Every Little Thing Read online

  “Who’s rooting for us?”

  She walked away from him towards the kitchen table and took her jacket off the back of a chair. She snapped it up into the air, like a matador’s bull-blanket, and jammed her arms in. Tugged it tight. “I wasn’t expecting this. This chemistry. Me and you. Whatever. But...it’s there. And even admitting it, it’s too much like cheating. I think Keith’s right. It might be confusing for you and me to adjust to friendship. Considering the way things ended.”And she walked out of the room.

  He should’ve let her walk away. He shouldn’t have said it, but he did. “The issue isn’t our chemistry. It’s that a happily engaged woman doesn’t feel chemistry with another man, no matter who he is.”

  She stepped back into the kitchen. He wasn’t expecting those tears under her eyes. “Yes. They can! People are attracted to strangers, forGod’s sake! Being in a relationship doesn’t mean you stop feeling attraction, it means you stop acting on it.”

  “Love isn’t devotion, Allie.”

  “Then what is it!”

  “A feeling.”

  She said nothing, stared at him. “Our…situation is different, Cohen. And complicated. More complicated than what you just said. Nothing’s that simple. Nothing is!” Her lips started trembling in a way that tore at his heart. “I have to go!” And she did.

  Cohen sat down on the staircase—one hand on the rail, the other on his lap—looking at the mattress on the floor.

  Lee stumbled into the kitchen and shouted at him. “What’s going on! I don’t want anyone in my house if you’re going to be shouting all the time!”

  Cohen nodded his head as if Lee could see him nodding from that far away.

  “Allie? Allie! ” His neck tilted back, owl movements as he scanned the room for her.

  “She’s gone, Lee. She just left.”

  “When’s she coming back?”

  LOUD,

  LOUDER

  ALLIE DIDN’T HAVE to come by on her lunch hour to make lunch for Lee. Cohen had to eat, so Cohen could have easily made Lee’s lunches. But she’d say, It’s only fair I help out, and, he’s accustomed to me checking in. Regularity’s important here. So she’d come by, eat lunch, feed Lee, and be formal with Cohen: hellos, goodbyes, thank-yous, and that was it, as Cohen sat at his microscope tweezing another spider-like dragonfly larva from murky pond water in a petri dish.

  Bag after bag, and week after week, he’d been pouring pond samples into petri dishes and plucking out snails and larvae to catalogue and count them. He was sick of it. The results had proven that fertilizing the pond had worked, but science is based in numbers and his boss needed mathematical proof that something was working.

  Three or four times a week, Allie would come by: act warmly to Lee and distant to Cohen. She’d never utter more than those hellos, goodbyes, or a thanks again, but she’d started laying plates of food beside his microscope without a word. On one of those days, just after plunking food down for Cohen, he’d turned and saw her at the fridge; her ass pointing straight at him. Come here, right now. Grab me by the tops of my shoulders, for leverage. Get it over with.

  She’d caught him looking. A forgiving glance. She sat beside him at the table, crunching a raw carrot. “I am trying to find a facility for Lee, so you know. I know you can’t stay here forever. And I feel bad coming and going without thanking you enough or chatting more.”

  Another crunch of her carrot, and she wouldn’t speak while chewing. He sat back in his seat and waited. “I’ve gone to visit two of the three places in the BD pamphlet that those doctors gave you. But I only liked one of them, and there’s still a third to go see. I’ll keep you posted.”She tapped his hand a few times with hers, to emphasize the promise. Or to gauge the chemistry between them.

  In the two weeks after the mattress incident, she’d kept her visits brief and their interactions dry and formal, but the looks they’d cast each other were a language all their own, and his eyes heard her eyes just fine.

  Or they heard what he wanted them to hear.

  Wait.

  SOME NIGHTS SHE’D come by in the evening to keep Lee company. But Lee didn’t want company. He didn’t need it. Cohen had hooked cable up to the TV in Lee’s bedroom, and that TV was the only thing Lee wanted from the world. If someone came into his room and talked during a show, he’d snarl like a dog, scratch at the air, Get Away.

