Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  Jeremy told Benny that he respected his decision, then he poured out the last of the beer and made a toast: “To the Ice Shack, and to the inventor of ketchup chips.”

  “I broke that little prick’s nose for it,” Benny said.

  “Point taken.”

  A few weeks later, Jeremy stood out on the deck of the Shack, which didn’t yet have railings, and called his sister. Marie answered on the first ring, and told him right away that her pregnancy was giving her diarrhea, so he should not get upset if she had to hang up on him all of a sudden.

  “So when is that place of yours going to be up and running?”

  “A month. Month and a half, max.” That was the soonest he could afford to hire staff.

  “You’ve been talking about it for so long, I was starting to wonder.”

  “Wonder about what? That it would never happen?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it? Lots of places go belly up before they open their doors.”

  “I was actually calling to maybe get some encouragement. It’s been a rough week.”

  Jeremy picked up a length of unpainted wood, a slat for the railings. Pretty soon, there’d be tables and chairs where he was standing.

  “When were ketchup chips invented, do you know?” he asked her.

  “What’s that?”

  There was a squeal of voices on the other end, and Marie broke off to answer her husband, who was shouting something at her. It was already dark out – the bridge lights had come on, and Jeremy could see the glittering stripe of the river through the bare branches of the trees.

  “Look, are you asking me to tell you everything will be fine with your bar, that you’re a total winner?” she asked him, then the phone went dead. She must’ve dropped it or pushed the wrong button with her cheek.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Jeremy said into the sudden silence.

  * * *

  A framed photo from the Shack’s opening-night party hung on the wall behind the bar. Smaller photos – of parties and birthdays and playoff nights, all curled slightly with age – were pinned casually around it. Staff and customers held up bottles and glasses, grabbing each other around the neck, their mouths open or smiling, the flash giving them the glowing red eyes of demons. One of the bartenders called it their Zombie Gallery, and the name stuck. Most were from the first few years of the Shack’s existence. Jeremy kept saying they needed to start adding new ones – he had dozens of images waiting on his laptop, but couldn’t figure out how to extract them and get them printed.

  “Just as well, I guess. We don’t need any more pictures of me looking all hammered up.”

  In the opening night photo, Jeremy stood on a bar stool and struck a bodybuilder’s pose, his face red and his hair dripping with brightly coloured paper streamers. The staff got it framed for the bar’s one-year anniversary, upon which Jeremy attempted to recreate the image, and almost fell sideways through a table covered in party snacks.

  By the time the original picture was taken, Jeremy was oblivious to his surroundings. It was past midnight, and the party had been going officially since eight o’clock, though he’d been drinking on and off since noon, and only had a few bites of things as he ran through the kitchen throughout the day. He couldn’t keep anything solid down, his stomach and his head were floating free like balloons tied together by a long string. As the sun went down outside and people started to pack the place, he had a vision of the bar filling with dark water. Everyone in there was like a sea plant, anchored to the floor and rooted, while Jeremy moved among them on invisible currents. He went out onto the patio a few times, where he had strung coloured lights through the railings, and the lights looked like incandescent candy. He got afraid of being washed over the edge and down into the ravine below, and tried to stay near the safety of the bar, with its heavy gravitational pull. The cold wood felt good. He smacked it hard a couple of times, claiming it, like it was the flank of an animal. Mine, he thought. People around him – friends, staff, drunken strangers – whooped and cheered. Everything in the place, every salt shaker and ash­tray and fork, had been brought there by Jeremy. He could have touched any object in the room and said exactly how much it had cost him in money, trouble, and time.

  Benny was there, walking around like a proud uncle. “This fucker wanted me as a partner!” he shouted at the young man standing next to him.

  Jeremy, laughing, said, “I don’t know about partner. Not too late, though!”

  His parents showed up early in the evening, and he gave the two of them a quick tour. His dad, Gord, was especially impressed to see all the young men in whites working in the kitchen. Nothing else looked like work to him, none of the other staff acted like employees. His mom, Anne, offered to help clean up when someone dropped a full glass of vodka and cranberry juice behind the bar. Jeremy led her away, telling her it would be taken care of. Marie didn’t come to the party, but sent a card with a photo of a vintage biplane flying upside down – Jeremy’d had a poster exactly like it on his wall when he was a teenager. She used to bug him by sneaking into his room and hanging the whole thing upside down, so that the ground was the sky and the plane appeared to be flying right side up. The card said: You’re flying high. Just don’t look down! Inside, there was a note apologizing for missing the party and congratulating him on getting the Shack open at last. There was only one X and one O at the end. One kiss, one hug. As if she didn’t want to spoil him.

  He bought a round of shots for a group of guys who all played hockey together in some beer league, then corralled into the group a woman who’d been walking by on her way to the bathroom. She had on a tight sweater-blouse with a glittering tiger on the front, and was with a group of other women who were all done up with hair teased high above their heads.

