”She abandoned the kettle for a minute and sat back at the table, excited. “Because I have to go to Toronto on the twelfth. Just for two days, but still, I don’t want him left alone until I figure everything out. One of those live-in nurses or whatever they’re called or a home maybe.”

  “Yeah, really. I’m all set up. I’m on vacation, in my head.”

  “Lee’s...deterioration has gone on too long now, and he’s too blind, let alone the rest of it, to look after himself. I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve been stopping in here to cook him most meals because I’m not sure that he eats otherwise. There’s never any dishes or signs of him having eaten. I ask him about it and he gets testy. I’ve gotten too used to it. To the way he is. And he’s been getting worse, but slowly enough for me to adapt, you know? He’s not okay to be living alone. The doctor telling you he needs to be in a home was a wake-up call.”

  She picked up another bag of pond water and peered into it. “Keith said he’d like it a lot more if I didn’t move in here while I figure out Lee’s long-term care. Keith thinks Lee’s crazy and that crazy people are dangerous.”She walked over to the cupboards to get two mugs for their tea. “Are you sure you don’t mind? Because— Jesus, shit!” She’d opened a cupboard door and a stack of glasses fell out, shattering all over the counter and the floor like bombs going off. He looked over, and she had the edge of a cut finger in her mouth; one foot laid on top of the other foot, like a ballerina, and broken glass encircling her. The way the sunlight refracted in it made the glass look like a ring of fire. “Um. Help.” She was frightened, cute, laughing.

  “Okay, don’t move.”

  “Obviously! Broom’s next to the fridge.”

  “Got it.”

  He looked back to her and saw a small drop of blood at her heel. “There’s some under my foot!”

  He ran out to the porch and she yelled, “Where are you going?”

  “Don’t move!” and he wrestled on a pair of Lee’s too-tight steel-toed boots. Only the first half of his feet would fit into them, so he came back into the kitchen tippy-toeing in clunky boots, walking like a man with broken knees.

  Her panicked face relaxed a second to laugh at him. “What are you doing, you fool?”

  He came towards her, glass crunching under his feet. He swept the countertop behind her with a dishtowel. Little clinks as glass rained down to the floor. “Okay, put your arms out.”

  “What?”

  He motioned with his arms. “Make a T shape.”

  “What?”

  “Be a scarecrow. I’m going to pick you up and sit you on the countertop.”She stuck her arms out,made aT of her body. “Okay, keep your arms stiff or you’ll just slide back down onto the glass. Ready?”

  She panicked, dropped her arms. “No. Wait!” She hugged herself. “Say you won’t drop me in this sea of glass!”

  “I won’t drop you in the sea of glass. Arms back up. Let’s go.”

  He grabbed her, her warmth penetrating his fingers. His palms awkwardly close to her breasts.

  “Okay, ready? One…two…” He plunked her down on the countertop, and as she settled there, a hand grazed her chest.

  “Wow. That was mildly heroic! Your little outfit there: the boots, the broom.” She laughed. “Thanks!”

  Cohen got to sweeping the glass. Perched on the countertop, she explained, “Lee always does that. He takes dishes out of the dishwasher and just lays them in there, right on the edge. The glasses end up stacked high and resting against the insides of the door just waiting to tip over, like a…glass skyscraper. It’s never him that opens the door when the dishes fall, so he never learns not to do that...”

  Cohen was throwing the first batch of glass into a garbage bag and went back to sweep up the rest.

  “…half the time he smashes glasses putting them away like he’s not looking where he’s thrusting things, but it isn’t his fault, I suppose, if he can’t see where he’s putting them.”

  She put two hands up over her eyes like binoculars and said, “Can you imagine losing your peripheral vision?”

  She was kicking her legs through the air as she talked to him. Her heels sometimes banging off the cupboard doors beneath her.

  Cohen, kneeling in front of her, sweeping glass into a dustpan, looked up at her and said, “I think I got all of it. You can hop down.” He saw her purple panties before she’d scissor-snapped her legs crossed and blushed a little. She’d kicked him in the head as she crossed her legs. Cohen got back up and swept the broom around a little more.

  She stuck her two legs straight out. Nodded her head to her slightly bloody foot. “There’s rubbing alcohol and Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet upstairs. Fix me up, Doc, before I get down?”

  He pulled up a chair and wedged the rubbing alcohol between his thighs. He handed her the Band-Aid, “Here, hold this,” and took the top off the rubbing alcohol. Soaked some cotton balls. She leaned forward to watch, her chest resting on her thighs as he cleaned her foot. She let out a quick sigh of pain; the alcohol like a wasp at her heel. When she flinched, she’d squeezed his shoulder and kept her hand there. A finger against his neck. And maybe he leaned a cheek onto her hand. It was fighting an instinct not to kiss her wrist. He looked up and saw that she’d been staring him in the eyes the whole time. A kiss-me-now cue, but it couldn’t have been.

  She sat back up, “So, you really don’t mind hanging around until I get back from Toronto?”

  “No sweat.”