  On one of the nights Lee had cast her from his bedroom, Allie made herself a cup of tea, said to Cohen, sitting at the kitchen table peering down his microscope, “His show’s over in fifteen minutes. Might as well wait it out.”

  “Yeah, but then another show starts: i. e., another reason to yell at anyone breaching the ten-foot radius around his TV. It’s gotten to the point I lay his meals by the door like he’s a prisoner. Or a dog.”

  “Tea?” she said.

  “Sure, thanks. There’s a box of Earl Gray—”

  “I know where it is,” she said. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she caught a look at the website opened on Cohen’s laptop which was sitting on a section of the kitchen counter he’d converted into a makeshift desk.

  “I’m nosey, and you know it, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask about...this?” She turned the computer screen towards him. The headline, Adoption in Canada.

  He laid his tweezers down, caught.

  “Wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “You’re...are you serious, about adopting?” She smiled, for some reason, looking very excited he’d say yes. “I’ve heard it’s easier to fly to the moon than adopt a child though, right?”

  “Basically. And being single doesn’t help. But that’s only the start of my barriers.”

  “My God! So you’re serious about this!” She was thrilled. “You’d be Daddy of the Year,man! You’re so great with kids. You’d raise the best little people...ever.”And she was finally talking to him again. Guard down, warm, the way he liked her. She was at the table, leaning on it with both arms, to look him square in the eye. “Boy or girl?”

  “You don’t really get to choose. It’s not like a pet shop where you point and pick.”

  “Take what you can get, hey?”The kettle whistled and she tended to it. “So, knocking a woman up the old fashion way is too roundabout for you?” She laughed, fishing their teabags out of a box and throwing them into their mugs.

  “Long story, but there’s an adopted kid at my work. We’ve got an afterschool program now, and I was running it for a while. The kid stole my heart, basically. Coolest little guy you’d ever meet. Honestly. His father’s a dud, and he’s shipping him off to Florida. To live with his grandmother. Broke my heart and got me thinking, I guess. I’m cruising through my thirties, and I’ve always wanted a kid. Just one.”

  “Sounds to me you want this boy. What’s his name?”

  “Zack.”

  She came back to the table. Laid their teas down.

  “But like I said, you don’t get to pick and choose. You just hope you get a kid like Zack.”

  “Or you make the kid as cool as Zack. That’s what good parents do! Mould and shape their offspring like potters at a wheel. This is exciting,Cohen!”

  She laid her hand on his again for a moment. Tapping it like, Way to make such a big life decision. But she went cold, fast, said, “Keith doesn’t want kids. And he’s not amendable on the matter.”

  She shifted back in her seat. Their legs met under the table and neither of them moved. Their eyes met. The look on her face softened his bones as he sat there. She started rocking her leg, against his, in a way that seemed like she was only rocking her leg.

  Lee burst out of his room. It was at the back of the kitchen. “I want some food. There’s a movie coming on!”

  Allie shot up. “Is it something we can watch together? I’ll make us some popcorn, on the stove.”

  SHE CAME BY a few nights after that. With a movie she thought Lee might like. Cohen was at his makeshift desk at the kitc
hen counter and recognized the way she enters a house. With patience, and grace, like taking your shoes off was an event you didn’t need to rush. She’d lay them side by side out of everyone’s way. And then she’d be loud about tearing a hanger off a rack for her jacket. He heard her out there that night, and he anticipated her coming into the kitchen.

  She had a way of foregoing hellos and cutting right into the chase of a conversation. “I’ve been thinking about you adopting, Cohen. I’d be so happy for you. A little boy or girl. You building them from scratch!”She was standing behind him, an arm on his shoulder, being nosey about the email he was composing to Clarence. It was to let Clarence know he might be working from Lee’s longer than expected.

  Allie’s beauty was something he could sense. It didn’t require him turning around and seeing her. It didn’t require eyes, though he’d caught a glimpse of her reflected in his computer screen, reading his email. “I’m not definitely adopting, and if I apply, there’s a very slim chance I’d be considered anyway. Then there’s the waiting game. Takes forever.”

  “Classic Cohen attitude,” she said, pouring two glasses of Pepsi: one for her, one for Lee.

