***
It finally happened. I came home from school one day and there was my dad. He was standing in the living room, right where he belonged, surrounded by the trappings of his new job as a Canadian border security agent. The little kids were chasing each other around him like he was a maypole when they weren’t scrapping over the honour of wearing his real policeman style hat. He showed me the special wallet with a cut-out in it for his shiny, new badge. Carrie was curled up on the coach, wrapped in the fur-lined Arctic grade parka the government had given him to wear on the worst nights of January. Mum stood draping pair after pair of blue polyester trousers onto clothes hangers.
“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” Dad told us. “I really think this is what I should have done for a living all along.”
Naturally, I was beyond happy to have him home again. But as I stepped back from hugging him, Dad’s hand clung to my wrist. “Still wearing that boy’s gold bracelet, eh?” he said.
I pulled my arm away and tucked the gold braid inside my sleeve. “Sometimes,” I answered even though I wore it nearly every day.
“So how is Bracelet Boy?” Dad persisted.
I groaned. Why was Dad ruining our reunion with this kind of silly talk? “I don’t know. He’s the same as always, I guess.”
Dad hummed disapprovingly at my answer.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” Carrie broke in. There was something menacing about the voice she used. “Heather likes Ben Jones way better now, anyway.”
I gasped. “What did you just say?”
But Dad’s mood brightened visibly.
“Especially since Ben came to her rescue when she fainted at school. It was classic,” Carrie continued, batting her eyelashes dramatically – infuriatingly – from inside the hood of Dad’s parka. “See? Look how red she is right now.”
“I’m shocked at what you’re saying,” I scoffed. “That’s all. And Ben Jones just happened to be standing right in front of me when I fell down. That was all it was –”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Dad raised both his hands. “Heather fainted – at school?”
“Dang it, Carrie,” I began. I had planned on telling my parents about my unexpected venture into unconsciousness eventually – but not like this.
Carrie was still telling the story for me. “It’s not a big deal. It all happened while Mum was in the hospital. Dr. Timms said it was just stress, right Heather? No one wanted Mum to worry about it while she was sick so–”
Now Mum was interrupting Carrie. “Well, that explains all the weird questions I’ve been getting around town about Heather’s health.”
Dad dropped his hands. “How could you guys keep something like this from us?”
“I didn’t keep it from you,” Carrie huffed. “I just told you all about it.”
I heaved a loud sigh and braced for the worst. But Dad wasn’t mad. He had drawn one arm around my shoulders and pressed his chin against the top of my head. “Honey, we’re a family that helps each other. I love that about us. So don’t try to weather things all on your own. You’re important in this family for what you need to take from us, not just for what you need to give.”
I bowed my head into his shoulder and bit my lip. “Sorry, Dad,” I said.
“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” Mum said. “Keeping all of this from your parents was not the right thing to do but seeing Dr. Timms about it was.”
“Thanks to Ben Jones again,” Carrie sang.
“Honestly–” I resumed my protest.
But by now, Jeff was standing at the bottom of the stairs with the keys to the station wagon in his hand. “Come on, Heather. We gotta go.”
I muttered a good-bye as Dad let go of my shoulders. Then I trotted down the stairs and out the door behind Jeff.
Going to work felt strange that night. Everything was changing. Dad was back at home with a new career and tonight was Wayne’s last shift at TacoTown before he left us to work at the mall. Unlike the incident of the mole removal, Crystal was handling this change pretty well. I don’t think Wayne gave her enough credit for understanding that their lives couldn’t continue to unfold as mirror images for much longer. After Crystal and Bert went home at nine o’clock, I stayed to the very end of the shift, along with Wayne and Darren, to close the restaurant. It was a quiet evening. No one in town seemed very hungry for tacos. After a long lull, Wayne finally locked the front doors and disappeared into the back office to count the cash register trays full of money for the last time.
“You’ve got twenty minutes,” I heard him tell Darren before he closed the office door and left us alone.
Darren rounded on me almost as soon as the latch clicked into place. “Okay, Mack, what would you say if I told you I was through with you?”
More changes, more revelations – and somehow, I hadn’t seen this conversation coming. I had always thought that when Darren grew tired of me he’d just quietly drift away. I assumed I’d look up one day and wonder where all his special attention had gone. But instead, he was forcing the moment into a major turning point I couldn’t just ignore. There could only be one reason why: he wanted to create a crisis – make me choose. He was gambling on the chance that I might panic and tell him I wanted to be with him after all – if the only other choice was to be alone. It’s true that the thought of a world where I couldn’t count on Darren to be admiring and spoiling me all the time was a sadder world for me. But I also knew that it was a far better world for him.
I cleared my throat. “Well, as long as being ‘through’ with me meant you were still willing to be my friend, I guess I’d say I was happy for you,” I answered.
Darren steeled his features. “Would you miss me?” he asked.
“Yeah, kind of,” I admitted. “It’s nice to be – appreciated. But it’s also not fair to you.”
He nodded, as if he was agreeing with me. “Okay then. Unless you do anything to stop me, I’m going to ask someone else out.”
This was also unexpected. “Oh. Do I know her?” I asked. He wasn’t talking about Crystal, was he?
All at once he seemed a little embarrassed as he grinned and nodded into his chest. “Yeah. It’s Shelley, from the other evening crew.”
“Shelley?” There was a faint note of disgust in my voice. Did he really mean the girl with the over-bleached hair who spent her shifts avoiding work, wandering around the restaurant whistling “Suicide Blonde” to herself? I didn’t know what to say. Darren could tell he’d made me speechless and I think he enjoyed it.
