Below is another short story which I hope you will enjoy.
Substack has been an interesting experience but it has not advanced my career forward in any way. Nevertheless, I thank those of you who have tried or stuck with me. For my recent subscribers, I hope you will get a chance to read my earlier stories and novel (links below); and for longer-term subscribers, I will still occasionally put out a new story but my focus now is on writing my new novel and, alas, preparing to move once again.
DOWN THE DRAIN
"Shit, crap, merde."
Ronson isn't sure if he’s describing the potpourri rising in the bowl before him or venting, but either way he's spent a second too long doing it. By the time he reaches for the plunger propped in the corner behind the toilet tank and thrusts it towards the ascending mix, a single, inane thought pops into his head:
Archimedes.
The plunger hits, the slop cascades over the bowl’s rim, and he bellows, "Son of a bitch!"
"So what happened up there?" Ronson's wife, Carol, asks. She sits at the kitchen table with their twelve-year old son, Rickey. They've already started breakfast: toast and coffee for her, Raisin Bran with extra raisins and orange juice for the boy.
"The toilet overflowed," he says. "And its . . . cargo didn’t seem bulky enough to plug when I flushed."
"Really," Carol says, her interest piqued. "The same thing happened to me last night, but I forgot to say anything because it didn't spill over. The water level rose, hovered around the rim just long enough to scare me, then dropped with a sucking sound – like it was being vacuumed out."
"Hey, that happened to me too," Rickey says. "In the rec-room bathroom this morning while Mom was hogging the upstairs can."
Ronson, with his coffee prepared, doesn't sit at the table just yet. Instead, he reaches out, plucks the Raisin Bran box from the table, and holds it aloft. "Alright then, maybe we should retire this for a while . . . just so we don't exacerbate our problem."
Rickey swallows his half-chewed mouthful of cereal and asks, "What’s that supposed to mean?"
"Absolutely nothing," Carol says. "Except that your father's trying his hand at humor again. He's famous for it when he's under stress."
"He's under stress because the toilets are acting funny?"
"No, not because of that," Carol answers. "Although that might be adding to it now."
"Well, I still don't get what he meant."
"What he's trying to say, Honey, is that Raisin Bran, or bran in general, is supposed to make you regular."
"Regular?" Rickey appears even more confused by her clarification.
"Regular," Ronson repeats, "is abbreviated terminology for 'crapping on a regular basis'."
"Uggh!" Rickey pushes his almost empty bowl away from his place setting.
Carol sighs and looks to her husband. "Well, now that we've all enjoyed this enlightening breakfast-table conversation, are you going to grab a quick bite before we head out?"
Ronson appreciates the trace of a smile that Carol slips him while setting him straight, but he hadn't intended to talk 'crap' at the table or switch the selling point on their 13-year-old son's favorite breakfast from sweet-treat to possible digestive aid. He meant to do nothing more than mention their plumbing problem.
The truth is, though, the start of his morning – the plunging and mopping and re-flushing – has left him more out of sorts than he might have been, bolstering his burgeoning new perspective: he has to take life’s shit, but it sure doesn't have to take his.
Downing the last third of his coffee with a tilt of his cup, Ronson says, "No, let's just get going. I seem to have lost my appetite, too."
After Ronson drives Rickey to school and drops Carol outside her office building, he crawls along Danforth Avenue in bumper-to-bumper traffic, inching past bakeries, butcher’s shops, restaurants, and coffee houses as he looks for parking. The act is more annoying than taxing, leaving him with enough free time to estimate how often he's uttered the words fuck, fucking, and asshole or any combination thereof (including the pièce de résistance, 'fuck you, you fucking asshole') to other motorists while jockeying for position in morning rush-hour en route to Rickey's middle-school. His guess comes to 'far too many'.
He finds an open parking spot two blocks from his destination and assesses his immature behavior while filling a parking meter to its two-hour limit. This introspection brings him back to Carol's breakfast-table comment about him being under stress.
