Chapter 14
Fourteen
By the time we finished frisking Dennis, we were both in need of a drink.
My sister’s fiancé, Brian (also my ex), works at the local pub, not as a bartender anymore, but as a janitor.
“Why did he get demoted?” Elliot asks, holding the door for me.
As the name suggests, The Mapledale Cider Club specializes in hard apple cider, sourced from our local orchards.
Prior to the cozy rebranding, it was once an Irish pub where you can get pitchers of Guinness and a Sunday roast. All the fundamental elements remain, from the stained glass windows to the worn red leather booths.
Now you can also order fifty varieties of cider.
“He was a lousy bartender,” I say, making sure to lower my voice in case Brian happened to be sweeping nearby. “Mixed the most awful cocktails. Got argumentative with the customers, always challenging everyone to a nut cracking contest.”
“Pardon me?” Elliot asks, scanning the dark interior for our suspect. The bar was sparsely populated at this early hour. A lone pair of tourists were huddled in a booth, sampling the seasonal flight of apple ciders.
“Shhh…” I cock my head toward the dejected figure in the shadows. “There he is.”
Elliot follows my gaze to the bar where my ex was perched on his favorite stool, his mop and bucket abandoned in a dusty corner.
Brian runs his fingers through his unwashed hair, disheveling the greasy strands.
His five o’clock shadow makes him look deceptively hobo-like and shifty.
I don’t know whether I should give him $5 or clutch my purse to my chest at the sight of him.
These are the complicated feelings my ex arouses in me.
And of course, Brian is spending his break doing his favorite activity, though it’s not what you think it is.
Brian’s glass of Red Delicious IPA is almost full. He’s never been much a drinker and he’s definitely not an alcoholic. But you can always find Brian at the bar because of the nuts.
Even now, well past his glory days, Brian sits amongst a pile of discarded peanut shells. I take in his receding hairline, his puffy face and waistline paunch...
The dry hands, always so eerily dry…
And I immediately regret the three weeks we used to date.
In my defense, I was twenty-two and Brian was the best-looking guy in Mapledale.
Obviously, he’s curdled like cream left out in the sun, but a decade ago, he was young and fit and bore a passing resemblance (if you were myopic and somewhat delusional) to Leonardo DiCaprio circa his Romeo + Juliet days.
Brian was a champion nutcracker…
Meaning he won every nut cracking competition he’s ever entered.
Now, you may be wondering, how many nut cracking competitions are there?
Trust me, in Mapledale, there’s a competition for every type of nut (walnuts, chestnuts, pistachios, the humble peanut) and a mixed nut competition where you never know what nut you’re going to crack.
It’s a long story but Brian can crack them all.
And it was thrilling, watching from the sidelines as Brian de-shelled nuts with his bare hands.
He was like a machine, clearing an entire bag of pistachios in the blink of an eye.
His hands were like natural nutcrackers, strong and sure, taking down the mighty walnut without the assistance of an actual nutcracker.
I knew a guy with hands like that could take care of me.
As with all my past mistakes, Brian seemed like a good idea at the time. Now he’s a washed up former nut cracking champion, pathetically mashing peanuts at the pub with no blue ribbon to show for it.
All this I whispered (and whispered fast) to Elliot as we slipped into a shadowy booth in the corner and order our flight of apple ciders.
Elliot digests it all with an expression bordering on disbelief.
“In a town of strange people with strange backstories, that is by far the strangest.” He shakes his head as if to clear his mind from the grips of a fevered dream.
“You’re telling me that drunk,” he points to Brian, who was crumbling peanut shells between his thumb and forefinger while slowly nursing his lukewarm IPA, “was a champion nutcracker?”
“He was like a prodigy,” I say, not seeing anything weird about it.
“Look, every small town has its traditions. This is one of our traditions, dating all the way back to the town’s founding…
when Jeremiah Maple challenged his best friend Ebenezer Dale to a chestnut cracking competition.
Whoever cracked the most chestnuts the fastest got to name the town. Guess who won?”
“Maple,” Elliot holds up his right hand, palm up, “and Dale.” He glances at his left palm. “Maple-dale,” he says, bringing his hands together.
“It was a tie,” I nod. “In high school, when Brian cracked that first walnut with his bare hands, it made the front page of The Mapledale Sentinel. We all thought he was the second coming of the founders. Brian was a winner…” I glance over my shoulder at the washed-up man playing with a bowl of peanuts, absently watching daytime TV. “What a waste.”