  “It’s time. For proper care for him. I’m travelling more and more now, and he’s not getting any better, but definitely worse…”

  Cohen tuned out. Fell back through time. Every year between now and back then stopping that fall no more than a cloud could, until it was the day they’d met all over again.

  He heard something at the staircase, looked over. It was Lee, sat on the steps, two hands holding rails like a man in prison. “Allie? Allie, is that you?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” She jumped down off the counter onto her not-cut foot.

  He shouted, “Where’ve you been!”

  She leaned into Cohen as she passed him, her soft voice in his ear, “I said he takes to me. I didn’t say he was nice to me. Appreciated things.” She walked over to greet Lee.

  He wanted to ask her how long she’s been slaving over Lee like this. Because he wanted her to whisper the answer, like she just had, into his ear. With her hand on his shoulder. Lips to his ear.

  ALLIE CUT UP red potatoes, fried them in a lot of olive oil and fresh rosemary. “I’d bottle this smell if I could,” she said to Cohen as he washed a few dishes beside her. “Wear it, like a perfume.”

  “What, and have men hunger for you?”

  “Lame,” she said, patting him on the shoulder, Nice try.

  She laid out some flaxseed toast with real butter. Cut up chunks of smoked gouda. She was fearless with knives: the clicks on the cutting board were faster than a ticking clock.

  When it was all ready, she called out to Lee, not sure where he was, and Cohen cleared all his stuff off the kitchen table. Lee came stumbling into the kitchen with his hands out, w
aiting to bump into a chair. Everything was guesswork now; having given up on what remained of his vision, he was all hands and ears. The top of a chair found his hand, like it was being helpful, reaching out to Lee. He sat down, jammed his neck back, and looked around the room, with his owl-head movement, scanning for Allie. He shouted at her. “Them potatoes and the herbs, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “Smells good enough, I guess.” He put two hands on the table, and as they fumbled around in search of cutlery, they knocked over his glass of water. Cohen jumped back in an exaggerated manner, out of fright more than anything, and went to get some paper towel.

  “Goddamn glass,”Lee said.

  Allie sat beside him with her food. “It was only water. No biggie. Cohen’s got it cleaned up already.”

  “I didn’t want water anyway. I want some juice!”He jammed a forkful of potato into his mouth. White bits falling out of his mouth as he made his clenched-fist demand. Allie got to wiping his chin, and he batted her hand away.

  Cohen shot Allie a wide-eyed, raised-eyebrow look, Wow. And said, “Coming right up,” as he laid a glass of orange juice where he knew Lee could see it.

  Lee was a fast eater: he ate as if an impatient busboy was waiting behind him, to yank the plate away. Every second counted, so he barely chewed his food before he’d swallow it.

  Near the end of lunch, Allie said, “I think we’re going to relocate your bedroom to the den,Lee, so you don’t need to worry about the stairs anymore. It only makes sense,” she said, trying to soften the situation. “I don’t know why you’ve been taking those stairs all these years, since you don’t use the den at all. May as well be a main floor bedroom—”

  “I don’t give a goddamn where I sleep! I’ll sleep in the fucking garage!” He gulped down his whole glass of juice and wiped his mouth with a shirt sleeve. “Do whatever you want to do, just hurry about it. If you’re going to move me,move me, but don’t make me go around later wondering where the fuck I’m supposed to sleep tonight!” He threw a quarter piece of toast down on his plate. It bounced, flipped over. Cohen could see perfect teeth marks in it.

  Allie and Cohen gave each other a look,Well, could have been worse, at least he agreed, and Lee stormed out to the living room. He turned on the TV. It was blaring. Lee was shouting complaints about something or other, but the TV was up too high to hear him. “Fuck—damn…microscopes every—all of…it’s for!”

  “What?”

  “NOTHING! Never mind!”

  Cohen walked over to the living-room doorway and looked in at Lee. Arms crossed, face crumpled up, history channel on. Something about army tanks. Voice-over narration and black-and-white footage.

  He turned back to Allie, and she was putting Lee’s plate in the dishwasher. “I guess we should get to it then?”

  She clapped her hands, chop chop, and glided over to the staircase at the end of the kitchen. “Giddy-up.” Her ponytail wagging back and forth like a happy dog’s tail.

  Allie was already sitting down on Lee’s bed when Cohen entered his room. Her facial expression was a perfect embodiment of Hmm. “I dunno know where to start!”

  “I gutted out the den last night, so that’s done and ready to move into—”

  “Yeah, I noticed. Good man. I guess...let’s take the drawers out of the dresser,” she nodded to it. “Lay them on the bed. We’ll move the dresser down and then bring these drawers down, with all the stuff still in them, and slide them back in.” She’d already started yanking out dresser drawers and laying them on the bed. She had three drawers laid on the bed before Cohen got started himself.

  She went over to a nightstand and hauled out the top drawer. She plucked out a photograph, held it up like she’d panned gold. “Oh my God, how sweet is this? He keeps a picture of me...” she paused for a second as she looked at it, and her tone changed a little, “...a picture of us, in his nightstand!” She sat on the bed, and Cohen came over beside her. It was a picture of Cohen and Allie on the pier in Grayton. One of Cohen’s elbows resting on the fence-like ledge around the wharf. In the photo, Allie was side-on, facing Cohen, her face stretched into pure joy, shocked or surprised she’d actually hooked something on her fishing pole, and she was reeling it in. Cohen was mid-laugh in the photo, a hand on her hip like, I’m here if you need a hand reeling it in.