Damn right he is. Severe stress. He's never been in this position before and never thought the time would come. Yet it has, and even as he locates his building and hesitates in front of it, summoning the gumption to do what he has to do next, three people shoulder past him. He pushes in behind a fourth, cutting off a fifth person in the process, and is swept through a rotating-door foyer and into a cavernous rotunda. Occupied computer booths line its walls. To the far right of the room, at the back, a row of clerks sit in numbered alcoves; in the center, at the end of the lengthy line before him, three more clerks man a crescent-shaped registration/ information desk; and to his left, what appears to be a United Nations demographic sampler of work-force-age citizenry occupies a sea of fold-out chairs. Many in this crowd have brought their children – squealing preschoolers whose crayons, coloring books, and readers have lost their initial allure and are now being used as projectiles and bludgeons.
Ronson stands in the South-Central Employment and Immigration office – even though twenty-seven years earlier, as a downy-cheeked boy fresh out of high school, he'd lucked into a full-time, permanent government job of his own with Customs and Excise. Back then, legend had it that if you landed one of those, you'd never find yourself in a line-up like this.
But times change, and although Customs hasn’t laid Ronson off, exactly, he is ‘off-roster’ until the next fiscal budget restocks his department's coffers.
He looks at his watch: 9:23 am. About twenty people form the registration line before him and another sixty or seventy crowd the waiting area. Discounting the children and other tag-alongs, Ronson figures maybe fifty people require service ahead of him – unless the majority of those seated at the computers in the periphery are here for more than job-searching; as he thinks this, the p.a. system crackles and a disembodied voice fills the room: "Number seven to desk three . . . number seven, desk three."
"Number eighty-eight to desk five . . . eighty-eight, desk five."
The amplified voice jerks Ronson from his stupor. He rechecks his stub number, zigzags his way across the room to a chair resting between two portable office walls, and hands his paperwork to the middle-aged woman sitting across the desk from him.
She says nothing while Ronson watches her practiced gaze slide down the front page of his application. She seems detached.
"Photo I.D," she says at last. "Preferably driver's license."
Ronson hands her his license. She jots down the registration number with machine-like precision in an office-use-only box, slides the card back to him, and throws his papers into an out-box. Then she looks up at him and says, "Your application follows the stream now. Allow four weeks for processing and up to eight weeks for your first check."
"What . . .?"
Ronson's first word escapes like a tea-kettle squeal; he spends a moment searching for the rest of them.
"I . . . I might be back to work in less than three months!"
"Oh, silly me," the woman replies. "I guess we'll fast-track you then, even if it means all of those desperate, officially unemployed people have to take a back seat."
She nods to the huddled masses behind Ronson on the word 'officially' then gives him a moment to respond.
“Or it might be a little longer,” he adds, but with little gusto.
"Alright, then. Up to eight weeks," she says.
*
Ronson sees the incident unfolding from fifty yards away. He breaks into a sprint, yelling, "Hey, wait! Wait! Don't do it!" but as he threads his way around knots of startled pedestrians, oppressive humidity and human congestion swallow his voice.
His protests are futile, anyway; before he reaches his car, the parking enforcement officer has melted into the crowd.
Ronson rips the ticket from under his driver-side wiper and checks it for time of issue. 11:23 a.m. Two hours, not counting the time it had taken him to walk from his car to the unemployment office, has passed since he'd put the maximum amount of money into his meter.
Now, both his math and his logic may be off, but Ronson figures he'd just spent an hour and fifty-seven minutes of his morning picking his nose and three minutes getting fucked (not in the good way, either) only to be relieved of thirty bucks for the experience.
*
Apparently, Rickey has been aware of the clarinet issue for a week now, but only here at the dinner table does he tell his parents that they must resolve it this evening.
"So your only two options are to share a school rental or buy your own?" Ronson asks.
"That's what my music teacher told me," Rickey says. "And I'm supposed to have one by tomorrow afternoon."
