2. Nick
2
NICK
T here’s nothing more depressing than a dive bar the morning after. Moonbar glowed last night, bursting at the seams with people, and laughter, and music. As daylight trickles in from King Street through the high-set windows, the graffiti wall looks more like a misdemeanor than art, and every surface looks sticky to the touch.
And that’s after I cleaned up.
“Nick, seriously. Thank you so much.” On the other end of the line, Bernie sounds exhausted.
I flick off the main lights and push through the Employees Only door. Then I take the stairs in the freezing stairwell two at a time.
“I’m so sorry you had to work on your night off.”
“Berns.” I close the door behind me and rest my head against the wood. Home sweet home; warm, cozy, never sticky. “I promise it’s fine. I did last call after you left and woke up early to finish closing this morning. I hope Adam’s feeling better. Let me know if you need anything.”
On cue, Bernie’s six-year-old son retches in the background.
“Oh shit. I gotta go.” She hangs up.
I should shower. And eat. And start the booze order for next week. And finish the schedule for next month.
Instead, I fall onto my unmade bed.
I should sleep first. Sleep is critical for me, a guy no longer in his twenties. I dragged my own ass out of bed after midnight, bartended for two and a half hours, then got up at seven to avoid the inevitable who the fuck closed last night? text I’d get from Rocco this afternoon.
Vibrations from my butt pull me from the almost immediate sleep I’ve drifted into. I fumble for a minute, digging my phone out of my pocket, then answer without even lifting my head from the pillow. “Bernie, I promise everything is fine. Just worry about Adam.”
“Who is Bernie?”
Life leaves me in a single slow breath at the sound of my father’s voice.
“And who is Adam?”
Chest tight, I roll onto my back and blink up at the bright February sky through the angled skylight above my bed. “Dad. What’s up?”
“I am fine, Nicholas. How are you?”
It’s Nicholas today. That can’t be good.
I clear my throat, tamping down my unease. “Tired.”
“That’s what a party lifestyle will do to a thirty-year-old man.”
God, he is condescending as fuck. Does it come naturally to him or did he take classes in how to sound disdainful? I’ve always wondered.
“Excuse me,” I say with all the huffiness of a twenty-one-year-old girl who thinks I don’t know how to make a cosmopolitan. “I’m thirty-one and a half. And I wasn’t partying. I was working.”
To Dad, they might as well be the same thing. He’s the kind of person who is polite to his servers, friendly with his garbage collector, and tips his cab drivers, but can’t abide any of his children stooping to such work.
The horror.
“What do you need, Dad?”
“It’s our fortieth wedding anniversary in a few weeks. Are you and Carrie coming?”
I throw my arm over my eyes. Instantly, I gag and drop it again. Apparently, I stink. “Carrie and I broke up.”
Carrie dumped me. She said I have Peter Pan syndrome and she’s honestly not wrong. Not that I’ll tell my father that. The breakup wasn’t a total surprise; I liked Carrie, maybe even could have loved her, but she wants to be with a guy who works a nine-to-five job. She’s ready to move into a house in the suburbs with four bedrooms, three and a half baths, and a two-car garage with a man who’ll take her for brunch on weekends. She deserves that. She deserves all the things she wants.
But I work nights and weekends, and I hate brunch on principle alone. I know how difficult the shift can be for service workers. And I was always too tired from working the night before to take her anyway. I’m a guy who lives above a bar in an apartment with one bathroom. I don’t even know what half a bath would look like?
Dad’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, he says “I’m sorry to hear that” in a tone that makes me think he’s about to add something fatherlike.
Instead, he says, “Your mother will be devastated, as you know.” Yeah, that’s more like it. He’s more interested in making a fool of me. “She really liked Carrie.”
Well, Old Man, devastating my mother is my favorite pastime. “Do you want me to see if Carrie can make it? I can stay here.”
“There’s no reason to be snarky.” He sounds legitimately surprised by my reaction, because what it really comes down to is this: my father and I don’t get each other. “We just want you to achieve the same success as your siblings.”
“To be clear, in this scenario, I’m only successful if I’m dating someone?” I feel like the child of one of Jane Austen’s mother characters.
“Maintaining a long-term relationship would be the first step toward marriage and starting a family, yes.”
