Every Little Thing (29 page)

He slid his other hand to her other hip to stabilize her. She squeezed the backs of his arms before hauling herself away from him, slowly, sending a blunt-edged sigh into his neck. It felt like sex. Like
fucking
. Like something too basic and primitive to fight against. So he broke the ice, a corny joke, because no one feels what he just felt unless it's mutual. “What are you, falling for me all over again?”

She looked at him like she didn't understand.

“It's a joke. You fell and I caught you.”

“It's not even funny, Cohen. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Some corny soap opera story and everyone rooting for us. I don't want to be that cliché.”

“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 kitchen 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.”