by Rose, Katia
I nod. “Sorry again about the limes.”
She waves my apology away. “You did great tonight.”
I’m about to head for the back again before I add, “Oh and heads up, I think they’re about to run out of potatoes back there.”
She looks up from the rum and coke she just finished. “Non. You’re kidding me.”
“Unfortunately not.”
“Tabarnak,” she swears, “that is going to fuck some shit up.”
Dylan’s thoughts exactly.
I leave her shaking her head in disbelief and brace myself for entering the back of house again. It wouldn’t surprise me if Dylan and Zach were still standing where I left them, contemplating just how much of a creep I am.
What does surprise me is when I get two steps down the hallway and am met by Dylan stepping out of the office, looking much more happy to cross paths than he did by the fridge.
“Did you punch out yet?”
“I...no,” I stammer.
“Good. Grab your coat. We’re going to the grocery store.”
Six
Dylan
ALLUSION: An indirect literary reference to a person, place, thing, or event
“We look like those little old ladies who go out power walking on Sunday mornings.”
Renee’s laugh comes out in a puff of breath as we both strain our shins speed-walking along the crowded sidewalk of Avenue Mont-Royal.
“Now we just need matching tracksuits,” she pants.
“I want a shiny purple one.”
She laughs again, and a very messed up part of me with no grasp on socially acceptable behaviour wants to record the sound so I can play it again and again. She laughs like music, like wind chimes and clock tower bells.
“You sure you’re okay to stay this late?” I ask for what feels like the tenth time.
“I told you, it’s fine. It’s not even that late. It’s barely eight o’clock.”
“God, I hope this place is still open,” I grumble as a group of tipsy college girls gets in our way.
“It’s open, Dylan. I told you I already checked Google Maps.”
I’m being insane. I’m being a fucking maniac. I should be back at the bar, admitting that I screwed up and dealing with the consequences of my actions. Instead, I’m going to blow a ridiculous amount of money on grocery store potatoes that will only save us a couple dozen orders before we run out for good.
I just couldn’t take the weight of all those disappointed faces in the kitchen. Not yet. Not until I can stand in front of them knowing I did everything I could to make this right.
“Screw this. How’s your sprint, Renee?”
She squints at me as sorority row continues to teeter on their heels in front of us.
“My sprint?”
“We’re sprinting. Three-Two-One-Go!”
I dodge the girls and tear off up the sidewalk, letting out a deep laugh when I hear Renee’s lighter strides catch up beside me.
“People...are...staring,” she pants.
From somewhere in the line of a bar beside us, a guy shouts, “Run, Forrest, run!”
“Important diplomatic business!” I call. “No need to panic, citizens!”
“Dylan!” Renee does her best to hiss her disapproval as she jogs after me. “Slow down!”
“I can see it!” I don’t slow down in the slightest. “It’s right there! I’m gonna beat you to the door.”
“Oh no, you are not.” Her voice takes on a dangerously competitive edge, and before I know it, she’s blasting past me full tilt and careening towards the revolving door up ahead.
I could probably catch up to her, but I don’t. I just watch as I jog along in her wake, my eyes tracking her shape as it darts between gaps in the crowd. Her hair bounces against her back, forever slipping out of its ponytail. She gets to the door and slaps the brick wall of the building before turning around and throwing her arms up in the air.
“People are staring,” I mock when I finally meet up with her.
She continues jumping up and down in victory. “I’m okay with the staring if it’s because I’m a winner.”
She exaggerates the last word with a toss of her head and beams at me.
How could anyone not stare? She makes the blue light shining down from the Marché sign above us look like a spotlight set up just for her. It tints her skin and paints her teeth in indigo. I watch it catch on the whites of her eyes, reflect on her pupils as they lock with mine.
The tinny sound of a pop song is rattling out of the store’s speakers, but for the next few seconds, I don’t hear anything—save for the rush of blood in my ears as her smile slips and her eyes get even bigger.
“Dylan?” I watch her lips move for a moment before my brain catches up and recognizes my name.
“Huh?”
“Potatoes, Dylan. We should go get the potatoes.”
I swear I can’t even remember what a potato is until she turns to lead the way through the store’s entrance.
“Should we get a cart?” Renee asks. “A basket?”
“Uh...” I do my best to fire up my synapses. “A basket. We can’t take more than we can carry anyway.”
We each grab one of the black plastic baskets and head for the produce section. It’s a small store, more somewhere you go to grab last minute staples than do your big monthly shop.
“Um, Dylan?” Renee comes around from the other side of the display I’m standing beside. “I found the potatoes.”
“Okay, great. Let’s start grabbing them.”
She doesn’t move. She looks like she’s about to tell me my cat died.
Only I don’t have a cat.
“What is it?”
“It’s just...It looks like they have, um, four.”
I squint at her. “Four what?”
“Four...potatoes.”
In what feels like it must be slow motion, I round the corner of the display.
There’s the potato bin. There are the potatoes.
One, two, three, four.