"We'll have to go shopping tonight, then," Carol says, with the unspoken portion of her sentence – because I don't want my baby sharing anything that has to go into his mouth with anyone else – fully understood.
For sheer parental paranoia, Ronson's unspoken fear matches Carol's; in fact, he feels it goes one morally distasteful step further, wearing the face, no, the many faces he'd seen in the unemployment office that morning. The world is encroaching, and their boy needs protection.
"Absolutely," Ronson says. "We'll drive over to Zach's after dinner."
"It only costs a hundred bucks to rent one," Rickey says. "And fifty of that's deposit. You get it back at the end of the year."
"And buying one, which we'll get to keep, will cost us a couple of hundred bucks," Ronson says. "Consider it an investment."
"Oh boy," Rickey says. "We get to invest in a clarinet."
They find parking about ten business addresses east of Zach's Music Store, an integral part of the über-cool Queen-Street-West scene since before Ronson was a teenager. Over the years, Zach's image has shifted from Psychedelic to Glam to New-Wave to Grunge with chameleon-like ease, hopping from rock to rock with never a disco-misstep. But what the store’s present identity is, Ronson doesn't know. The only thing he knows about the place for sure, since separating from Carol and Rickey upon entry, is that its heavily tattooed clientele makes him feel older than he ever has before; he's never felt so square, either, if he can use that word without magnifying both his square-ness and his newfound aging anxiety.
But as he drifts away from the racks of dog-eared rock-song catalogs on the far side of the cash registers, he pushes these thoughts aside. He’s amongst the guitars now, and he walks the floor with his head on a swivel, drinking in all the shiny, lacquered Fenders and Gibsons propped on stands and hanging from the walls. He'd spent many summer days between grades nine and ten doing exactly the same thing here, except back then he would dream about buying one, any one, the cheapest one, and bringing it back to his basement to learn the chords to a Talking Heads song or a Clash tune.
He hadn't though, each time drifting down the street to The Candy Factory to spend his money until, before he knew it, his summer, almost three full months, had dissipated as inexorably as his daily pocket change. But that had been at least thirty years ago, and now he has absolutely no idea where to look for a clarinet, of all things.
Over by a box of rolled up cardboard tubes, he spots a jewelry-festooned young woman pressing the tip of a pricing gun against one poster cylinder after another. Rows of half-moon earrings loop through the cartilage in her ears; a silver fishing hook snags her right eyebrow; and a small silver bone, just below the ragged hem of her cut-off T-shirt, crowns her navel like a macron atop a puckered letter O.
Ronson approaches her. "Excuse me, Miss. Do you work here?"
She stops what she’s doing and stares at him. "Does it look like I work here?"
He isn't sure how to respond. Yes, it looks like she works here, and in hindsight his question seems stupid, but her . . . brazenness? He stands before her, his brow furrowed.
With a laugh, the woman finally says, "Just yankin' ya', Man. What are ya' lookin' for?"
"I . . . uh, I'm looking for a clarinet."
The woman rekindles her stare, and Ronson replays the last of his sentence in his head: a clarinet . . . a fucking clarinet! How square is that?
Apparently, the woman thinks the same thing. With a curt nod to the staircase at the back of the room, she says, "Second floor," and returns to her pricing.
Ronson contemplates the sting of her dismissal as he takes the stairs to the second floor. Here trumpets, tubas, and trombones hang from wall clamps, harps and stand-up basses grace nooks and crannies. He walks to an alcove marked Woodwinds at the back of the room, where Carol and Rickey already stand in front of a glass display case, and pulls up beside them.
"Here's an eye-opener. Five hundred bucks for the least expensive one," Carol says, nodding to the array of disassembled brass and plastic pieces laid out in a series of open, velvet-lined carrying cases.
"Holy shit," Ronson replies.
"Like I said, for a hundred bucks I could still get one at school," Rickey offers. He looks unhappy standing in this spot between his parents.
