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The elevator dinged, and we stepped inside. I was moments away from getting the shoulder pat: two quick taps that saidSee ya laterandThanks for lunch. I hated the shoulder pat. On days like this, when I was hungover, exhausted, and mentally unprepared for another four hours of work, it felt impossible not to touch Garrett properly. To not wrap my arms around his sturdy shoulders and tug him toward me as hard as I could.
The dinner—my worlds were about to collide. I had almost forgotten that a couple of weeks ago Garrett had been visibly upset and complained about how he and Jen weren’t heading home for the holidays. They couldn’t afford to fly back to the West Coast, what with their whole house-buying plan looming on the horizon. The two of them were staying put in Toronto, lonely and trapped in the snow-laden city while everyone else gathered with their families to read Charles Dickens (his dad readA Christmas Carolout loud every year, which was sickeningly amazing) and eat turkey (or Tofurkey, in Garrett’s case).
So I had stupidly offered to have a mini Christmas for them at our condo, thinking it would be a good excuse to see Garrett outside of work, because the thought of going almost two weeks without being in his periphery made me feel kind of sick. It was all set. He and Jen were coming over the day after Boxing Day, and Rob was thrilled. Like I said, Rob had never really seen eye to eye with many of my friends, so he was excited to start afresh. His exact words: he could “start afresh” with these new friends. Friends who would not turn up their noses at his preppy collar, his high-flying trader job, the fact that his parents lived in Bedford Park, or that his father headed up one of the biggest law firms in the country.
The doors opened to my floor. And there it was, the pat. “Hope you make it through the rest of the day. Drink some water. You look way pale. No more coffee. If I catch you on the way to Starbucks this afternoon, I’ll going to confiscate your card.”
A witty comeback was nowhere to be found in my brain, so I stuck out my tongue and blew a raspberry at him. Araspberry. Like I was five and he was seven and had just pulled my hair.
The work boyfriend: a constant source of humiliation of mammoth proportions. Lucky for me, Garrett had a good sense of humor, and my juvenile response set him off laughing. The doors closed and he was gone, elevating back to his office to watch more documentaries about interesting and important topics like the impressive performance of our Canadian troops during the First World War. To make some calls. To produce something. I closed my eyes, leaned back against the wall, and shook my head.
Arriving at the glass doors that marked the entrance to our offices, I reached into my purse to grab my card key only to realize that I’d left it on my desk. That meant having to call someone to come and get me. Beth was out for lunch with Raj, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself any further with Siobhan before she discovered any photos of me if I couldn’t get assigned to that intranet task. That meant the only viable option was Marianne. Chances were she’d jog over. And regale me with perkiness on the long, cruel walk back to our desks. I called from the phone beside the doors.
“Hel-lo, Marianne speaking. How can I be of assistance today?”
“Marianne, it’s me, Kelly. I’m outside the gates. Forgot my card key on my desk. Can you come and let me in?”
“You are always forgetting that card, aren’t you? You need to get one of those clips that attaches it to your clothes.”
“I sure do.”
“Be right there.”
The awkward conversation on the way back to my desk was not worth the thanks and praise I had to give her for the favor, nay, the blessing, of letting me back onto the floor. To top it all off, as we landed back at our cubicles, she said, “So, like, you and Garrett aresuchgood friends. He’s ridiculously cute. And such aniceguy. I totally went to high school with his girlfriend, we hung out all the time. They’ve been in love for, like, ever. Totally the couple to make it, you know?”
I had eaten lunch with Garrett every day for the last three years, and we’d talked about how awful our friends were in high school so many times. Like I said, mine were still organizing all-night raves fifteen years after a rave was even a thing. The majority of them were deep into experimenting with many, many illegal substances. A few had real jobs like Rob’s. We had a dozen conversations about my bad drinking habit senior year, mainly the result of a terrible boyfriend and a will-they, won’t-they relationship that was beyond messed up. Garrett knew about it all—about how my prom date, someone I begged to go so I wouldn’t have to face my ex alone, spent the entire time chasing, photographing, and then dancing with another girl, and how much that hurt. How once Meghan had found Jason, we’d become this odd threesome. And he’d told me about how his friends were burning out on the slopes at Whistler, having migrated from Banff.