Joke’s on Mom. Being an uncle is more my jam. I can’t say that to her, though. Her desire for grandkids comes from a good place. The only thing she loves more than being surrounded by her family is being surrounded by more of us.
“By the time he was your age, Alex was already…”
Here we go. Dad launches into an explanation of all of my perfect eldest brother’s achievements starting with marriage to his high school sweetheart, Robert, then moving on to their two and half children, if you count the dog—which I do—and Alex’s job working at the only truly acceptable company in my father’s opinion, his own: Scott & Sons Furniture Solutions.
An airplane works its way across the sky above me as Dad moves down the list of his other successful children.
Miranda, the type A super-mom who has been able to read a lie on my face since I was old enough to deny that I’d supplied it. Not currently employed but married to a guy rich enough for her to be a stay-at-home mom.
Then Claire, a lawyer, also married with a kid. This one’s hard for Dad to reconcile. On the one hand she gets points for being a working mom, on the other a mother should be home with her children.
Alex and Rob never get this kind of hypocrisy because Rob is the one who stays home with Tilly and the new baby, and he is neither a woman nor my father’s child.
I’ve got a long day of work ahead, regardless of what my father thinks about my job or relationship status, and I’ve had enough of this conversation. Like a coyote, I’m willing to chew off my own foot to get out of this trap.
“Dad.” I cut him off before he can list the reasons Charlie, my closest sibling in age, is a better son than I’ll ever be. Spoiler alert: it’s because he’s the youngest and he can do whatever he wants. “I got to go, but I’ll be in Muskoka for your anniversary weekend.”
“Alone,” he says with the contempt of a health inspector ticking off multiple health code violations.
Fuck this. “Nope.”
“I thought you broke up.”
“You’ll just have to wait and see.”
“What’s her name?” His tone is skeptical, and rightfully so. I have no girlfriend or date to speak of.
“So sorry. You’re breaking up. I’m going through a tunnel. I ran out of minutes,” I yell into the phone.
“Nicholas, I know you’re not?—”
I hang up and toss my phone across the bed. Then I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets. Anything to relieve the pressure built from another friendly conversation with Mr. James Scott.
“Shit.” I do this every time. Win the battle, lose the war. Maybe Dad is right. Maybe I am a loser, because after a decade of arguments like these, one would think I’d know how to stop having them. But without fail, by the end of another round with him, I’ve reverted into a seventeen-year-old, begging his dad to let him apprentice as a carpenter or take a gap year or apply to culinary school. Anything but the Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Toronto he expected of me.
Now, I’m a thirty-one-and-a-half-year-old lying to his father about having a girlfriend, just to get the guy off the phone.
The shower helps the smell I’m giving off, and a load of laundry helps the T-shirt.
Working nights for my entire adult life has gifted me the magic power of sleeping at any time of day. After a long nap, I tackle the schedule and the beer and booze orders for next month. Before I go downstairs to start prep, I schedule social media posts for the bar and lie in bed daydreaming about what it would be like to own the place myself one day. The business is probably valued around eight hundred k. Throw in property taxes, bank loans, and insurance, and there’s no way it’ll happen in the next five years. Though it’s a nice ten-year goal.
Maybe fifteen.
I started working here as a barback when I was nineteen, in my first semester at U of T. By summertime, Ed, the owner, promoted me to bartender and I quit school to work full-time. My dad didn’t know until he tried to pay my tuition for the upcoming semester and was informed by some poor bastard in the accounts department that they had no record of my enrollment.
He didn’t speak to me until Christmas and then it was only to ask me to pass the mashed potatoes. As if the silent treatment was a punishment. Dad thought he could keep me under his sphere of influence if he kept paying for my school, so I made sure I’d never need his money again.
Rocco shows up half an hour before their shift with an early dinner for us and their plans to pitch expanding the cocktail menu to Ed at tomorrow’s staff meeting. Their easy company and excellent cooking ease the tension from my shoulders. I can once again pull off Nick, The Man, who’s friendly, if not a little apathetic, instead of Nick, The Kid, who really needs to talk to a therapist about his daddy issues.
Despite the modicum of comfort I’ve found, I still don’t know who to bring to my parents’ anniversary party.
I sneak a peek at Rocco, who’s cutting limes next to me.
“What?” they ask without breaking the rhythm of their chopping.