  “One shot,” Jeremy said. “One shot with all my new friends here.” Like baby animals waiting to be fed, the hockey players standing with him watched the bartender’s hands as he poured out the dark shots. “This is my bar and this is my party, so you have to. By law.”

  The players urged her to say.

  Her name, he found out after the shots had been downed, was Julie. They shared three more rounds of shots, a plate of nachos, and had a long, rambling conversation about women soldiers serving on the front lines in Afghanistan – Jeremy had no strong feelings about the subject, but Julie, whose ex-boyfriend was in the military, convinced him that having women right in the middle of it all was a distraction for the male soldiers and a liability, given how Afghan men viewed women in general.

  She shouted in his ear: “They’re like cavemen over there!”

  “They are over here, too!”

  Which got her laughing.

  The two of them ended up downstairs in his cramped office, up against his desk, there being no couch yet and no room to lie down amid all the boxes. She kissed like a big, friendly dog: wet and frantic with her mouth wide open and almost covering his completely. He realized, at some point, that he was enjoying himself, really enjoying himself. As she raised her jean skirt, he also realized he didn’t have a condom anywhere. He figured he could probably get away with timing things just right, but then she produced one, flashing and crinkling, from her purse.

  “That’s lucky.” He pulled at the wrapper with his teeth.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” she said, then laughed so loud he worried someone would hear them.

  Afterward, she gave him a sympathetic, forgiving smile, kissing him on the forehead as he stared at the floor and tried to catch his breath. He felt he ought to have lasted longer, given everything he’d had to drink, but he came almost before he was aware he was about to. He wanted to stay there in the office for the rest of the night. Something had fallen out of him, like an engine falling out of a car. The humming that had been in his ears all night was gone, and it seemed as though the party upstairs had gone silent. Maybe everyone h
ad gone home, sneaking out quietly while he was downstairs. They’d all just been humouring him.

  “You need some pictures in here or something, or some plants – it’s not very homey,” Julie said, looking around his office. “You’re standing on my purse.” She pulled down her blouse, restoring the glittering tiger, which now looked as gentle and friendly as a house cat.

  Later, after he’d locked the doors, Jeremy convinced himself that he ought to stay the night, to sleep in one of the booths. It seemed like something a new owner should do, to make sure everything was okay. The bartender persuaded him to go home, and called him a cab. When he woke up in his bed the next morning, he was still fully dressed, there were coloured streamers in his hair, and one of his pockets was gummed up with a used condom.

  * * *

  The bar fell into a deep hole early on, but Jeremy refused to worry, knowing this kind of thing was cyclical. How could it not be? The first few months had been a dream – the place was packed at least four nights a week. In fact, that whole first spring and summer were good, the patio was always jammed. Jeremy floated through the crowds like it was his birthday every night. But then business dropped off a little in the fall, and died out altogether the minute snow appeared in the air. People scattered. It stayed bad all winter.

  He told his staff, “You just have to hold it together. We’ll climb out of this. Just watch.”

  A couple of servers left, along with some of the kitchen guys, and he had to fire a busboy, who retaliated by stealing beer from the basement. They made the best of the really bad nights, like the time they pushed aside a bunch of tables for an impromptu staff dance party during a Tuesday that seemed to stretch on forever. A waiter who was taking lessons got everyone tangoing across the room.

  A wine rep cornered him one night. “I don’t know what your exact situation is, but maybe you need to bring some partners in.” He could see the empty tables, the nervous wait staff, the lurking cook.

  “Are you offering?”

  “I don’t have that kind of money, are you kidding?”

  “Then what are you worried about? It’s not as bad as it looks. I won’t end up living in a cardboard box. Worst comes to worst, I’ll sell the place off and go live in a cabin somewhere.”

  Brenda, a waitress who’d been there from the start, finally came to him on behalf of the rest of the floor staff. Everyone was pissed off about the scheduling and the lack of tips. Servers were coming in for shifts, only to be sent home after an hour with nothing in their pockets. A few people were already looking for something else – she thought he should know that. She wouldn’t say who, only that they were people who probably wouldn’t have trouble finding a spot elsewhere. “They don’t want to leave. They like you, and they like working here, but they can’t live on nothing.”

  “They like me, but they’re fine with me taking all the risk, while they jump ship at the first sign of trouble. I sleep maybe four hours a night, Brenda. If I could snap my fingers and fill the place with millionaires, don’t you think I would’ve done it already? Do you think I’m intentionally sabotaging my own business?”

  “That’s really stupid. Nobody thinks that.”

  “So why is everyone coming after me, like I have some magical key that will make people come and spend money?” He grabbed a handful of the keys hanging from his belt and jangled them at her. “Is there a magic one here that I don’t know about? Just tell me and I’ll use it.”

  “Oh, stop being such a baby, Jeremy. God, I can’t stand it. You’ve got too many people on the schedule right now. If you need to, fire a few people. I can help decide who.”

  “Brenda is my rock,” he told people. “If I could clone her, I would. I keep a lock of her hair in a vault, just in case I ever need to clone her.”