“Renee, there are only four potatoes.”
“Um, yes.” She appears at my side, speaking with the hesitation of someone asking a psychopath to put the gun down nice and slow. “Yes, there are four.”
I snort. Then I chuckle. Then I’m howling.
“Four potatoes.” I have to put my basket down and brace my hands on my knees. “We came all this way for four fucking potatoes.”
“We sprinted for four fucking potatoes.”
Renee’s laughing nearly as hard as me now. Her basket hits the floor too, and she grips the edge of the bin with one hand while clutching her stomach.
“It’s not...even...that...funny,” she gasps.
“No, no it’s really not.” I shake my head and suck in a huge breath before holding it, trying to get myself under control.
Then we mistake of looking at each other, and the manic laughter starts all over again.
“Four!” It’s the only explanation I can offer to the man who pushes his cart up beside us and stares. “Only four of them!”
He wheels his cart away. Renee is practically on the floor now.
“You’re insane!” she accuses.
“You’re insane!” I shoot back. “Look at you. You can hardly stand up.”
She throws her head back to stare at the ceiling and begs, “Why are there only four potatoes?”
I don’t know how long we stand—or try to stand—like that for. It really shouldn’t be funny, but it’s like everything I’ve felt since starting this job has finally found a point of release, like a pinprick of relief ripping itself into a widening tear.
“Excusez-moi.”
We’re both still trying to learn how to breathe again when a store clerk makes his way over, a bar above his nametag declaring he’s the manager.
“We do not permit intoxicated people on the premises,” he announces in French.
It shouldn’t make me laugh. It really shouldn’t, but of course
it does.
“We—we’re not d—drunk,” Renee stammers, also in French, before she gives in and laughs too.
We’re being herded to the exit seconds later, still trying to defend our sobriety as we continue to snort after every second word.
“Well, I can safely say that’s the first time I’ve been kicked out of a grocery store,” I announce after the first hit of cold night air starts to calm us down.
“Oh really?” Renee asks. “That’s the third time for me.”
I do a double take. “You’re joking.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
She flashes a blue-lit smile.
“I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.”
She doesn’t answer, just starts leading the way down the sidewalk. We should be jogging back— tonight just got a lot more complicated at Taverne Toulouse, and as the manager, I should never have left in the first place—but neither of us seems to have it in us.
I drag a hand down my face as we pass a souvenir shop that’s closed for the night. Maple flavoured candy and wooden moose statues sit in the darkened window display.
“Monroe is going to kill me,” I admit. Maybe it’s unprofessional, but professionalism is a lost cause for tonight. “Even Zach might get in on my murder, and that dude would literally not hurt a fly.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Once there was this wasp in the bar, and—”
“No,” Renee interrupts. “Why do you think they’re going to kill you?”
“I fucked up.” The words are out before I can consider stopping them. “I keep fucking up.”
“How long have you been the manager?”
I can see where she’s going with this, but it’s not an excuse. It’s not something I can console myself with.
“Long enough that I shouldn’t be making these kinds of mistakes.”
We separate to let a big group move between us and then join together again. Her arm is close enough that our sleeves would brush if either of us made the slightest change in where we’re stepping. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as charged before, as aware of someone else when they’re near me.
The heat running from my shoulder to my fingertips is a reminder to step away. Heat is dangerous. Heat burns. Whatever else I might be feeling for her, the last thing I want is to burn this girl.
“Everyone really likes you, Dylan.” Her voice drops lower, but I resist the urge to move closer. “I know I haven’t worked there long, but I can tell. It was the same at the poetry workshops. You...People like you.”
She sounds like she wants to go on, but she stops herself.
“Thanks.”
I let the words sink in. I thought she didn’t want to acknowledge how we met. The way she tensed up in the office the other day told me the subject was off the table, and I haven’t brought it up since. I wasn’t planning to ever bring it up again. If she wanted to forget about everything and start over as strangers, I was willing to follow her lead.
It was probably the smarter choice, anyway.
Only she’s just admitted she hasn’t forgotten. The way we laughed tonight, the way she’s always got a comeback for me, the way just a sentence from her can turn my whole perspective on its head—it’s all a reminder of those days at the library workshops, of the nights I’d see her at slams, the times I’d watch her get on a stage and let her words pour out in a river that could swallow the whole world up in a flood.
I didn’t think of her like this—there was no heat, no bristling awareness of her body—but I did see her. I saw that she was special. I saw that she was rare.
I see all that and more now. I want to go deeper than the surface. I want more than the sassy comebacks and sarcastic jokes. I want to get to know her, to get more than a glimpse of the fractured and fascinating person underneath. I want to know the good stuff, the bad stuff, what she’s ashamed of, what keeps her up at night. I have the outline, and I want to colour her in.
“It’s too bad,” I joke, doing my best to steer us back to safer waters, “that this job takes more than people liking me.”
“Maybe you have the wrong job.”
