Every Little Thing Read online

  “Good man,” Cohen said.

  “I don’t know about that.” Arms crossed, looking down, shaking his head diagonally. “No one listens to me bitching. And the frustrating part is no one should have to protect a supposedly protected area like Bird Rock. Anyway, like I said, go on, get, you’re blocking off my table.”He waved his hand around to insinuate a mob of people were trying to get a look at his goods. The street was empty. Entirely empty. Tumbleweeds in Western movies empty.

  “C’mon, Cohen.” She tugged at his arm. He went soft whenever she touched him. He felt pathetic about that. Like she could sense that inner trembling. He bent to tie a shoelace as Allie stepped into her car.

  With Allie out of earshot, he said to Lee, “We’re not actually together together,Allie and me.”

  “Wha?”

  “You keep calling me her boyfriend. A little awkward.”

  Lee raised an eyebrow. Just one. His eyes were the colour of blue Bic pens. “I think she’s waiting for you, kid.” And when Cohen turned around to walk away,Lee said, “You mean to tell me you’d say no to a girl like that?” He nodded to Allie in the car, buckling in.

  “Well, no, just that we’re not, like...we’ve only just met—”

  “What are you, five years old or something? Do yourself a favour and win her over, Colin. It can’t be that hard. Like I said, her last boyfriend was a dimwit, dull as beige. And her bright as yellow. She clearly doesn’t expect much from a guy. And that dipshit boyfriend she had left her when trying to console her about her mother’s cancer got old and boring. Like a proper dickhead would. Now go on, kid, she’s had the car running for two minutes now. I’m choking on her exhaust here, and you’re blocking off my table. Go!”

  “My name’s Cohen, by the way. Not Colin.”

  “Whatever. You know who I’m talking to, don’t you?”

  He picked a knife back up off the table and started whittling a fresh block of wood into another lighthouse.

  COHEN GOT IN the car, and she apologized.

  “People around here sort of buy things off Lee, like his little carvings he does, to help him out. He’s tried stained glass too. He doesn’t need need the money, but he sort of does. Half the time, people don’t display what they buy off of him. In their houses, I mean. He pretends not to notice when he visits them.”

  She was talking with her head down, afraid Lee was a lip-reader. “I pretty much give Lee a bunch of photos to sell every month. There’s a lot of sales to tourists in the summer, and he needs the money more than I do. But the rest of those photos in the trunk are for The Craft Shoppe.”

  She lifted her head back up, looked at Lee, and put it back down, fastening her seatbelt. “Anyway, if Lee offers to buy lunch,” she said, rooting a hand around in her jeans pocket, “tell him it’s on you.” She stuck a twenty and a ten-dollar bill in his hand. “That’s for my and Lee’s lunch. He’d never let me pay, but he’ll take your money no problem.” She laughed about that, staring back at Lee in the rear-view mirror as she drove towards The Craft Shoppe.

  “He’s an interesting guy. Sweet and witty. He, ah…He was also a prisoner of war. For years. In the Philippines. Can you imagine? Years. Starving and wasting away like a stray cat. Malaria and everything. Watching your friends die or be killed. Besides all that, when it was over, and he came home from the war, he couldn’t find his parents. His father’s job had him moving around a lot by necessity. He says he figures they assumed he died, but I assume they were never that close. That there was some tension there. A story I’ll never know. I mean, sure, it wasn’t like these days where you can find people online, but still. You’d try hard enough, and you’d find them, wouldn’t you? No one loses their son. After the war, Lee ended up here, in Grayton of all places, even though he’s from The States.”

  She’d finished her story and looked at him like he should be impressed by it. A slow nod, pressing her chin into her chest. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. He looked out his window, following the sagging U of power lines between telephone poles as Allie drove down the street. She was so intent on the road when she drove, so alert and paranoid, that he wanted to yell boo.

  “There’s a fantastic hike up by Bird Rock. Wanna do that, once I drop these photos off? Before lunch?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “There’s petrels and razorbills out there. And those cute little dovekies. And I saw a cormorant out there once too.”

  “Must have been a double-crested—”

  “Aren’t you impressed?”

  He looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “I mean, aren’t you impressed that I like birds so much?”

  His face folded into sarcastic grin. “Cormorants, hey?Why are women so impressed by big birds?”

  “Grow up,” she said, and she hit him. “But. Did you know there’s actually a bird called a blue-footed Booby? I mean, booby, c’mon, right?”

  “Actually, there’s three boobys, in the genus Sula, and the term, booby, is innocent. It means clumsy, in Portuguese or something, because boobys look clumsy on land.”

  “Who the fuck knows something like that?”