  “Remember that when you start handing out raises,” she said.

  “Isn’t it enough that I remember you in my prayers?”

  Early on, the two of them would find themselves alone in the bar at the end of the night, the rest of the staff sent home, the doors locked on the last of the drunks. While they drank, Jeremy would cue up “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, which he insisted on playing at least once a night, just as he’d done way back in his bartending days. It seemed important to have something like that: a tradition, a good luck charm.

  “Just listen to this. Blind as anything and listen to what he’s doing.” He paused to let the sound of massed electric pianos take over the room. The surface of the bar became a keyboard over which Jeremy’s fingers moved effortlessly.

  She finished her glass. “I’m so sick of this song.”

  “Then you are sick of life.”

  They would talk about some of the more difficult or memorable customers they’d dealt with, about awful jobs they’d had in the past, and then finally about funny or terrible things they could remember from their childhoods. She told him about her uncle, who used to babysit her, and who had a habit of sneaking into her room at night to masturbate while he watched her sleep. She’d planned to confront him about it one day, but he had his head taken off in a car accident before she had the chance. She laughed about it, and said she only wished he’d suffered a little more.

  Jeremy had little to offer in response, and so he told her about a cousin of his who, at the age of 16, went running off the end of the dock at her family’s cottage and landed headfirst on a rock just below the surface, snapping her neck and dying instantly. He told her how, at the funeral, the family discovered she had dozens of friends they hadn’t known about. There was even a boyfriend no one had met before, who was invited to speak and who said something about how jealous he was that most of the people there had known her since she was a baby, while he’d only met her a few months earlier.

  Brenda looked like she was about to cry. “Oh my God. Life can be so fucking shitty.”

  “That’s not the only way of looking at it.”

  The dead cousin actually belonged to a bartender Jeremy had worked with one summer. He’d heard the whole story about the broken neck, the funeral, and the boyfriend while the two of them stayed up all night, sitting on a beach and drinking vodka. From then on, he always associated death with the way the water looked from where they were sitting: black and shifting, throwing off sparks of moonlight.

  Jeremy told Brenda about his sister’s miscarriage, which had happened the first time Marie and Brian tried to have kids. It was not long after the two of them got married. Marie named the unborn baby Gordon, after their father, though they had refused to let the doctor tell them the gender. She still talked about that lost baby sometimes, especially after Christmas dinner or whenever she’d had too much to drink. She’d get weepy and talk about how afraid she’d been that she was not fit to have children, that her own body was rejecting her claims to motherhood.

  She’d had three kids since, so Jeremy figured it was a case of one step back, three steps forward.

  He once asked Brenda if she ever wanted kids, and she looked at him as if he had just broken into song.

  “Me neither,” he said.

  More than once they ended up naked in her bed with the smell of sex and wine and extinguished candles filling the small room. She always fell right asleep as soon as they were done, and he would lie there with her frog-green IKEA reading light on, looking through whatever she had next to the bed – usually a book about mental health or a bright magazine full of celebrities he didn’t recognize. He liked both equally. When Brenda finally left the bar, lured away by a supervising job at a hotel company, they made a half-hearted attempt to keep dating, but it didn’t last, and he gradually accepted that, as with so many things in his life, it was the Shack that had made whatever it was they’d had happen. On her last night there, he put on “Superstition,” and insisted she dance with him in the middle of the bar. There was a photo of it somewhere.

  * * *

  Business at the Sha
ck eventually climbed back up to a respectable level, thanks in part to the deal he’d made with the local slow-pitch league for discounted group dinners after practices and games. “Thank God for ladies and their friggin baseball,” he said, surveying the tables full of women in uniform. “What’d I tell you!” he shouted happily at one of the waitresses as she flew past with four full plates on her arm. “She’ll be complaining later about how busy it was,” he said to whoever was standing next to him.

  The other thing Jeremy did was convince his parents to put more of their money into the bar – money that they’d gotten from selling the house Jeremy and his sister had grown up in and moving into a tiny, cottage-style home. As he liked to point out to them, that money was only going to sit in a bank and do nothing. It took three successive dinners at their new house to get them to even consider the idea.

  “We’re not millionaires,” his father declared while they ate ice cream out of small bowls.

  His mother asked, “Do you maybe have too many people working for you? The times I’ve been in there, it looked like you had a waitress for every table.”

  “It’s not anywhere near that, come on. Anyways, if you start cutting corners, it’s not long before you might as well sell out to a Crane’s or somebody.”

  His father asked if it would be so bad, making someone else take on all the risk.

  “It’d still be your bar, essentially.”

  Jeremy put his bowl down. “No, it wouldn’t. Essentially, it would belong to someone else. There’d be someone else’s name on it. Essentially, I would be back working for someone that isn’t me. That would be the essence of the situation.”

  “I’m only saying you need some help and money is an issue. You can’t just stand there doing nothing.”

  “Who said I’m just standing here doing nothing?”