Glass Half Full

by Rose, Katia

  “Hey, you know what would make you feel better?”

  “What?”

  “A delicious and visually pleasing aҫai bowl! I need to make a new Insta post, and I’ll let you eat it after.”

  “Wow, Michelle, that really means a lot.”

  I know that in my sister’s world, it actually kind of does.

  “Trust me,” she urges as she pushes herself up off the floor, “this is going to turn your whole day around. Maybe even your whole life!”

  I smile to myself as she starts banging around the kitchen, grabbing ingredients from the cupboards. My whole day already has turned around, but it’s not because of perfectly portioned superfoods.

  It’s because of my sister. Finally, after years of that gap growing between us, I know that whether it’s with kitten Band-Aids or Insta-worthy food porn, we’ll always have each other’s backs.

  Twenty

  Dylan

  APHORISM: A literary statement characterized by its witty and concise expression of a widely accepted truth

  Can you meet me for coffee tomorrow morning?

  I stare down at Monroe’s text for what must be the twentieth time today. She sent it yesterday. I already replied. We’re meeting in fifteen minutes, and yet I keep scrolling back to the message.

  I have never met Monroe for coffee in my life. All of our meetings take place at the bar. Sure, I’d consider her a friend, and sure, we’ve hung out at a few events outside work, but we do not meet for coffee.

  This has to mean something, and it probably isn’t good.

  I even Googled ‘what does it mean when your boss asks you to get coffee’ last night. The results were not insightful. I’m going in blind.

  I show up a few minutes early and decide to go ahead and order for myself. The place is average size for a cafe, with wood panelled walls and big front windows to let the light in. They have all these colourful knitted pillows on the chairs.

  Renee would like it here.

  The thought is followed by a pang I should be familiar with after the last few days, but it threatens to send me doubling over just the same.

  I’ve been a coward. She wasn’t on for many shifts this week, and I purposefully arranged to be out running manager errands or on call when she was there. I told myself it was for her benefit, that I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, but really I just don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do the next time I’m in a room with her. I don’t know how much time I can buy myself before I find an answer. I don’t even know if there is an answer.

  “Un Americano, s’il vous plait,” I order from the barista.

  Even ordering coffee makes me think of Renee. Every fucking thing makes me think of Renee. I thought I was making the right choice, but I’ve never had a right choice feel so wrong. Difficult, sure. Dubious, yeah. Gut wrenchingly, wake up in the dead of night covered in sweat kind of wrong? Never.

  Monroe arrives just as I’m sitting down at a table. It’s not even November yet, but she’s wearing her infamous puffy red winter jacket, the one that almost reaches to her knees—not that her height makes her knees particularly difficult to reach. She waves to me and motions that she’s going to order.

  “Esti, it’s cold.” She borrows a swear word from the Québécois after she’s got her drink and pulls off the arctic explorer jacket before settling into the chair across from me. “It’s going to be a chilly Halloween. I don’t know if that will be better or worse for our party.”

  We’re having a big Halloween event at the bar in a few days, and part of me perks up at the notion that she may have invited me here for a planning session, but she breezes right past the subject.

  “So, one of the staff quit yesterday. She handed her resignation in to me.”

  Monroe watches me like a poker player looking for tells, and I know it’s pointless to try keeping my face blank. I’m sure I’ve already let the bolt of shock and pain her words send through me make itself known. It drives itself too deep inside me to pretend it’s not there.

  “Who?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

  Monroe stares at me for another long moment before she confirms what I was already certain of. Her answer shouldn’t make me flinch, but I still have to pull in a sharp inhale I’m sure she doesn’t miss.

  “Dylan,” she continues, “I know you probably want to protect her, but it’s really important that you tell me if anything happened between you and Renee that I should be worried about. She already quit. I’m not going to fire her. I’m not going to denounce her reputation from the rooftops of Montreal, okay?”

  The mental image is enough to make me huff out of a laugh and diffuse the slightest amount of tension.

  “You understand why I’m so concerned, right? If you’d both come to me and told me you were dating, I would have been open to finding a solution. We’re adults and professionals, and I trust the two of you enough that I think we could have found a way to make it work, but she quit. She quit, and I need to know why. I need to know if there’s anything else I should do about it.”

  Fuck.

  I let out a sigh.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  “Dylan?” Monroe prompts. “This isn’t, um, super encouraging.”

  I force myself to look up at her. “Sorry, I just...Fuck, I never wanted her to quit. This job means so much to her.”

  Monroe nods. “I could tell. Now listen to me. This is not an inquisition, okay? That’s why I asked you to meet me here instead of the office. I’m not just asking you as your boss. I’m asking as someone who genuinely cares about you and wants this to turn out as best as possible for everyone involved. So, what happened between you and Renee?”

  I brace myself with a sip of espresso and search for a starting point. Monroe is right; she needs to know.

  “We...developed feelings for each other,” I admit. “I kept it under control for a while. I knew she was off limits. I really didn’t think it would affect things at the bar. That was naive.”

  Monroe raises her shoulders an inch and tilts her head in a ‘ya think?’ gesture.