  “Remember?”She asked him, punching him on the shoulder. “It was totally a red plaid fisherman’s coat that I caught. Remember?” He nodded, and Allie said, “We shouldn’t be picking through his stuff.” She threw all the photos back into the drawer and gave Cohen a look, like she wanted to ask him something. Her mouth opened a little and then closed, like a fish on land.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”She got up off the bed and they put the last of the drawers on the mattress.

  They stood at either end of the dresser, ready to lift. “Got it?” He lifted his end.

  “Got it. Go.”

  But halfway down the stairs, him struggling under the weight of the heavy oak dresser, her barely with a hand on it anymore, she’d blurted out, “Keith’s not as bad as you make him out to be, you know. He never was.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means let’s get this dresser over the stairs, quickly, before it steamrolls over me!”

  She laughed, “Sorry,” and took a bit more of the weight.

  Walking the dresser into the den, Cohen said, “Allie, if he makes you happy, and all that shit, does it really matter what other people think?”

  “It does. Sort of. No one understands. People not trusting my take on Keith. It’s—I mean, shit, you want people to like your fiancé, you want them to want to be around him, so that he feels a part of you! I mean, Jesus.” She put a hand up, C’mon. “It degrades how I feel about the relationship I’m in, and that’s not fair. If someone invites me somewhere, out for dinner or to a movie or something, they seem more excited when I say Keith’s out of town or he’s busy and can’t make it. They don’t say anything, but it’s in their voice. Or it’s obvious because, like, Mel and I will go out for a drink after a movie, when it’s just the two of us, but never if Keith’s with me. That kind of thing.”

  They laid the dresser in place, but it wobbled. Allie kept pressing the edge of it, watching it wobble, and said, “What the hell?”

  “Old house with sunken floors. There’s levellers on the bottoms of the legs. I’ll fix it later.”

  “May as well fix it now.”

  He got down on his knees and said, “Lift it up off the ground for me?”And she did. He turned the leveller a few times, and she laid the dresser down, surprised it had done the trick. He stood up, brushed a splotch of dust off his knees, and said, “As long as you can list five things, about the person you’re with, then you still belong together.”

  “Five, hey, magic number?”

  “Yes, and one’s a universal freebie: the financial convenience of splitting bills.”

  “Would you judge me if I said that I love how Keith’s still the jealous type, all these years later? That he’s giving me shit that you’re Lee’s caretaker?”

  “That doesn’t count as one of your five. You could live without a jealous man. The fact that he’s jealous adds nothing to your daily enjoyment of life.”

  “Jealousy means he still cares. Most of my friends’husbands, like Leslie at work…her husband wouldn’t react if she spontaneously combusted right in front of him and needed to be extinguished. I swear. He’d just ask her to keep it down and be quiet about it because the game is on.”

  “Really, he still cares, that’s enough for you? That’s all you’re after? You…any woman deserves a little more fireworks than he still cares, don’t you think? That whole jealousy thing. That’s just a personality trait. I bet he was the kid who never shared well at daycare, and that had nothing to do with him caring about his toys.”

  “Never mind. C’mon. Let’s go start bringing th
e drawers down.” She slapped him on the shoulder, walking passed him.

  He followed her up the stairs. “How about you get the rest of these drawers down, and back into the dresser, while I start taking the headboard off the bedframe?”He hauled a screwdriver out of his back pocket and held it up like it was something to be proud of and knelt down to start removing the headboard.

  He was still on his knees, half-hidden behind the bed, when he heard her giggle, say, “Still loyal to Fruit of the Loom, hey? Your shirt’s halfway up your back,” and she tugged it down for him. Helped him up.

  They each grabbed an end of the mattress. It wasn’t heavy, but it was awkward to manoeuvre. They tugged and steered it towards the staircase and were taking it one step at a time until Allie lost her footing and came flailing towards him like a skier who’d lost control. He let go of the mattress to catch her. He planted his feet to make a wall of himself. She fell into him like a bird hitting a window, and their bodies were enmeshed. He had an angle of her hip in his left hand, his other hand on her back; their necks joined the way swans embrace. They stayed that way for long seconds, like maybe the fall wasn’t over. But it was. And so much can happen in a second, and they let it.

  He slid his other hand to her other hip to stabilize her. She squeezed the backs of his arms before hauling herself away from him, slowly, sending a blunt-edged sigh into his neck. It felt like sex. Like fucking. Like something too basic and primitive to fight against. So he broke the ice, a corny joke, because no one feels what he just felt unless it’s mutual. “What are you, falling for me all over again?”

  She looked at him like she didn’t understand.

  “It’s a joke. You fell and I caught you.”

  “It’s not even funny, Cohen. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Some corny soap opera story and everyone rooting for us. I don’t want to be that cliché.”