  “Now who’s immature?”

  It was a forty-five-minute walk out to Bird Rock from the parking lot, but Allie said she knew a shortcut through the woods. Five minutes into her shortcut, the spaces between the trees were getting closer and closer until they had to sidestep through crusty and closely spaced spruce. The pokes from serrated sticks weren’t far off jabs from knives. Sometimes they’d have to duck under immoveable branches. They played limbo under one branch, and Allie won.

  Every couple of steps, he’d turn around and see her taking a picture of something. Sometimes him when he wasn’t looking. The snaps of her shutter. He liked the way she’d point the camera at something like it was the only thing on earth. And the way she’d pace around a thing, trying to find the right composition and light. Her tongue sometimes bit between teeth. At one point, he turned around and she was knelt into a patch of bright pink wildflowers, her camera in them like a bee. Without turning to face him, she shouted out an inquisitive, “Are these ones rare or anything?” not looking at him as she snapped the picture.

  “Bird’s eye primrose. Not common, not uncommon.”

  “What kind of answer is that,” she said, turning to face him as she launched herself up from her kneeling.

  The army of branches had already hitched Cohen’s shirt twice, as warning, before a third one took action and cut the back of his neck deeply enough that Allie winced when he showed her and asked her how bad it was. No words, just a wince, and she offered him some tissues from her purse.

  “Are you sure about this detour? I mean, maybe we should turn around. Unless...you have a machete in your bag and want to clear the way.”He put a hand up, Look at all these trees. He turned around and Allie was right there; she brought her lips to his. Put a hand on his face to make the kiss count.

  She pressed her body into him, leaned hard, so he’d know to lay down on the ground, and she crawled on top of him. There were tufts of lichens crunching under his head; twigs like dull forks in his ass and elbows, and she was wrestling his pants off, impatient with his belt. She left his shirt on, and scooped a hand up her skirt to shed her underwear.

  Her skirt curtained over his knees and belly, rising and falling, up and down. And then she took it all off: all of her bare there in front of him. His hands on her hips. She fell forward, planted her hands on the forest floor; her hair dangling over him like a tunnel blocking out everything but her face. That smell of cinnamon or cloves: the first time he’d been close enough to notice it. She reached down and put one hand to use on her clit, finished first, everything tightening, that infinite exhale, as her hand, under his armpit, grabbed a fistful of dirt. She laughed, as she rolled over, like there was something funny about it. She knelt beside him, naked still, and did something fast with her hands, something practiced and to the point, that finished him off in a minute.


  There was nothing awkward about it as they dressed, and she was surprisingly nonchalant about being naked in broad daylight: the shadows of tree branches flickering over her body like TV static. She stepped into her orange panties; let the elastic snap hard as she took her thumbs away. He had his arms wrapped around her before she’d gotten her bra back on, for a waltzing, swaying bear hug. He ran a finger up her spine, ran it back down. The bumps and ridges of her backbone drumming through him.

  She laid her head sideways onto his shoulder. Whispered, “What?”

  “You’re...I mean. That was...I—”

  “Shh!”

  “That last bit. What was—”

  She was smiling when she broke free and tossed him his shorts. “Let’s not talk about it.”

  They hiked back to the trail and walked out to Bird Rock with their arms slung around each other like they’d been together for years.

  FILLING

  SPACES

  THREE MONTHS IN that jail and Allie hadn’t visited. Called. Sent a letter. There was supposed to be that much. A phone call, after the trial: her on the other end fidgeting with the phone cord. Sorry as hell and blubbering with remorse. A good person would have set the record straight with the police that night, and every night, that kept him awake.

  The judge had sentenced him to six months, and he wondered, as the gavel cracked down, if six months in prison meant 180 days or 183. And if he’d get out two days early because February was part of his sentence, and February only has twenty-eight days. Being sentenced that day in court, hearing guilty, sitting on that stone-hard stool, had felt like standing in freeway traffic and seeing a transport truck barreling towards him. Except the truck never hit him, and that unique split second of panic lasted longer than a split second. Longer than a day.

  They weren’t allowed pens in their cells, but a calendar was fine. He’d scratch the days off the glossy pages with a cracked bit of cement, small as a penny, he’d found in the corner of his cell. It was a satisfying midnight ritual that gave some small purpose to his day. Then he’d go stare, out that tiny window, at that tiny pond, waiting to be tired. And by the time he was tired, he was more hungry than he was tired, and robbed of another night’s sleep on account of the aching hunger. Rocking back and forth, tossing and turning, worried about mortgage payments now that he was out of a job. His RRSPs could only get him through a year.

  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 we
re 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.