  “Part of me could tell she felt something too, but I tried to ignore it. Then at the reopening...She was in a bad place. She needed someone, and I couldn’t not help her. I care about her so fucking much, Monroe. Even if I never got the chance to be more than a friend to her, I would have felt lucky. The things she’s gone through, the way she’s overcome them, she’s just...incredible.”

  Monroe smiles, her eyes lighting with a bittersweet kind of sympathy, and rests her hand on my arm for a moment before she speaks. “So...at the reopening?”

  “At the reopening, we...we ended up kissing.” It feels weird to admit it; it’s not like Monroe and I dish about dates or anything, but I know it’s important for her to be aware of what happened. “After that, we knew we couldn’t pretend there was nothing between us anymore, but we also weren’t ready to announce it to everyone, so we backed off. We cooled things down and took it slow. We met up for some coffee dates, got to know each other better, then one day...I just realized, like, how the fuck could I think I’d be good for her? Here I am, continuously screwing up the first real position of responsibility I’ve had since...since jail, and here’s this fucking miracle of a woman who has so many good things ahead of her, and I’m just destroying her chance to have them. She shouldn’t date someone with a record. She shouldn’t have to worry about that. So I ended it. I told her I couldn’t do it, that she deserved so much more, and she quit. That’s what happened between us.”

  “Dylan.” Monroe reaches for my arm again. “I know you’re the poet here, but don’t you think ‘destroy’ is a pretty strong word?”

  I think about it before shaking my head. “No. Maybe? I don’t know. I do know my past isn’t ever going to stop popping up in my present, and it’s not a past I want to force on anyone else.”

  Monroe sighs and grabs her coffee, taking several long pulls like she’s going to need caffeine to
get her through whatever she says next.

  “Dylan, you can’t force something on someone if they’re willing to accept it, if they’re asking you to give it to them.” She pauses to let that sink in. “I don’t know exactly what happened to you when you were nineteen, but I’ve never based my judgement of your character on things you did when you were barely more than a teenager—not when I hired you, not when I promoted you, not in the almost four years I’ve had you as a member of my staff. When you first told me about your record, you spoke like someone who owned his mistakes, who learned from them, who was willing to prove they didn’t define him. That, above all else, is what made me take you on at the bar, and you didn’t let me down. The only time I’ve seen you let your past affect you is since you took the manager job. You doubt yourself. You measure yourself. You think you’re not enough. Why is that?”

  She asks the question in the same tone I used to give poetry prompts at my workshops: the tone that invites you to pause, to look deep, to find the answer behind the answer.

  No small talk.

  “I don’t want to let people down again,” I admit. “I’m fucking terrified of being a disappointment.”

  “Dylan, I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to forget I’m your boss for a second while you answer. Do you honestly enjoy being a manager?”

  I can’t help letting out a chuckle. “You know, you’re not the first person to ask me that.”

  “Maybe I should have asked you sooner,” she admits.

  “Here’s the thing. I...I think part of what I’ve liked so much about Taverne Toulouse is that it feels safe. It’s a home. It’s a haven. I think pretty much everyone who walks in the door feels that way, to some extent. It’s a place you can recharge, and maybe I’m...” The thought crosses my mind for the very first time as I speak it. “Maybe I’m done recharging.”

  Monroe nods like the idea is much less new to her than it is to me. I swear this woman must have lived a past life as some sort of mystical sage.

  “But that’s fucking terrifying,” I explain. “I’m an ex-convict. I should feel lucky just to have a job. I should feel lucky to have this stability. I shouldn’t be ready to throw it all away. I took the manager job thinking it was the right step for me, that it was what people expected of me and that because of that, it was what I should do.”

  Just like Renee going to England.

  I’ve never seen that parallel in our situations before, but it hits me now. She trusted other people’s expectations and aspirations more than she trusted herself.

  “So I fucked up,” I continue. “I took a job I should never have taken because I didn’t want to let people down, and then I let them down anyway. I let you down. I...I let Renee down.”

  Monroe picks up her coffee and chugs the rest of it down.

  “I’m about to be incredibly understaffed at the bar, aren’t I?” she asks dryly.

  I don’t have to say it. It’s clear I won’t be keeping my job. Even if I asked for it, she’d be insane to let me keep managing when I just said myself it was a mistake for me to even start.

  “You’ll stay on until I find a replacement, right?”

  I nod. “Of course, for as long as you need me.”

  It’s not like I have anywhere else to go. The overwhelming sense of being lost, of spinning in circles in the dark while searching for the way home, threatens to take hold of me the way it’s been doing ever since I watched Renee walk away.

  “Will you do me another favour?” Monroe asks.

  “Anything.” She sure as fuck deserves it.

  “Take a few days off. I’ll cover for you. I think you’ve got some...searching to do.”

  “Searching?” I repeat. “Sometimes I think you’re hiding your clairvoyant powers from us all. Are you sure you can’t see the future?”

  “You think I’d need to drink this much coffee if I could see the future? I’d know if we’ll turn a profit this quarter and wouldn’t be driving myself to insanity every night.”