"It hasn't come to that yet," Carol says.
"Well, if you're not going to listen to me, can I at least go and look at the good stuff?" Rickey asks.
"Alright, then," Ronson says. "But be careful. The place is half-filled with druggies."
They leave the store toting a $650.00 clarinet, having put down $450.00 and leaving a $200.00 post-dated check synchronized with the estimated arrival of Ronson's first E.I. payment. They know they’ve overpaid – or overbought, anyway – but the two-months' leeway on the check has clinched the deal. They’ll just have to tighten their belts until Ronson gets his job back.
They speak of that very responsibility as they walk back along Queen Street, with the adults, at least, building themselves up for the task. It’s in this state, with their new outlook fully hyped, that Ronson finds another parking ticket wedged under the driver's side windshield wiper.
"Son of a fucking bitch!" he bellows, snatching the ticket from the car. He looks at the time scrawled upon it. 8:27 pm. They'd spent four minutes too long bickering over the price of their final choice in clarinets then locating Rickey in the guitar aisles.
He folds the ticket in half, employing too much gusto, giving himself a substantial paper cut in the process. He unleashes another “fuck” before stuffing it into his shirt pocket, right next to the one he hasn't removed from earlier in the day.
That night, after another near toilet spill, Ronson issues a decree. "In the morning, anyone who has to take a dump should use the upstairs bathroom and not flush afterwards. After I drop you guys off, I'm going to rent a drain snake from Stevenson's and get to the bottom of this."
"No way I'm shitting on top of anyone else's shit," Rickey says. "What if it splashes?"
"Watch your mouth, please, Rickey," Ronson says.
"Well, he is only following your example," Carol says.
"You're right. I'm sorry. I'll try to control myself. It's just these Goddam . . . these damned expenses are killing us."
"I'll admit they seem to be mounting right now," Carol says. “But don't you think we should bring in a professional for this?"
"No – especially not for this. It costs a hundred bucks for a plumber just to ring your fu . . . to ring your doorbell. I'll rent the snake and run it into the main sewer feed myself. If I don't get results, then I'll call a professional."
Ronson awakens twenty minutes early the next morning and slips down to the basement bathroom to contemplate his repair job while grabbing a quick shower. Removing the toilet will be a tough enough challenge, but the idea of having to operate a snake, a full-fledged industrial tool, scares him.
Without actually knowing how to operate one, Ronson plays out different snake scenarios in his mind, distracting himself to the point where, with a head-full of shampoo dripping over his face, he fails notice the backed-up drain water pooling around his feet. In fact, he doesn’t realize he has an emergency until a water-bloated stool nudges his ankle and he squints down through soap-seared eyes.
“Fuck!”
Still covered in suds, Ronson scrambles from the tub. He reaches over and turns off the shower, but debris-ridden water continues surging from its drain. A few seconds later the pipes behind the far wall rattle and the toilet’s water begins to rise, spilling over the bowl’s edge in vomit-like spasms. The tub gurgles in sympathy.
Someone upstairs has flushed.
By the time Ronson mops the basement mess, its combined volume and foulness has bested his home-fix-it spirit. While Carol phones Roto-Man – Drain and Plumbing Specialists, he cross-examines Rickey at the breakfast table.
“I thought I’d said no flushing last night?”
“Yeah, and I said I wouldn’t . . . poop on top of anyone else’s . . ..
“Anyway,” Rickey continues, “if I wasn’t supposed to flush, what were you doing in the shower?”
Before Ronson can admit he hadn’t made the connection between the toilet water’s and shower water’s ultimate destinations, Carol appears at the kitchen entrance.
“The Roto man will be here sometime between mid-morning and lunch.”
After breakfast, Ronson drives Rickey to school and Carol to work. Next, he tries to establish some footing in his new morning routine of cruising the Internet for sports news, but he keeps getting drawn back to the living room to peek between the front-window curtains like an anxious hausfrau.
