Then
Ethan was out back, tapping a new keg of Miller Light. He could hear Ruby and Charlie making stilted conversation at the bar, and he hurried so he could save them from each other. Charlie made Ruby deeply nervous with all of his bluster and wilful bro-fulness, and Ruby flummoxed Charlie with her mix of slight primness and sharp-tongued wit. Ethan was the buffer between the two of them, smoothing each other’s edges and making sure that the conversation didn’t veer too far in either direction.
He sealed the tap, wiped his hands on his jeans, and headed back behind the bar. It was a Wednesday night and there wasn’t a game on, so it was fairly quiet. The regulars were perched in their usual spots, and in the corner, a group of teachers from the nearby high school had come in after their summer-school classes and were still there, empty bottles littering the tables, the occasional collective laugh or shriek rising and falling. They would be sorry tomorrow when their alarm clocks went off and their hangovers kicked in, but in the meantime Ethan was happy to keep supplying them with wine and plates of nachos he microwaved in the back kitchen.
‘Ethan, did you know that your girlfriend has never seen The Big Lebowski?’
Ethan shrugged noncommittally. When the three of them were together, a lot of the conversations were led by one of them asking him if he knew something apparently abhorrent or ignorant about the other, and over the past month he’d become an expert at polite distance. To them, he was Switzerland, though his allegiance did swing slightly towards Ruby, as she was better looking and let him sleep with her. ‘She was probably too young.’
‘Dude, it came out like six years ago! It’s not like she was a baby back then.’ Charlie swung towards Ruby, eyes intense. ‘Seriously, it’s the best movie ever made. How have you not seen it? I mean, you don’t even know about the Dude!’ He swung back towards Ethan. ‘Your girlfriend doesn’t know about the Dude!’
‘It’s a good movie,’ Ethan said to her. ‘We should watch it sometime.’
‘A good movie! How can you stand in my presence and say that The Big Lebowski is just “a good movie”? You only drank White Russians for, like, three years after you watched that movie! We watched it so many times the tape got demagnetized! How can you not remember this?’ Charlie had worked himself up into a fury now, and was taking his frustrations out on a beer coaster that he was methodically shredding.
‘I’m not saying it’s not a good film!’ Ethan said, holding his hands up. ‘You need to relax, man.’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll watch your stupid film,’ Ruby said, rolling her eyes at Charlie and pulling the frayed coaster away from him. ‘But if I watch The Big Lebowski, you have to read Jane Austen.’
Charlie was horrified. ‘Why the hell would I want to read some old chick talk about love and shit?’
‘She’s not just some old chick,’ Ruby said. She began to shred the already-shredded beer coaster between her fingers and Ethan gently took it out of her hands and replaced it with a new, unshredded one. ‘She’s one of the greatest English novelists. And it’s not just about love, it’s about . . . she writes about the human condition!’
‘Yeah right. I know boring chick stuff when I hear it.’
Ruby looked at Ethan beseechingly. ‘Ethan, please tell your friend that Jane Austen is not just “boring chick stuff”. If she could hear this right now, she’d probably be rolling in her grave.’
‘If she could hear it, she wouldn’t be dead,’ Charlie pointed out, smug.
‘Oh for God’s sake – you know what I mean! Ethan, tell him that Jane Austen is amazing!’
Ethan sighed. He did a lot of sighing around the two of them, but secretly he loved it. The two people he loved most in the world – apart from his dad, of course – sitting together and keeping him company while he worked. It made him almost giddily happy, even though they argued all the time. Or maybe because they argued all the time. ‘Jane Austen’s cool, man,’ he said with a practiced shrug. ‘Pride and Prejudice is actually pretty funny.’
‘Dude, when did you become such a pussy?’ Charlie said, visibly sickened. ‘Do me a favor and get me another beer. Or do you need to change your tampon or something?’
‘Don’t be such an asshole!’ Ruby said, reaching over and swiping him on the arm.
‘What?’ Charlie asked, rubbing his arm. He looked genuinely confused.
‘How are you ever going to get a girlfriend if you say things like that?’ Ruby asked.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said, tilting dangerously on the bar stool. ‘I do just fine.’
‘Liar,’ Ethan said, stifling a laugh.
‘Hey, fuck you, man. Just last week I had a girl from Wentworth practically begging me to take her number.’
‘Really?’ Ruby asked, eyes narrowed mischievously. ‘I used to be on a swim team in Wentworth. I know lots of girls there. What was her name?’
Charlie looked temporarily flummoxed. ‘I . . . uh . . . I can’t remember.’
Ethan burst out laughing. ‘Dude, come on! At least make one up!’
‘I can’t remember, okay? I was wasted! But she was super hot, I know that.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Ruby said.
‘Speaking of super hot, how’s your sister doing?’ Charlie asked. ‘Now she is someone I would like to get to know better, if you know what I mean.’
‘Gross! Don’t talk about my sister being hot!’
‘Why not? It’s basically a compliment for you!’
‘How do you figure that you telling me you want to have sex with my sister is a compliment to me?’
‘Because of genetics, or whatever! And you’re the one who mentioned sex, not me, you pervert. Though now that you mention it . . .’
Ruby reached over and smacked Charlie again, harder this time, and his stool wobbled precariously beneath him. ‘Stop talking about having sex with my sister!’
‘All right! All right! I’m just saying, if you ever feel like spending some quality time with her when I’m around, especially with you going off to New York soon . . . I mean, I’m a guy who appreciates the importance of family, that’s all.’
‘Very kind of you to be concerned about my familial bonds,’ she said, rolling her eyes.
‘We could even double date, if you felt that would bring you guys closer . . .’
‘Enough already!’
‘Guys, guys, take it easy,’ Ethan said, tossing the rag he’d been using to clean up a grenadine spill over his shoulder. The group of teachers looked up from their wine fug in confusion. They’d forgotten there was anyone else in the bar a bottle or two back, and Ruby and Charlie’s argument had rattled them unpleasantly back to reality. They glanced at their watches and began muttering to themselves, their minds whirring into gear as they calculated how late it was and how few available hours for sleeping it off they had left before they had to be back at summer school. They gathered their belongings and said their goodbyes, hugging each other too long and too tightly and slowly, steadily clapping each other on the back. ‘Hope you guys all have rides home!’ Ethan called to them, and one mousey man, who had spent the evening tucked invisibly in the corner of the table nursing a watery glass of Coke, held up his keys and said, ‘I have a van.’
The door opened and they filed out into the night, ushering a blast of warm, muggy air into the bar. Ethan glanced up at the clock: an hour until closing. ‘Do you want to stick around tonight?’ he asked Ruby. ‘I know you have to work tomorrow and everything.’
‘Of course I want to,’ she said, placing a hand over his. ‘Who needs sleep anyway?’
‘I’m staying too,’ Charlie muttered, ‘not that anyone asked.’
‘That’s because everyone knows you’ve never left a bar before closing in your life,’ Ruby said, tossing a peanut at him.
‘Damn straight,’ Charlie said, catching it and throwing it back at her. ‘And I’m serious about your sister. I’ll be a gentleman and everything.’
‘I didn’t realize the word gentleman was even in your vocabulary.’
‘Ha ha. You’re hilarious. Look, just put in a good word for me, okay?’
‘Give me the rest of the peanuts and we’ll talk.’
‘Deal.’
Ethan watched the two of them bicker with each other and realized that he had never been happier than he was, at that moment, at past midnight in a dingy bar in his tiny hometown. It was happier than he’d ever been before.