  I shake my head. “Not buying it. I think you know more than you let on.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I nod.

  “Well in that case...Let me just say I don’t think you should write a shot with Renee off just yet.”

  My face falls. She might be able to see things way too clearly, but Monroe wasn’t there that day at McGill. She didn’t hear what was said, see what was lost.

  “Don’t go staring at me like a sad puppy,” Monroe orders. “You’re a grown ass man. That’s not going to get you anywhere. Do what I said and go searching. Sometimes my advice is actually pretty good.”

  “It’s always good,” I assure her, “and I’m grateful to have it.”

  * * *

  Turns out ‘searching’ leads me somewhere I haven’t set foot in almost a year: my old neighborhood. The day after my meeting with Monroe, I find myself getting off the bus just a block from the street I grew up on. The place has cleaned itself up a little over the past few years. The row houses still sport sagging front steps and mossy shingles peeling off like dead skin. There are still boarded up windows, and someone’s got a mouldy mattress taking up their whole front yard, but there are also houses with little gardens surrounded by chicken wire and carved pumpkins lining the laneways. One address is even decked out like a haunted house. No one bothered putting more than pumpkins out when me and my brother were kids. Everything else would have gotten stolen. Even the pumpkins usually got smashed.

  I usually only come here for Christmas. My family can at least pull itself together enough for that, although the tension creeps in from the second my brother and I arrive in the morning and grows to the point where we can barely sit through dinner. Every awkward moment and strained silence is just one more reminder that I did this. I ripped us apart.

  I don’t intend to knock on my mom’s door. I didn’t come here to bother her. I just came here to search, to walk the same sidewalks I did as a kid, to try finding that place in my memory I can point at and say, ‘This is what started it. This is where it all went wrong.’ Maybe I wouldn’t be so fucking terrified of screwing up again if I knew just what made me screw up in the first place.

  I kick a few dead leaves around as I make my way up the road. I’m getting closer and closer to our address. The place Kyle grew up isn’t far either. Every inch of pavement here holds stories, holds parts of what made me who I am.

  When I finally reach the house, I stop. The neighbours on either side aren’t so bad, but Mom’s tidiness still stands out. She’s always kept the place so tidy: tidy little front lawn trimmed every week, tidy flowerbox under the window already pruned back for winter, tidy polished numbers screwed to the tidy paint job on the front door. She’s not a neat freak by any means, but she likes to make a good impression. She always said living in a bad part of town didn’t give us an excuse to be bad people, and making the most of our shitty, poorly heated, kind of crooked home was just one of the ways she didn’t let herself be defined by her circumstances.

  I need to keep walking or somebody watching will think I’m casing the house and call the cops. There are a lot of people around here who don’t have much to do besides stare out between the gaps in their curtains all day. I’ve just turned away when I hear the door swing open.

  “Dylan?”

  My mom is pretty. She aged fast, much faster than she deserved. I can’t remember a time when she didn’t have silver strands in her hair, and the lines in her face run deep, but that doesn’t hide how pretty she is. You can see the Irish heritage in her pale skin and green eyes, and even wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, she’s got an undeniable grace to her.

  “What are you doing here, Dylan?”

  There’s no malice in her question, just surprise.

  “I, uh, I was...passing by.”

  She raises her eyebrows at me, challenging my lame excuse for an explanation, and pulls the door open wider.

  “Well, are you coming inside?”

 
I can’t walk away now, so I take the few steps up our little stone-lined laneway and follow her into the house.

  “I was just heating up some apple cider,” she tells me as I kick my shoes off. “Would you like some?”

  “Uh, sure. Yeah, that sounds nice.”

  Here comes the awkwardness, the inevitable reminder that I broke something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fix. She tells me to head into the living room and follows after with two mugs a few minutes later.

  “It looks great in here,” I comment.

  It really does. She’s upgraded all the furniture to brand new stuff from IKEA, and there’s a new light fixture hanging from the ceiling. The walls are a fresh shade of white.

  “I did it this summer,” she explains. “Have to keep myself busy living here all alone.”

  I’m hit with a fresh pang of guilt. She shouldn’t be alone so often. Peter, my brother, moved to Ottawa a few years ago and visits as much as he can, but it’s not much. I should be here more.

  I just don’t think she’d want me.

  “I like it,” I needlessly confirm. I have no idea what to say. I feel like something needs to happen, like something in me is straining to break free and make itself heard, but I can’t find its voice.

  “How are things at the bar?” Mom asks.

  “They’re good. We finally reopened. Things are really picking up.”

  Small talk. I fucking hate small talk. I don’t know what I came here to say, but it isn’t this.

  “Actually,” I begin, as my blood starts thumping in my ears, “I quit. I’m only staying there until they find a new manager, and then I’m leaving.”

  “Wow.” Mom sets her cider down on a coaster. “That’s big news. What are you doing next?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She stays silent, and I realize this is far from the dramatic revelation I hoped it would be. I quit my job, and I don’t have a new job. Of course my mother isn’t ecstatic for me.