  “You seem confident he’ll let you watch that movie with him.”Cohen nodded to the DVD on the countertop.

  “I was talking to him earlier. We made a date. He’s game. And listen. I couldn’t help read your email there,” she nodded to his computer screen, “telling Clarence you’re going to be working from here another while yet. This is getting ridiculous, I know, and I’m sorry. I’ll go meet with that other care home A-S-A-P.” She walked to Lee’s room with the glasses of Pepsi and the DVD tucked under an arm.

  Cohen got back to typing his email, but heard Lee shouting right away, “Fuck off! Go on! Go, get out of here!” Lee had gotten up off his bed and chased her out of the room like she was deaf, dumb. “I know what you’re up to! Trying to take my house from under me!”

  She backed away from him, scared, and Cohen got between them.

  “Lee, no!”

  “Well Keith is. What’s the difference? Keith is trying to take my house!”

  “What?

  ”

  He went back into his room. Shut the door. There was the sound of furniture being dragged around as if he was barricading himself in there. She went to his room, pushed the door open to confront him, but he pushed back, jamming her hand in the doorframe. And she cried about that, blaming the pain for the tears as she wrapped ice cubes in a dishtowel and brought it to her fist. Lee hadn’t even reacted to her yelp, after he hurt her hand. He simply walked away like he’d proven his point. Sat on his bed. Blared the TV even louder.

  Allie and Cohen sat at the kitchen table, staring at her slightly swollen knuckle. Her tears like flecks of glass in that light. “He’s such an asshole now!”And her guilt for saying so had kicked a triplet of sobs out of her throat. She looked vulnerable, isolated. Alone. So he put an arm around her. For the first time in six years. And that current, that voltage, was still there. “May as well watch the movie anyway” she said, sniffing that distinctive end-of-a-cry sniff.

  “Fuck that asshole!” Cohen said. “Let’s make popcorn and not offer him any!”

  She laughed and offered him the glass of Pepsi she’d poured for Lee, and he took it.

  They sat on the sofa together, and she said, “He’s not even there anymore, you know? In that room, in that body. He’s not even there anymore.”

  She was okay by the end of the movie. Popcorn. Two hands, one bowl.

  “Keith hates these kinds of movies,” she said, halfway through the film, during a sex scene, because one of them had to say something to cut through their own sexual tension. “He’s a car blowing up and flipping over forty times kind of movie guy. Vin Diesel and Rambo and shit.”

  But Cohen referenced the scene in the movie they were watching. “Do men actually do that?” he pointed at the screen. “Rip a woman’s bra off? Aren’t bras like twenty bucks a pop?”

  She laughed. “This from a guy who can’t even unhook a woman’s bra. If someone tore my favourite bra off, I’d slap the bastard and bill him for it.”

  All four of their feet were up on the coffee table that night. Heels plunked down, toes pointing up, legs spread so that their lower halves were Vs. Vs that made aW though: her right-foot toes resting against his left-foot toes.

  When she was leaving that night, he walked her to the porch. Grabbed her jacket, held it, so she could get her arms in. “Lemme see that knuckle,” he said, and the swelling had gone down.

  “I know he needs to be in a facility,” she said, and the first thing Cohen thought was, But that means no more of this, us. She bent over to grab a shoe, laid a hand on Cohen’s shoulder for balance. “But I mean, he’s fed, he’s looked after, right? He must be happier here, in his own home. If he treats us like shit, I can only imagine how he’d react to a bunch of strangers, the nurses and doctors and other patients.”

  “Exactly.”

  IT WASN’T LONG before she’d started coming over for no good reason—no more excuses—and lingering longer. Keith spent half his time travelling and the other half at the office. And she never liked being alone.

  Cohen got out of the shower one day and came down over the stairs, pulling his shirt on, to find Allie in the kitchen. “There you are!” she said, as if she’d been combing the whole city for him. She was holding a tomato, pointing to it, “What’s this?”

  He screwed up his face, perplexed, “What do you mean? It’s…half of a tomato.”

  “No,” she said, peeling a sticker off of the tomato. “This?”

