Epilogue
Standing Appointment
Nigel had a standing appointment now.
Saturdays, ten a.m., first slot of the day, blocked out in the book in Frankie's own hand — NIGEL (DO NOT BOOK OVER) — despite the fact that Nigel did not, strictly speaking, require weekly grooming, being a French bulldog and therefore possessed of roughly four inches of total coat.
He got the full treatment regardless. The bath, the blueberry spritz, the nails, the ears, the works, every single Saturday, because his other dad insisted, and his other dad had developed a way of insisting that involved sitting on the counter he was still — six months later — not supposed to sit on, and being so transparently happy about the entire arrangement that Frankie had long since given up the fight.
It was April. The east end had gone green and loud, the patios were out, the streetcars ran with their windows open, and Clip Joint on a Saturday morning was the specific kind of busy that Frankie had spent two years telling himself he didn't need anybody to help him enjoy, and had turned out to be completely wrong about.
The regulars had adjusted to the new arrangement with the speed of people who mostly just wanted their dogs to look nice and their groomer to be happy.
Mrs. Osei brought Malcolm a Tupperware of jollof "for the tall one, he's too thin," which he was not.
Gary asked Malcolm's opinion on whether the schnauzer looked confident, and Malcolm — who had never met the schnauzer before Christmas and now held firm views — said the dog looked like a CEO, and Gary left glowing.
The kid with the anxious greyhound had started booking Saturdays on purpose, because the big quiet man on the counter had a way of sitting still that settled her, and nobody had ever told him it was a skill; he'd just figured it out, because that was simply who he was — a man who could make a frightened thing feel safe by refusing to be in any hurry about it.
Frankie knew a little something about that. He'd gone and married the feeling. Metaphorically. So far.
"You're in the way," he told Malcolm, for the ten thousandth time.
"I'm supervising." Malcolm had Baxter in his lap — Baxter, who at twelve and a half had appointed himself Malcolm's personal responsibility the day the man moved to the city, and now went boneless with contentment the second Malcolm sat down anywhere.
Nigel was up on the table getting fluffed, radiating the smug of the recently pampered.
Two dads, two dogs, one shop. A whole pack.
"I'm excellent supervision. Ask anyone."
"I'm asking the dogs. They think you're a soft touch."
"The dogs are correct."
"For the record," Frankie said, working the blueberry spritz through Nigel's four inches of coat, "you've now attended more of my shifts than most people I've dated. It's embarrassing. You could get a hobby."
"You are my hobby." Malcolm scratched Baxter's ears.
"You, and this shop, and these two idiots.
I spent twenty years making films about people who quietly hold a whole small world together with their bare hands and never get thanked for it.
Now I come home and watch you do it live, all day, for forty bucks a dog.
Best content in the city. Front-row seat. "
Frankie pointed the spritz bottle at him. "Do not put me in a movie."
"Too late. Pitched it already. It's called The Groomer. Eleven minutes. Nobody will buy it and I don't care."
The feature had shot over the winter — three weeks on location in Macon, which Malcolm had done and come home from, home being a word that now meant a city two thousand kilometers north of where he'd been born, and a flat on Logan above a bakery that he mostly didn't sleep in anymore because it was three blocks too far from the shop.
He ran the whole thing from Toronto. He flew out when he had to and flew back the second he could, and the terrifying father had turned out, once claimed, to be a man who emailed Frankie dog photos, and the mother had visited in February and cried at the airport and called Frankie "the one who fixed him," which Frankie had objected to loudly and treasured privately.
You're allowed both, Frankie had told him once, not really believing it, back when he'd believed almost nothing. It turned out to be true. The man had the work and the person. He'd just had to be brave enough to build a life that held both, instead of a life that fit in a suitcase.
Frankie knew a thing or two, these days, about building a life that held things.
He'd signed the lease. Back in October, the week after a man showed up on a Tuesday with a Frenchie and a year on Logan Avenue, Frankie had taken the renewal out from under its paperweight, and the thirty-percent number that had felt like a death sentence in September had felt, in October, like a bill he could pay — because it turned out the whole calculus of is it worth rebuilding this alone, keeping it alive alone, being the best in the city at it alone changed considerably when you crossed out the word alone.
He hadn't let Malcolm anywhere near it. Malcolm had offered, once, carefully, and Frankie had said absolutely not, this one's mine, put your name on your own lease, and Malcolm had grinned like Frankie had said something romantic, which, Frankie realized later, he had.
It was his shop. His name, and no one else's, on the thing he'd built.
He just wasn't so precious anymore about being the only name in his life.
Dez had noticed, obviously. Dez noticed everything.
She'd watched him sign the lease and hire a second bather and start turning away work he was too booked to take, and she'd watched the humming come back — the real humming, the thing she'd told him about in the worst week — and she had said exactly one thing about all of it, back in the winter, on a slow afternoon with snow coming down past the big window.
"You look like a man who lives somewhere warm," she'd said. The same words. From the worst day. Handed back to him fixed.
"I do live somewhere warm," Frankie had told her. "It's got terrible coffee and a man who won't get off my counter and two dogs who've unionized against me. Total disaster."
"Yeah," Dez had said, grinning, going back to work. "Look at you." And she'd never made a speech of it, because that wasn't the kind of friend she was: she'd been there for the tweezers, and she was here for this, and she didn't need to narrate either one.
Which was the other thing.
***
Later, after close, Frankie took Malcolm upstairs, and Malcolm stopped three steps into the apartment the way he did every so often, still, and looked at the wall.
There was a photo on it now.
It had gone up in November. Frankie had done it alone, on a Tuesday, deliberately choosing the same day of the week the man had flown up on, because he was, underneath the sparkle, a giant sap, and he'd stood on the good armchair with a hammer and a nail and put a hole in the wall he'd kept blank for two years — the blank wall, the nothing I'd have to take down someday wall — and hung a photo of the four of them.
Dez had taken it at the shop's tenth-birthday party in the fall: Malcolm on the forbidden counter, Frankie mid-laugh beside him, Baxter unimpressed in Malcolm's arms, Nigel a blur of motion at the bottom of the frame because Nigel had never held still for a photograph in his life and never would.
It was crooked. Frankie had never fixed it. It matched the tattoo that way.
"It's still up," Malcolm said, quietly, the way he said it every so often, like he still couldn't quite get over it. He never made a thing of it. He knew exactly what it had cost, and he knew that knowing was the whole gift.
"Course it's still up. It's load-bearing now." Frankie came up behind him and put his chin on Malcolm's shoulder and looked at it with him. "I'd have to take down half the wall to move it. Structural. You're stuck."
"Devastating," Malcolm said, and turned around, and kissed him, unhurried, the way he did everything, in the apartment that had stopped being a place Frankie hid and become, without either of them making a big deal of it, a place Frankie lived.
With people's names next to his. With a photo he'd have to take down someday, hung up anyway, on purpose, because he'd finally understood the thing it had taken him thirty years and one skunked French bulldog to learn:
that the whole point was having something you'd hate to lose.
Down on the floor, Nigel snorted in his sleep and rolled over onto Baxter, who tolerated it with the weary grace of a much older dog, and the streetcar went by outside throwing its familiar spark, and Frankie Bissonnette — groomer, sap, formerly the best in the city at being fine alone, now retired from it — stood in his own gold-lit life and held onto the man who'd refused to leave it, and did not, for once, do any math at all.
There was nothing left to count. It was all just his, now. Standing appointment. Every day, indefinitely.
No one booking over it, ever again.
THE END