“I like your nail polish,” I say, because Rocco needs buttering.
They pause their work, stretch out their fingers to show off the dark red, glittery paint, and smile at their hands. “The color is called Blood of Beelzebub. It’s a good choice for Valentine’s Day, don’t you think?”
I think it sounds positively occult, but I plaster on a grin. “Yeah. It looks great.”
They flip their shoulder-length hair out of their eyes so I can get the full effect of their cocked brow. “I’ll ask again, Nick. What?”
“If I needed a date, would you have someone to set me up with?”
They smirk. They’ve got the kind of smile that draws blood, and I’ve been left bleeding many times. “Absolutely not.”
I laugh. “Rude, but please enlighten me as to why the hell not.”
Rocco points their knife at me, abandoning the limes. “I appreciate that you don’t date in the industry. Some of these bar managers work their way through the college-aged servers like they’re McConaughey in that movie all the straight guys love.”
“Not a predator. Good to know.”
“But Nick. Nicky. Nico. Do you know what would happen if I set you up with one of my friends?”
I lean against the bar, folding my arms across my chest. They mimic me. If I were a man who “took things more seriously”—thanks, Dad—I’d accuse them of insubordination.
“You’d be helping your best friend out because he really needs to find a woman he can pass off as his date before his parents’ wedding anniversary?”
Turning, Rocco rolls their eyes and picks up the knife again. “Though that sounds like a hilarious story I don’t actually want to get invested in,” they say, going back to cutting, “that is not what would happen. No, I guarantee she’d fall for you instantly because you’ve got that scruffy I’m a stray dog and just need some love look.”
I blow out an annoyed breath. Not a huge fan of the dog comparison, but I’ll let it slide.
“With your flannel and your band T-shirts and your daddy issues.”
I turn around, too, and scoop my limes into the container. “First of all, only I’m allowed to say I have daddy issues. Second, I thought I wanted to hear this, but it turns out, I do not. Thanks, Roc.”
“Nick.” They place a hand on my shoulder, their green eyes softer than I’ve ever seen them. “Women love you from the start and I can tell you like them, too. But you leave them hanging.”
I flick a piece of lime pulp off my Man Machine Poem tour T-shirt. It’s hard to be self-righteous about the band T-shirt comment when I am literally wearing one.
And Rocco’s not wrong. I certainly left Carrie hanging.
A couple patrons trickle in, and Rocco heads over to take their orders while I finish up prep.
“I’m taking a smoke break,” I call down the bar.
They tuck their hair behind their ear with one hand while shaking a martini shaker with the other. “You don’t smoke, baby.”
The bar is quiet for now, but that’s the thing about King Street West on a Monday. It could be quiet for the rest of the night. Either I’ll cut Rocco and maybe even close early, or thirty people will pile in here in the next half hour and we’ll be slammed until last call.
Here on this block of King Street, life is always teetering on the edge of a party. The loudest place to be when a Toronto sports team is winning, the worst place to try to sleep after last call. For now, I’ll take advantage of the quiet.
“Just pretend.” I blow them a kiss as I pull my winter coat around my shoulders.
The alley behind the bar has one light over the door. I stick to that small halo, more for some semblance of warmth than out of a need for safety. It’s cold as balls out here. I shove my phone between ear and shoulder and stick my hands in my back pockets.
“Nico.” Carrie’s voice is the only warm thing out here.
Sinking into the comfort of it, I lean back against the cold bricks. “Hey, Care.”
Rocco thinks it’s unhealthy that I talk to my ex, but we didn’t break up because we weren’t fond of each other. We just want different things.
“Aren’t you working?” The sound of her television fades from the background. I can picture her moving through her Roncesvalles condo, the three steps it takes to get from her living room to her bedroom door.
“Taking a break. How’s work?”
Carrie launches into a description of her kindergarten class’s latest art project. For a few minutes, I soak in the easiness of our friendship.
“Nick?”
I blink out of the trance I’ve fallen into. “Yeah.”
“You didn’t call to hear about my kindergarteners.”
Traffic is picking up on the street, the noise building with it. “I need a favor,” I say, my heart suddenly in my throat. “Is there any way you could come with me to my parents’ house in a couple weeks?”
She sighs.
“Just as friends…”
“As much as I’d love to see your mom again, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Her tone is gentle but firm.