I stop moving so fast someone bumps into me, swears, and swerves to other side of the sidewalk. I stay where I am. Renee is already a few metres ahead when she realizes I’m not beside her.
No one has ever told me that before.
The few people I’ve let in on the fact that things aren’t going so hot at Taverne Toulouse—namely Monroe, Zach, and a couple of my friends from the poetry scene—have all tried to reassure me with the same affirmations: “It’s just an adjustment period,” “You’ll get the hang of it soon,” “Have a little faith in yourself.” No one has asked me to consider the fact that maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.
Is it?
“You okay?” Renee backtracks to where I’m standing and stares up at me. “You look like you just got a huge splinter in your foot or something.”
I stamp my feet on the pavement. “Splinter free, I think. Let’s keep moving.”
I catch her glancing at my face a few times, like she can hear just how hard the gears are turning in my head.
“I’ve been at Taverne Toulouse for over three years,” I find myself explaining. “It got me out of that construction job I had with my cousin’s company. You remember the poem I wrote about that?”
She answers with a grimace that tells me she remembers exactly how much I loathed that job.
“I thought I was going to work there until I died or my back broke. Not that it isn’t a job worth respecting, but...it wasn’t where I wanted to be.”
Her eyebrows wrinkle. It’s cute—far too cute. “So why did you stay so long?”
This is the part of the story I always come back to, the part I rarely ever share.
“I...I don’t really know,” I lie. “All I know is that it was slowly draining everything worth saving out of me. If I hadn’t had poetry...I don’t even know.”
I can still hear the rattle of machinery around me, hear the patter of rain on my hardhat as I wore my hands down into calloused lumps digging hole after hole in the ground. That’s about all I was qualified to do. All the guys knew why my cousin gave me the job, why it took a family connection for me to even get a job, and they weren’t quiet about it.
Hey, drug lord.
That’s how they’d greet me on site.
“It was a pretty dark time, but poetry...It’s like the one place where I can always feel like me, you know? It always makes sense.”
Renee nods, eyes fixed on the pavement.
“One night after a slam, a bunch of us ended up at Taverne Toulouse. It was still a student bar back then—a really trashy one too, but even then...Well, you’ve been there. Somehow, you walk in, and everything is...”
“Okay,” Renee finishes for me. “At least, that’s how I feel when I’m there. I feel like, maybe just for a little bit, everything is okay.”
“That’s it,” I agree. “That’s exactly it. It’s not like everything is amazing and all your problems instantly go away, but you feel more like you can handle them, like they’ve got less of a hold on you. At least, that’s usually how I feel...”
We walk in silence for a few moments. I can see the bar’s sign coming into view up ahead.
“Shit, this conversation took a turn for the depressing,” I try to joke.
Renee just shakes her head. “Not every conversation has to be easy. There’s this...This thing someone told me once. He said, ‘I don’t want your small talk. I want your words.’”
I swear it’s like someone slams a load of bricks into my chest.
She remembered.
I used to drill that into the kids at my workshops, hoping it would stick, hoping I could teach them they had words worth saying, words people should take the time to hear. That’s what saves you when the world feels like it’s doing its best to block you out.
“Why are you doing this job, Dylan?
Really?”
We’ve stopped moving again, but this time instead of picking the pace back up, we step to the edge of the sidewalk and lean against the window of an empty cafe.
“I just...” I close my eyes. I find the words. “I can’t let anyone down. Not again.”
She doesn’t say anything. Why would she? Everything about this is inappropriate. I shouldn’t be confiding in her.
I’m about to stammer out an apology when she speaks.
“I’m trying to decide if keeping this job makes you stronger or weaker, but the truth is, I don’t know.” She stares across the street, eyes fixed on something I’m sure no one but her can see. “I want to tell you that doing something just because you’re scared of what people will think if you don’t is a terrible idea, but...but who the hell am I to say anything about that?”
She smiles, but it’s not the one I like. It’s not the one that feels like it’s lighting me up.
“What do you mean?”
“I...” More pain that I ever thought she could hold flashes across her face before it’s gone, so fast I can’t even be sure what I saw. “It doesn’t matter. Maybe you’re stronger for staying. Maybe I just gave up too soon.”
“Renee...”
This is the moment I would reach for her. In some alternate universe, we stand on this shadowed sidewalk, and I pull her into my arms.
Here and now, we jump away from each other, suddenly aware of how many lines we’ve just crossed.
“I’m sorry. It’s been a ...weird night.” Renee runs her hands up and down her arms, looking anywhere but at me. “I shouldn’t have said all that.”
I want to reassure her, thank her, tell her just how bad I want to stand here talking to her all night, but she’s right.
“I’m the one who shouldn’t have said things. I...I’m your manager.” I know I must be imagining things, but I swear the statement makes her wince. “It was unprofessional of me. I apologize. If you want to head out now, I can punch you out. I appreciate you staying late.”
“Yeah.” Her voice sounds hollow. “You’re welcome.”
I watch her for as long as I dare as she makes her way up to the metro station.