He feels displaced, helpless as he peers out onto the quiet, weekday street. How could he have suffered this trio of monetary pummellings so quickly and coincidentally? They haven’t just experienced a leaky faucet, their drains pulse like severed arteries; they haven’t had to buy a basic, $100.00 instrument for Rickey, they’ve had to buy him a $650.00 clarinet (although Ronson did acknowledge some parental excess in that decision); and, at the center of this financial fiasco, not only has he been laid off, he’ll have to wait two months for his first unemployment check – some of which will go directly to the clarinet fund.
Ronson stays near the window, drifting back to the second-floor computer only when boredom overcomes exasperation. Finally, just before 2:00 pm, a Roto-Man van pulls in front of his house. A squat guy in his forties, wearing gray work pants and a matching shirt, unlimbers himself from the driver's side and stretches. He looks at his watch, then, in a series of deft motions, pops a cigarette from his pack, plugs it into the corner of his mouth, and lights it with the smoldering butt he's plucked from the other corner of his mouth.
He leans against an artist's conception of Roto-Man plastered on the side of his van (a winking, jauntily capped Lou Costello look-alike) for a minute before moving to its back doors and unloading a mammoth tool kit. From curtain's edge, Ronson watches him struggle under its weight, gripping its handle with two white-knuckled fists and waddling up the walk as smoke jitters from his dwindling cigarette like carbon dioxide from a struggling exhaust pipe.
Ronson opens the front door just as the man sets his kit on the porch and flicks his butt out onto the front lawn.
"Sorry I'm late." The plumber strains to corral his breath. "I've been experiencing backups all day."
He pauses, reconsiders his words with a chuckle. "Hey . . . backups."
From here, Ronson sees that distance has distorted his initial appraisal of the man. Curtis (the name sewn onto his shirt pocket) is probably in his fifties, and his burly physique, which at first had seemed to be of the 'hard fat' variety, appears softer up close. The loose flesh on his face and his pendulous earlobes hold a waxy pallor that Ronson finds disconcerting.
"Well, that's what you're here for now," Ronson says. "A major backup."
"Alright," Curtis says. "Let's take a look."
He hoists his kit again and steps into the house, huffing in Ronson's wake all the way to the basement. They enter the bathroom, a spacious four-piece (clean now except for some residue in the tub). Once more Curtis drops his tools and grapples for air.
"Give me a minute to . . . get the toilet off . . . then we'll run through your options."
"Whatever you say," Ronson replies.
Curtis takes another second to catch his breath before kneeling and shutting off the tank’s water supply. He opens his tool kit and a minute later, with the toilet sitting to the side, he and Ronson stared into a wax-ringed black hole leading, eventually, to Lake Ontario.
"Okay," Curtis says. "We've got two possibilities here, the first being a simple blockage. If it is, a snaking will take care of it, no problem."
"And if it isn't?"
"If it isn't, you've got a broken pipe. The old ones were made of clay and a tree root or simply time itself could cause a collapse."
"So which do you figure it is?" Ronson asks.
"Until I fetch the snake and get it in there, I've got no idea."
From his living room window, Ronson watches Curtis repeat what appears to be his tool-fetching ritual: for the first minute he gives his full attention to a cigarette; next, he retrieves his desired equipment from the back of his truck and wrestles it up the walkway, staggering under its weight with the remainder of his smoke clamped between his lips. Ronson calculates that the time spent on eight or nine of these trips – all performed at this rate – could easily account for his day’s alleged backups.
This time Curtis lugs the drain snake. Ronson has never seen one before and it looks heavy: forty yards or so of motor-driven, flexible metal cable tipped with an auger bit and wrapped around a large spool.
Curtis sets up the snake over the toilet's opening then doffs his work shirt. His gray T-shirt beneath, now dark with sweat, clings to his portly back like Saran Wrap on a side of beef. Ronson can't see past this wet slab as Curtis kneels over the snake, he can only hear the machine grind to life. A scraping sound follows as cable slithers into the drain.