“Yeah, no.” I rough a hand down my face and swallow back my embarrassment. “I get it. It was a bad idea anyway. I already told Dad we broke up.”
“What happened?” she asks.
“Don’t worry about it.” I open the back door and sneak a quick look down the hall to where Rocco slings drinks behind the bar. “I just ran my mouth with my dad again and screwed myself. It’s fine. I’ll go alone.”
“It’s not like you have trouble meeting people, Nick.”
Two cabs duke it out with those classic urban orchestral instruments: car horns and asshole-puckering obscenities.
I jam my finger into my ear with a little more force than necessary. “Yeah, I guess.”
Rocco wasn’t exaggerating about the older industry folks who use their younger staff or clientele like their very own dating app. I’ve never pursued bar patrons, even if they were closer to me in age. Ed’s first rule of working here: don’t shit where you eat.
“Dating app?” she suggests.
I grunt a noncommittal response. I’ve downloaded and deleted plenty of apps. I can’t explain it, my disinterest in meeting someone that way.
Fuck. Maybe Dad’s priorities are rubbing off on me.
“My sister got engaged last week,” she says.
“No shit. That’s amazing. Tell her congrats.”
She laughs. “She met her fiancé through a matchmaker.”
“I remember.” Carrie’s sister, Mandy, wouldn’t shut up about Core Cupid and her matchmaker, Chloe, when she joined. She went on and on about how the company created an algorithm that can predict romantic attraction with a ninety-nine percent success rate.
“Have you ever considered it?”
“Carrie, come on. I cancel my thirty-day trials on the twenty-ninth day.”
“So?”
The door flies open, almost taking my nose off. Rocco breathes a harsh cloud into the cold air. “It’s getting fucked up in there.”
I cover the phone. “I’ll be right there.”
Without a response, they’re gone, the door slamming shut behind them.
“So,” I say into the phone. “I’m too cheap to pay for matchmaking.” Not to mention I’m not the greatest at planning nights out. Most of my dates with Carrie involved her having a drink at the bar while I worked before she’d slip up to my apartment until my shift was over. Unless the women I match with are willing to sign up for Underground Karaoke or taste test Rocco’s newest cocktail recipes, I can’t see it working.
If Dad knew what a workaholic I’d turned into, he might actually be proud.
Music from inside vibrates through the door and the brick wall into my bones. There’s a scream, and not on the street, but from somewhere inside. “Shit. I’ve got to go.”
Already, my brain is behind the bar. I’m three orders deep with a towel over my shoulder. I love my job, especially early in the night like this, when patrons are still wide-eyed and no one is even thinking of doing bumps off the toilet seat yet. Maybe I’ll fire up the karaoke. The people love spontaneous karaoke.
“ Nick ,” Carrie says, her urgent tone making it obvious it’s not the first time she’s had to say my name. “Just think about it, okay?”
“I will, I will.” I stop with my hand on the door, the cold creeping into my skin and under my layers. “Carrie.” My breath billows in a silver cloud. “I’m really glad you’re still friends with me.”
Her voice sounds like a smile. “Me too, Nico.”
We never turn the heat on in the cramped manager’s office. No one spends enough time in here to justify the cost. Over the decades, it’s become a storage space for tax documents and lost and found items, as well as a closet for our winter coats. In the summer, it’s sweltering back here, but now in winter, I’m surprised I can’t see my breath. Despite the frigid temperature in here, I’m sweating. Bernie and Rocco don’t look much better.
Ed’s rattling breaths are the only sound. He’s had a cough for a while now. At first, we thought he’d caught a bad bug and just couldn’t shake it. Then, he started losing weight, and he stopped coming in as much as he used to. When he did, he looked more and more haggard. He’d try to hide the pain he was in, wincing through a cough or stopping a fit of laughter short with a grimace. More than once, we’ve caught him hiding in the back hallway, his hand splayed out on the wall to hold himself up, unable to catch his breath.
The stubborn man refused to go to the doctor until Rocco went on strike a few months ago. They even made a picket sign and marched back and forth in the snow outside of Ed’s Cabbagetown row house, chanting, “What do we want? For my uncle to go to the doctor. When do we want it? Yesterday.”
Ed went the next day.
He practically raised Rocco after their dad—Ed’s brother—died. From the tears brimming in their eyes, I think this is the first time they’re hearing Ed’s news.