All this time, he hadn’t, not once, explained that he knew either Marianne or Jen from that period in his life. All he’d ever said was that he was kind of the odd guy out at his high school because he didn’t want to smoke weed whenever he and his friends were skateboarding. And he only joined the ski team because there were, literally, no other sports. The class was too small, plus his gym teacher could keep them on the hills for half the day once a week. He, too, was a ski bum.
He never stopped by Marianne’s cube, never talked to her as he passed by. And he’d surely never told me that he’d been with Jen sincehigh school. That was years and years and years—more than a decade by this point in our lives, since Garrett and I were the same age, twenty-eight. That meant they had weathered prom, summer jobs, entire semesters away at university, and traveling after graduation, which I know Garrett did extensively, and now, moving all the way across the country to work in Toronto.
“Have you met Jen yet?” Marianne asked. The tone in her voice edged into an octave that felt disingenuous, and even a little disapproving.
“That’s why Rob and I are having dinner with them over the holidays. We figured it would be fun. The four of us have never gotten together before.”
“I would totally crash that party.”
My mind was so lost on the shock at the length and depth of Garrett’s relationship that I wasn’t really listening to Marianne. I sort of mumbled, “Sure, sounds great,” or something as we walked back to our cubicles.
“Awesome! Send me the details, and Cash and I’ll be there for sure.”
“Aren’t you going home for the break? Weren’t you talking to your mom the other day.”
“We thought about it, but Cash’s sister is about to pop, and he wants to be around for the baby.” Marianne continued telling me about her sister-in-law’s pregnancy. Damn, I hated how much this adulting thing was going around.
Cash, how ironic, seeing as he’d been a starving artist without a real job for about fifteen years. He was finding himself, living off the bread crumbs of the odd freelance writing gig and a royalty check here and there from a band he was in during university that had cut one amazing record that was still selling. He somehow always had enough money to support himself. I was insanely envious of his lifestyle. Who wouldn’t want to sit back and find themselves if they had the financial capacity to do it? He had opted out of the real “job job” ages ago and never looked back.
Sometimes, on days like today when my mind is adrift in the space of what-ifs and never-beens, I feel like I’m having a midlife crisis twenty-five years too early. Logically, I’m still at the beginning of my adult life, still trying to sort out what is to come and what I want. Many of my university friends had gone to law school, med school, grad school, even ended up with well-paying starter jobs, career-in-the-making kinds of opportunities. The grapevine informs me they’re as unhappy as I am—and many found any excuse to throw their good luck away, like sleeping with the boss and getting fired (check), getting downsized and moving back into their parents’ place (check), getting married in a giant ceremony that screamed “We’ll be divorced in six years” to avoid being alone (check). Now two of my friends were going back to school, one to become an overeducated pastry chef and the other to take an entry-level position as an intern at a publishing house. At least they can say they followed their dreams, and it’s good to get all this finding yourself out of the way before life got real and you had kids, double mortgages on vacation properties, and extramarital affairs. But what if all the hard work ends up with even more debt, more unhappiness, and a listless life like Cash’s, where his art was so amorphous no one was even sure it existed.
“We’d love to have you, of course we would,” I said. “It’s great that we have the almost two whole weeks off.”
“Exactly! That’s another reason Cash and I didn’t want to fly back home. We’ve never been tourists here. We’ve got a whole list of activities we’re going to try. Skating at Nathan Philips Square, visiting Casa Loma, we’re even going to take the TTC out to the Science Centre.”
We were still standing outside our cubicles. This was the longest that I had talked to Marianne in ages outside of a meeting or in an official work capacity. I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Are your parents still there, in Banff?”
Marianne nodded. “When I was a little kid we lived in Ontario, both my parents grew up in Don Mills. We moved out west when I was in grade two. My dad bought a hotel in Banff.”
I hoped my face would not betray the shock that registered in my mind. I was still reeling. Garrett had told me he spent grade nine in Banff, but then the rest of the time in Vancouver. Or maybe I’d just assumed he’d gone to high school there because he was always flying back there to see his parents. Garrett knew so much about my life growing up—all the bonkers time with my mother’s various boyfriends after my dad bailed, my absolutely dumpster heap of a relationship throughout high school with someone who used me and my acceptance of it as “better than nothing,” and how Rob was the first decent, kind, and loyal person I’d been with—we’d spent hours archeologically digging through my past. And I’m only now realizing how one-sided our friendship must be. Surface level. He let me drone on because I was good company and could pass the painful hours we spent earning a paycheck. My eyes threatened to water. He didn’t trust me with the truth. He was passing time.