"Well, the blockage isn't caused by any organic object lodged down there," Curtis says from his crouch about a minute into this probing. "Or if it is, it's not letting me bore through it, and I've got the arrowhead cutter on."
"What does that mean?" Ronson asks.
"It means I'm going to have to get the camera snake. It's got a nine-inch color monitor and a sensor, which will show me what's causing the stoppage in detail and allow me to locate it from ground level."
“I meant price. What does that mean price-wise?"
"I don't know yet," Curtis says. "Depending on where we have to dig – under the deck? The front lawn? – it could be anywhere from two-to-five-thousand dollars."
Two-to-five-thousand! How the hell were they supposed to afford even two-to-five-hundred dollars in their present situation?
Curtis shuttles the snake to a far corner and steps from the bathroom. Once more Ronson follows him to the first floor, this time foregoing his snooping to slump into the living room sofa and stew: two-to-five. The numbers echo in his head like a judge's sentence as he tries to figure out his next step.
He doesn't want to phone Carol until he gets the final quote, but in the meantime he can run an Internet check on Roto-Man, some competitors, and compare costs. At the very least, that will keep him from trailing Curtis around like a puppy waiting to get slapped for a mess he hasn’t made.
Ronson stands and stride towards the staircase, grabbing the newel post just as Curtis wobbles into the house under the weight of his camera snake. They stop, and from this location, Ronson can't help but notice the commingling of body-odor and essence-of-wet-ashtray wafting ahead of the plumber's space.
"So, you coming back down with me?" Curtis asks.
"Not this time. But give me a shout if you need anything."
"Well, I'll be there for a while, so could you do something for me right now?"
"Sure," Ronson says. "What?"
"Give me a minute to get back down, then flush the second-floor commode. I'd like to give the exiting water a listen while I'm setting up."
Nodding, Ronson leaves for the bathroom.
*
Ronson loses track of time as he waits for a diagnosis, slipping from one Internet plumbing site to the next until he hears the front door open at 3:45 p.m. He hasn't heard a peep from Curtis since he's come upstairs, but this isn't him. A much lighter footfall plays on the staircase. Seconds later Rickey appears at the den entrance, his knapsack still hooked onto his shoulders.
"Hey," Rickey says
"Hey," Ronson answers.
"The plumber's truck is out front, but I really gotta go. Can I use a bathroom now?"
"Yeah," Ronson says, standing. "The one on this floor – just don't flush until we know what's up . . . and I mean it this time."
Ronson follows in Rickey’s wake and takes the stairs, thinking, What in Christ's name is up? As his son said, the van still sits out front, yet he’s heard nothing for at least an hour. Has Curtis decided to forego the effort of actually leaving the house and is huddled in the bathroom right now, sucking on another cigarette?
Ronson continues to hear ‘nothing’ (an ominous lack of noise, really) as he descends into the basement, and he finds himself walking stealthily as he approaches the bathroom.
"Curtis . . .? Hey, Curtis . . .?"
Now he steps into the bathroom doorway, but even his strange prescience hasn't prepared him for what he sees:
Curtis lies face down on the bathroom floor, fully extended, with the palms of his hands pressed against the back wall as if he were pushing himself away from the baseboard. All visible flesh – neck and ears and arms stretching into the back of his upturned hands – is a mottled blue. His mouth, cheeks, and nose cap the toilet’s waxy opening.
"What the fuck?" Ronson creeps forward, kneels beside the plumber as a singular question crowds his mind: Is Curtis still alive?
Not likely, but he’s got to know, so disregarding nagging doubts about accident-site etiquette, he reaches out. The body’s cool, unyielding, not so much a person now as a thing, and Ronson's half-hearted effort to move it meets with little success.
He’s obligated to attempt one last time, though, and works his hand under Curtis's clammy hairline, but the plumber's head won’t separate from the opening; it feels heavy beyond gravity's pull, and for an instant Ronson wonders if Curtis had been too close and got caught in some sort of vacuum when he'd flushed the upstairs toilet.
