Chapter 24
grant was sitting on his deck in Yaletown—watching groups of people in their twenties walk from happy hour to happy hour—and drinking alone.
As he knew he would be. As he thought Alice had been doing, until last week.
He took a long swig of his beer. He had given up on growlers months ago and instead had a bottle in his hand.
It was still craft beer, of course, his favourite French-style light pilsner, but he no longer rode his bike to the brewery on Powell Street, empty sanitized growler jugs in his panniers, clinking together every time he turned or stopped.
He never enjoyed the ride, or the sinking feeling on his way home that the beer would explode whenever he flew over a speed bump, but he had done it for the optics.
It was the sort of thing a liberal politician in a city obsessed with food and drink would do.
After the divorce, though, he only wanted to duck into government liquor stores and run back out, a case of beer and a bottle of Scotch under his arms. Their split had not made much of a ripple in the media, but he saw the looks of sympathy he received in council meetings, at press events with the same three municipal reporters, at school from the other parents whenever he picked up the kids.
The last thing he wanted to do was stand at a busy brewery and wait half an hour for his growlers to fill while men exactly his age and income level stared at his face, wondering where they knew him from.
Yes, I’m the guy who was on that election flyer , he wanted to shout.
And yes, I am here to fill up big jugs with beer because I am going to be drinking alone .
The thought that he might be jealous of Alice’s single life was not something he had considered.
When she had told him she didn’t want to be married anymore, it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
They had been fighting for years, ever since Luca was born.
She was perennially disappointed in him, from the way he edged the lawn to the clothes he forgot to pick up off the floor to the way he rushed to the bathroom after they had sex rather than holding her until she fell asleep.
He knew all of these things annoyed her, made her rage even, and yet he could never remember to just stop or change the behaviour.
In couples counselling, when the therapist suggested that he didn’t want to change, that this was his way of exerting control over his wife, he had laughed, startling both the therapist and his wife.
Alice had turned away and looked out the window, as if she couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him.
The therapist frowned and wrote a note on her pad before staring him in the eyes.
“Do you guys know me at all? I am a feminist .”
He wasn’t sure why he had said that, because even then he knew it wasn’t the truth.
In his better moments, he could grudgingly admit that his life was built on the labour of women, on the house that his mother-in-law used to own, on the successful business that Alice had started and which had paid the bills while his early political career had paid hardly anything at all.
And yet now he was the one who made six figures and sped to meetings in nice suits, who got to cut ribbons at opening ceremonies, who provided quotes to journalists about port revitalization or homeless encampments.
But he didn’t change. It had been Alice’s idea to start her business, her mother’s idea to sell them her house.
Was he the asshole for not turning down the opportunities that came his way, even if they were responsible for them?
He grunted at the memories and shifted in his teak deck chair.
Grant could see the boys talking and talking, and the girls only blowing out smoke with neutral expressions.
Well, not so neutral. Bored. Condescending.
Finally, one of the young women, a short dark-haired girl who wasn’t so different from Alice, waved her hand as if to flick them away, brushing her fingers against one of the boys’ shoulders.
The boys shouted and gestured in anger; the girls just shook their heads and went back inside the restaurant, leaving the young men silent, standing awkwardly on the sidewalk.
Grant shook his head. “Walk away, boys. Know when you’re not wanted. ”
This new boyfriend, this Jas, maybe he was the kind of enlightened man that Alice had always wanted.
Maybe he knew the right thing to say when Alice complained about PMS, when she worried she looked fat but worried even more that she had internalized fatphobia.
Maybe he knew when to touch her and when to simply bring her a drink.
“Who the fuck is this guy anyway?” Grant picked up his phone and opened Google. “I bet it’ll only take me five minutes to find him.” He typed in Jas, Vancouver . He paused and added Indo . Alice would probably hate that he had used that search term, and that made him chuckle.
The search took three page scrolls, four LinkedIn profiles, and six and a half minutes. Close enough.
There he was, his bar mentioned on a happy hour listicle, acknowledged on the Vancouver Marathon registration site, thanked as a sponsor for a refugee charity. There was an Instagram account run by the hostess at his bar. The cocktails used vegan foamer because of course they did.
Grant stared at the Google Street View image of Jas’s bar.
He knew that cobblestone street, the hipster eyewear boutique beside it.
He might have even been there once, meeting a first date from Bumble.
It was entirely plausible that he would be walking down there, shopping for condo-sized mid-century furniture or specialty chocolate or designer shoes.
And if he looked into the window of a bar to see what it was like, he would be like any other person trying to find the best place for a negroni on a Friday night.
He looked at his watch. Six thirty. Far too early to see anything interesting.
Grant got up and walked to the kitchen and grabbed the coffee grinder.
He would leave at eleven, park in the alley, and wait.
He had four and a half hours to sober up.