  He looked at her like she’d lost her mind, and she said, as if he’d cheated her out of something, “This is grocery store tomato.” She shook her head and grabbed the handle of the back door. “Go get your shoes. Get mine too? Lee’s got this amazing heated greenhouse.”

  Walking through the yard she filled him in. “He’d let his greenhouse go to hell, but I cleaned it up two summers ago. I got it all in order, heaters and everything. Spiders and sticky tape so it’s pesticide free. It’s rigged so that I can get red, ripe tomatoes by June.” June! she’d said, raising her eyebrows like, Holy shit, right?

  “Those tomatoes from the grocery store, I mean, they’re so sour or tasteless or rotten because they’re shipped here all the way from…Mexico, sometimes.”

  They got to the greenhouse and she tugged open the bulky wooden door. It caught and skipped on the ground. She had to wrestle with it as it dug into the grass. It seemed rehearsed and habitual, the way she got the door opened, just enough to get in behind it, and shoulder butt it the rest of the way open.

  There were glass shelves covered in pots, stray soil, and white balls of fertilizer, and potted plants hanging from the ceiling. There were little strips of masking tape on all the pots with Allie’s handwriting scribbled on them. Looping Ls, Os no bigger than periods. The dot on her i in dill was more like a sideways line than dots. Dill, zucchini, tomato, grapes (Please Grow!), mint, garlic.

  She said, “Isn’t this place amazing?” as if they were standing in the middle of a picturesque jungle and Tarzan might just come leaping out from behind her tomato plants. She grabbed a small and rickety wooden chair. The chair had been painted army green—at least ten years ago, judging from the state the paint job was in—and climbed up on it. She had a serious, goal-oriented look of concentration on her face as she reached for the tomatoes, tugging them off a vine and lobbing them down to Cohen. Her tongue poking out past her lips sometimes. A little rustle of leaves every now and then. There was a herbaceous smell on the plump tomatoes in his hand, like cut grass and mortared parsley.

  Allie climbed down off the chair, handed Cohen a Tupperware container to lay the tomatoes in, and got to looking around for something. He had no idea what, but she couldn’t find it and wouldn’t give up. She was poking around like a burglar in a rush. He’d seen her look in the same place twice. Move things around. And then she smirked a lit
tle.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The package the tomato seeds came in. It had a funny comic on it. I wanted to show you. They’re called Alicante tomatoes. Get it? Allie Can-tay. Me and Lee, we were pretty excited about our tomato operation, the first year we got it up and running. So we started calling them Allie Can’t Say tomatoes or Allie Can’t Stays. All sorts of lunch-time puns. I’d say, Sorry, Lee, I gotta go and he’d say, Allie Can’t Stay? Before, you know, he changed.”

  She took a tomato out of the Tupperware and held it like it was a baseball. She brought it to his mouth. “Here. Taste this. You won’t believe it!” She got impatient when he didn’t bite into it. She stamped on one of his feet. “Take a bite!”

  “It’s a tomato. You’re acting like it’s an apple. I can’t just bite into it. It’ll...squirt everywhere.”

  She stomped his toes again, out of impatience, and moved the tomato closer to his mouth: the skin just shy of his face. He tilted his head left and right and back and forth, contemplating the best way to sink his teeth in, and he did. A spray into his mouth, a burst of flavour. Pale red liquid dribbling over her hand, and she licked it off the backs of her fingers, saying, “See!

  Amazing right?”

  And it was.

  “Holy shit.” Chewing it, “Best tomato ever. Honestly.”

  She took a bite out of the other side and more liquid squirted out. Some of it dribbling out of the corner of her mouth. He saw her throat drinking the juice down; another burst of red gushing out of the bite he’d taken from the other side. Her sucking her fingers clean.

  “Oh, there it is!”And they both looked to the pack of seeds resting against the wall. Flecks of dried soil caked onto it. She laid the half-eaten tomato back in the Tupperware container.

  She shook her hand dry and Cohen saw a seed fly off behind her. She reached for the packet, but a makeshift shelf at her shins forced her to lean forward, lunge, and miss. Her fingertips had knocked it into the gap between the shelf and the wall. It fell to the ground, in behind that clunky wooden shelf at her shins.