Backing away, Ronson is still pondering this unlikely and unsavory thought when he notices the nine-inch color monitor sitting on the floor beside the bathtub. Its screen shows solid gray except for what looks like white stitching running down the center of the screen. He looks back to Curtis, to the length of fiber optic cable lying next to his pant leg, and as he picks it up to inspect its tip, his own face looms across the monitor's screen.
Ronson reaches out to turn it off, but in mid-motion a thought strikes him. He hits the 'replay' button instead and soon finds himself watching a live Curtis mugging for the camera. The plumber's cross-eyed visage zooms in before a growing close-up of his hairy right nostril blackens the screen. An instant later his face reappears and he seems to be saying ‘testing’ into the tiny camera lens.
Then the levity stops. The plumber grows ashen, his eyes widen. Rivulets of sweat emerge on his brow, but he remains unblinking, staring at the camera in both fear and surprise, as if life's greatest mystery has just become clear to him and he doesn't like the answer.
This silent movie ends in a five-second gyration of light and motion, coming to rest on the stationary gray backdrop Ronson had viewed when first seeing the monitor.
*
In the following weeks Ronson tries adapting to his new life, but whether he’s driving home from limo duties, cleaning house, or trying to lose himself on the Internet, certain thoughts keep unearthing themselves.
One recurring nugget is that Roto-Man, despite only having to dig in soft soil, still charged four-thousand dollars because the drain's breach sat directly under the porch.
It could be worse, he supposes. Curtis, too, required a six-foot excavation of soft soil, and Ronson's research tells him that even if Curtis's family economized, their digging still cost more than twice the drain work.
In the meantime, Rickey has experienced six music classes at school, and over dinner on the night of the sixth, he describes the ordeal as "faggy." Ronson isn't pleased with his son's language, but kids do grow up. Next year the boy will be in high school, and after that? Well, where the hell does life go, exactly?
Alone, day after day, Ronson has ample time to revisit this question (along with his mental snapshot of Curtis's last pose – sucking noxious and eternal pipe). Finally, on a morning one month into his new routine, with Rickey already dropped off at school, Carol calls him on his obvious preoccupation as they continue on their way to her office.
"This too shall pass," she says, breaking a silence.
"Huh" Ronson says.
"You know. Your funk. Our money problems. Eventually, things will return to what they were."
"Until they change again," Ronson adds.
"I suppose. In the meantime, quit your moping. I know summer's over, but you can still enjoy yourself."
Ronson considers this for a moment. For sure, summer’s over, but it has been for years.
They pull to the curb outside her building, idle for a moment, then Carol leans over and kisses him. She slips from the car and says, "Phone me," through the passenger-side window before turning to join the stream of people entering her office tower.
Ronson merges back into traffic and without making any conscious decisions finds himself circling the downtown core. He stops, breaks the lone ten in his wallet for a Tim Horton's coffee, then roams some more.
Half an hour later, while cruising Queen Street West, he realizes that a thought has crystalized, that he has chosen a destination, and he rolls into an open parking spot about ten doors West of Zach's Music Store. He cleans out his pocket change for the meter, paying the two-hour maximum even though he doesn’t need to.
This leaves him with just five dollars cash and pretty well nothing on his debit card, which means he’ll only be pricing guitars for now. But he’s got two months before he has to go back to work so he is going to buy one. Soon. And when he does, hopefully, that poster-pricing clerk will be there to ring it up for him. He owes her a hard look.
But as he thinks about her and turns to check his reflection in a passing store-front window, he finds himself taking in different images altogether.
He gawks at an incredible array of treats – imported licorice, sponge toffee, chocolate. After all of these years, not only is it still open for business, it has grown from a modest confectionery into a neon midway of sweets and novelties.
Ronson takes one step past it, then another, before turning back to The Candy Factory’s doorway and stepping inside.
Thank you for reading.