“So, that’s about the long and the short of it,” Ed says in a wheezy voice that can likely be as attributed to emotion as it can the cancer the doctor found in his lung.
Rocco squeaks and Bernie reaches for their hand, squeezing tightly. I shut my spiral notebook. My scrawled notes about reminding everyone—cough, Rocco—about closing duties and preparing for St. Patrick’s Day are insignificant in the face of this news.
If Rocco is the embodiment of flight and I’m freeze, Bernie is all fight. “I’ll start prepping frozen meals so you and Rocco don’t have to worry about cooking during treatment. Roc will take you to your appointments and Nick will start the hiring process so we can fill the gap when Rocco can’t be here.”
Ed holds up his hand, and Bernie presses her lips together, like she has to physically restrain herself from more planning.
“That’s very sweet of you, Berns.” He sounds tired. So tired. Was he this tired last week? Has he been this tired for a while now and I just didn’t notice? He stands slowly, obviously sore, joints making a snap, crackle, pop sound that is all the louder in this stiff, scared silence. “But I can’t do both at once.”
“Can’t do both…of what?” Rocco asks.
Ed dips his chin and focuses on the desk calendar eternally stuck on May 16, 1999. “I have to sell.”
Rocco gasps.
Bernie blinks like Ed just slapped her.
I want to fucking roar. What I’ve longed for, literally dreamed of, asleep and awake, is to buy this bar, to keep it here, a small piece of Toronto history, a constant on an ever-changing street. To covet all the best parts of Ed’s haven and build new traditions. That one day, I’d be the Ed, giving the next generation more and more responsibility until they could practically run it themselves, letting them learn and adapt and grow with my increasingly unnecessary guidance.
I almost do roar I’ll buy Moonbar at him. The words are a hurricane force battering at my ribs so violently they’d blow this old man over if they escaped.
Until I remember that buying Moonbar is less a realistic goal and more the answer to the job interview question, where do you see yourself in ten years?
Ed outlines the process. Hiring an appraiser, then a broker. He says that these things usually move slowly. He doesn’t bother to say what we’re all thinking. Usually doesn’t take into account the many developers in this city who wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to commit horrific crimes in order to build condos on our footprint.
I’d rather slather my balls in fish guts and dip them directly into the Amazon River than let that happen.
Rocco hovers around Ed, adjusting the hat on his head, gathering his things and stuffing them into his old canvas backpack, offering him the faded green army jacket that’s way too thin for us to let him go outside in. “Do you want my coat, too? What about a scarf? Mittens on or off?”
Ed’s mouth works but he says nothing about their meddling. Instead of responding, he turns to me, like he can hear my thoughts. “You don’t know anyone who wants to buy this old dump, do you?” His laugh rattles in his chest.
Bernie and Rocco still and zero in on me, their expressions etched with hope. It’s no secret, my dream, but I thought I’d have more time. I fucking hate that I can’t keep it here for all of them.
“I’ll do my best,” I say, my voice a harsh rasp. If I have to go into debt up to my hair follicles, I will, to keep Moonbar in the family.
Ed nods, patting my shoulder in a paternal way that makes me feel like a kid, even as he has to reach up to me.
“We’ll have the staff meetings in my apartment from now on,” I say as he shuffles out of the office, Rocco trailing behind. “It’s warmer up there. More comfortable.”
He waves me away. “I don’t want to fuck with the stairs. Don’t worry about it, kid.”
Bernie follows them, squeezing my forearm as she passes, her mouth still pressed into a grim line. When it comes down to it, I really only have two options. I could apply for a loan, though it’s unlikely I’ll be approved. Maybe if I was a restauranteur or corporate entity, I’d have a chance. But just me? A bartender guy with pretty good credit, an abundance of band T-shirts, and no MBA? Fat chance.
Or I could get a personal loan. Like the kind my father has doled out to almost every one of my siblings, used to build an addition to a house or to start a side business. The kind he’s never offered to me for obvious reasons. Why would he lend any of his hard-earned generational wealth to the family disappointment?
I have a better shot with the bank.
From the doorway, I watch Bernie and Rocco fuss over Ed as he snoops around behind the bar, grumbling and growling at the way they hover as he goes.
For them, it’s a shot I’m willing to take.