Elliot watches me watch Brian. “And you only date winners, don’t you?”
Honestly, by now I should stop being surprised by Elliot’s personal attacks on my character. Nevertheless, I’m still taken aback by the sudden turn against me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How long until Brian couldn’t crack a nut before you dumped him?”
I hunker down, my face steaming. “We only dated for three weeks. Not even a month. And yes, Brian had stopped placing first in the competitions by then, but that had nothing to do with our breakup. Brian, being a winner, didn’t matter. It was Brian that soured me on Brian.”
Elliot grabs a small glass of cider and sips it, nodding in approval. “How so?”
“Dating the champion nutcracker was thrilling. It was like I was dating Rocky. But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be… pardon the pun.”
Elliot rolls his eyes. “Continue.”
“Just look at all those shells,” I say, stealthily gesturing to the discards around Sad Brian.
“He leaves them everywhere and never picks them up. He even expected me to clean up after him. If he thinks I’m going to follow him around with a broom and duster, he’s got another thing coming!
And the fingers…” I shiver. “My God… the fingers!”
Elliot side-eyes my ex, his gaze zeroing in on Brian’s hands. “What about his fingers?”
“Have you ever seen such dry, scaly skin? This is what gloveless nut cracking can do to your skin. All that salt and strain. I’ve plied him with hand lotion, but he says he doesn’t need to moisturize with this ‘chick stuff.’ I even offered him the option of non-scented hand lotion (which was imported from Germany and not cheap) and he laughed at me.
Can you believe it? Laughed at me. Well, look at my hands…
” I flutter my fingers. “I’m thirty-three, but are these not the hands of an eighteen-year-old? ”
Elliot takes a cursory glance at them. “They’re very nice.”
“Just nice?”
He clears his throat. “Soft.”
“I notice that your hands are smooth and supple,” I say. “I’ve also noticed that you have a bottle of lotion in your bedroom. See! You’re not a man who’s afraid of moisturizing.”
“I… ah…” Elliot picks up a sample of cider from the flight. “That’s exactly what I use it for. My hands and other things.”
I glare at him from across the table. “It’s quite a big bottle of lotion.”
He gulps his cider. “I have big hands.”
“Wait till you check out Brian’s old man claws.” I shiver again, thinking how awful it must be for my sister to have this man and his dry hands stroke her cheek. I would have a fit.
“Why did our champion nutcracker fall from grace?” Elliot asks.
Needing reinforcement, I pick up a reddish-brown cider, hailing from the northernmost region of Vermont, and knock it back.
“Ego.” I shake my head.
“Ego?”
“He nut-cracked too close to the sun and got burned.”
“Ah yes,” Elliot says, astutely studying the cider labels.
“Brian had a habit of challenging every guy at the bar to a nut cracking contest.”
Elliot chokes on his drink. “I beg your pardon?”
“He was very aggressive. A sore winner, if you ask me. Most guys would brush him off, but one night, someone took him up on his challenge and upped the ante. Bet that he couldn’t crack four walnuts with one hand. So eight walnuts total.”
Elliot rubs his brow. “I’m afraid to ask, but why?”
“I can’t explain the inner workings of a simpleton’s mind.” I nod to Brian’s hands, curled into arthritic claws. “He took the bait and SNAP!” I grimace, remembering the double cast Brian wore after the injury. “After that night, he was never the same again.”
“That’s the weirdest and most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,” Elliot says dryly. “Question is: will he crack after my interrogation?” He doesn’t pardon the pun, but thumps me on the back instead and gets up. “Let’s find out.”
Reluctantly, I follow Elliot to the bar. I was hoping we’d get through this investigation without involving Brian. I try to avoid Brian whenever possible, which is hard to do now that he’s engaged to my sister and they’re squatting in my mom’s house.
So far, I’ve managed to steer clear of Brian.
Even during my Thanksgiving party, I sat him at the far end of the table (out of my eyesight) and made sure we were never in the same room alone together.
Over the six months or so that Jen and Brian were dating and then suddenly engaged (a rush job, in my opinion), I held on to a glimmer of hope that my sister would come to her senses and dump him.
But Jen being Jen…
My sister may never come to her senses until there’s a messy divorce. And now, because of her bad choices, I have to interact with Brian and his nuts again.
Thanks Jen.
“Holly!” Brian’s beady eyes light up when I hop onto the stool next to Elliot.
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s cut to the chase. “Hello, Brian.”