“So, are you going to stop me?” he asked.
I finally shook my head. “I can’t,” I answered. “I really am sorry.”
“Fine.” Darren nodded again. “So do you think Shelley will have me? I want your opinion – as a girl.”
“A girl like Shelley? She’d be crazy not to have you,” I answered without any hesitation. But I paused before I asked, “And what about the part where you stay friends with me?”
Darren pushed out a dry laugh. “You don’t really mean that.”
“Seriously, I do,” I insisted. “We have to stay friends – for the sake of Crystal and Wayne if nothing else –”
He shook his head again. “It’s always about the twins –”
“Will you let me finish?”
“Oh come on, Mack. ‘Let’s stay friends’ is a meaningless break-up cliché,” Darren said, pulling the mop out of the bucket and beginning the final floor cleaning of the night.
“You are not breaking up with me,” I reminded him. “You can’t break up with me because we were never going out.”
“Whatever,” he muttered. “How many times this winter have I taken you to dinner, and movies, and bought you things – really nice things?”
After all these months, I was finally frustrated enough to roll the gold bracelet right off my hand. “Take it,” I said, holding it up to Darren’s face. “Take it
back.”
Darren made no move toward the bracelet dangling from my fingertips. “What would I do with it?” he fumed. “Shelley’s only seen you wearing it every day for the last three months. There’s no way I can give it to her.”
“What about your mom?” I suggested.
He winced. “Don’t be gross. Give it to your own mom if you want to.”
“Look. It was a mistake for me to ever accept it,” I explained. “And I’m sorry. Do you hear me, Darren? I’m sorry. I can’t take it back – but you can.”
Darren sighed and held out his hand. I poured the bracelet into his palm. But as soon as the last link of it left my fingers he threw the mop down and lunged at me, laughing, and draped the bracelet over the top of my ear. It hung there for a second before I snatched it off. I waved it in front of me as I chased Darren into the food preparation area behind the cash registers.
“You have to take it back!” I yelled after him.
He reached onto the counter and grabbed one of the giant caulking guns we used to dispense sour cream onto tacos. When he turned around he was pointing it right at me, like a weapon.
“You wouldn’t,” I hissed. Ever since I started working at TacoTown, I’d seen and heard people threaten each other with the sour cream guns hundreds of times. But I’d never seen anyone actually pull the trigger – until now. The sour cream gun fired and my apron was smeared with long, white gobs of it. I yelled and ran at Darren, slapping the gun away with one hand and grabbing a squeeze bottle full of extra hot chilli sauce in the other.
“Not the eyes, not the eyes,” Darren pleaded with me, raising his hands to his face.
But I didn’t want to maim him. I just wanted revenge. I painted the front of his apron with the runny, red sauce. I would have emptied the whole bottle onto his clothes if Darren hadn’t retaliated with fistfuls of icy cold shredded lettuce. I knew I’d be separating the stringy leaves from my hair for the rest of the night. There was only one way to defend myself: by hurling nacho chips at him as if they were ninja throwing stars.
Darren ran out of the food area in a hail of broken chips. I followed, yelling like a bad Kung Fu movie. It looked like I had him cornered in the dish-pen at the back of the restaurant so I picked up an over-ripe tomato from the box of yucky ones Sandy saved to return to the supplier.
“Are you ready to call a truce?” I offered, brandishing the squishy tomato.
But when Darren ran toward the sink, surrender was the last thing he had in mind. Instead, he took hold of the heavy duty rinsing nozzle and turned around to face me with it. He was just levelling the nozzle at me, getting ready to loose a blast of water, when Wayne came storming through the office door, slipping on hot sauce and cursing. “What the –”
“Don’t worry, we’re fine,” Darren said, aiming the nozzle at me again.
“Put it down,” Wayne bawled at him.
I dropped my tomato grenade back into the box with the fruit flies and scooted away across the dirty tiles. When I reached Wayne I swung around on his thick brown arm and stood safely behind him.
“Darren started it.”
“Don’t think I won’t hose the both of you,” Darren warned.
“Get off me, Mack,” Wayne commanded. “Sheesh, you guys. I’m still your supervisor for the next –” he looked up at the clock “ – ten minutes. And I’m ordering you both to knock it off and clean up this mess.”
Darren unhanded the rinse nozzle and I stepped out from behind Wayne. I picked the mop up off the ground as Wayne let out a sigh and shook his head. “Talk about a messy break up,” he said.
“We can’t break up,” I called after him as he retreated into the office.
“Yeah, we were never going out,” Darren finished.
“We were just friends,” I kept calling even though Wayne was gone.
“And we’re still friends,” Darren yelled too.
I turned and smiled at him. “That’s right,” I nodded.
After I finished cleaning the floors, I stood on the concrete step outside the back of the restaurant where a huge, steel dumpster sat collecting our daily garbage. I held a dustpan in my hand. Emptying it was my last duty of the night. Just before I tipped all the debris into the dumpster, something caught my eye – glinting and golden even in the dim light of the alleyway. It was a tiny gold bracelet that I hadn’t noticed had gone missing during the fight with Darren. Now it was tumbling out of the dustpan with the lint and dust and crumbs of the kitchen floor. It was too late to yank it back from the gravity that pulled it down into the dumpster. Unless I wanted to climb into the filth and stench of the bin after it, the bracelet was gone.
I looked over my shoulder. From the alley I could see Darren through the office window, folding up his soaked apron and packing it into his bag. The delicate, golden shackle that had tied us together since Christmastime was finally gone. And I hoped he was as happy as I was that we had both been made free.