“A flashback to the year before their encounter, when Cassidy was pining & unemployed, and Arthur wasn’t single but still wasn’t happy.”
Click Here for Part One.

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v

Cassidy was nineteen. That she was on the Principal’s List her Senior year meant nothing now she had graduated.

But if strangers didn’t have a hard time ignoring her giant, six-foot-five-inch stature, then her double-d breasts were the deal-breaker, which she tried to offset from an otherwise tiny frame by only ever wearing dark tops.

She had ash-brown hair that fell to her waist, which she never combed as much as the time she spent considering she should, and as a result the ends were split and messy. Her mother offered to comb it for her, but it took too long when Mom did it, and it was painful, in more ways than one: Cassidy was at the age now that, if mother & daughter sat together too long, then the younger would get interrogated about all the maternal standards, like what it was Cassidy wanted to do now that it was approaching a full year that she was out of high school – motherly bundled with a few other unsolicited suggestions.

Cassidy’s jeans were two sizes too big for her athletic core, and today’s pair wasn’t any different. But that was her prerogative: if they were any tighter, they would accentuate her hips, and a lower body toned from taking PE class seriously. She didn’t need anything else on her person to stand out. She looked down at her belt: it didn’t feel so tight on her, but it was too tight for the pant, as the loose waistline hung all scrunched-up below the buckle at the front.

Did she lose weight? Again? She loosened the belt by a notch, grabbed the pant by the button, and pulled the baggy garment back up over the buckle, resting the space between her pant and the button on the top rung of the buckle, like a shelf.

She liked the way working out made her feel, and she loved the camaraderie of a friend group who all enjoyed spending time outside and away from their phones, unlike a majority of their peers. This afternoon, as she looked at her reflection in her family’s rose-trimmed bathroom mirror while wearing a simple black t-shirt, Cassidy grabbed her hair by its tuft and guided it through a tie and into a bun, stuffing its true heft within itself. She leaned forward and checked again for acne, in the small, inflamed clusters of blackheads that lingered near the caves of her eyes. She straightened up, and standing tall her eyes met the top edge of the mirror. It was like that for two years and counting, and she still wasn’t used to it.

*

The hot sun radiated through Cassidy’s RAV4 windshield and off her convenience-store sunglasses, as she took the highway against 4:30 traffic to her new job. She had the country station playing on the radio: the local one, not the wide one, which overplayed Morgan Wallen & Luke Combs so much you were guaranteed to hear them if you randomly flipped to the station. Once, Cassidy heard “Fast Car” on one channel, and when she changed the station, the other was playing the Tracy Chapman version at the same time. The RAV4 still had a CD player, but her & her mother didn’t own any, and her new laptop didn’t have a drive so she couldn’t even burn one if she wanted to.

This summer was different than any before it. Cassidy had taken a year off after graduating, and over that year, those friends she thought were so inseparable from her had moved away, or started university, or a family, or ghosted her – she wasn’t sure what that was all about. Another one of them started playing Minecraft when school shut down, and now that they didn’t have a schedule, it was impossible to reach them outside of Discord.

Scratch that: it wasn’t impossible to get a hold of some of them. But everyone was doing their own thing, and Cassidy always felt like she was interrupting something anytime she did get someone, verbally, on the phone. Messaging was impossible. The weight of starting a life had begun its thousand cuts.

She supposed it could have been worse: that her mother didn’t let her stay at home while she dipped her toe into the world, in the wake of a public school education unlike any she had pictured. But she wasn’t sure what she actually wanted to do for a career. For a life. Maybe something outdoors.

The restaurant was lined with windows facing the parking lot. That early August night, standing outside, waiting for her first shift to start, she took a hit from her vape pen preloaded with her favourite Kush, and blew the bubble-gum scented smoke all over the courtyard outside the main entrance. She coughed, and her white-on-white skin blushed pink all over. The sun was setting over the mall parking lot and the last, warm rays of the day flushed the dining room and the clients inside, who couldn’t ignore the pretty White teenager smoking behind the reverse-facing decals that proudly declared the establishment was a local favourite.

As it was in the dining room, it was in the kitchen, too. It was a crew of all-men, facing outward so they all could see Cassidy beyond the counter and out through the windows. Their mouths were agape: another hottie. Everyone except Arthur. He stood at the fry station with his back to the door.

vi

Arthur was in a relationship with a lovely woman for thirteen years. Lovely. She was kind, and forgiving. Selfless. A bit on the heavy side, but with soft features.

When they first met, Arthur was twenty-four, with a great and glorious ambition that didn’t really include her. They never married, but they had talked about it. They never had children, but they had talked about it. They were presently living in a rented apartment, but they’d been back-and-forth about speaking to an agent and taking the next step in buying a property together. Maybe.

There never seemed to be a ‘right’ time in the market: the coronavirus had done a number on everyone’s life. Arthur knew only his own. He’d lost his job, and she didn’t. He got government assistance, but they still relied on her income to make ends meet. Arthur wasn’t a loafer: he looked for work everywhere, of every kind. Nothing was off-limits: construction; serving; stocking; even scrubbing toilets – but he couldn’t get any offers, and he wasn’t sure why. He pondered on pandemics past, and how easy it must have been to get a job carting corpses during the Plague, just so their late families didn’t have to handle the body themselves. He blamed his troubles now on the immigrants.

And all the while, his partner was there, rubbing his back, reassuring him that everything would be okay. He finally found a minimum wage, part-time gig that would take him on, and his partner took him out for dinner to celebrate. His savings slowly came out of the red.

A patient man should have seen the unfolding of these circumstances as serendipitous. But Arthur wanted more. He was closer to forty than ever before, and he wanted to feel young again. He was stifled, and jaded, and didn’t want to endure it. He blamed this on her.

*

After a year of careful consideration, a passive-aggressive holiday season, and a delicate handle on his finances, he sat his common-law wife down one night in February. They were side-by-side on a ten-year-old futon in their living room: a couch Arthur had bought on discount at a big box outlet that otherwise mostly sold car parts. It had the same periwinkle slipcover it came with, and under Arthur & his soon-to-be-ex’s seats was a decade of old dirt & stains a trip every six months to the laundromat down the street wouldn’t abate anymore.

Arthur’s partner had an inkling what would be coming, but she wasn’t sure. She asked him if she could say something first. He let her.

She told him that she’d noticed the problems they’d been having over the last few months – really, the whole year; since the previous summer, “You know how difficult it is for me to tell you what’s going on, with me – what I’m thinking. It’s hard to share.” COVID was tough, and there were times she wasn’t sure whether Arthur could salvage the life they were building together.

But he did! He found a job, and he had kept up his half of the bills – barring the times he had a discussion with her first. As far as she knew, he was taking responsibility for him and his. But there was something else causing this moroseness, “Is it the CERB repayments?”

It wasn’t the CERB repayments, but she reminded him that she would help him with that. She told him that she loved him, and that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t get over together. Subconsciously, her hand smoothed over the crest of her belly. He told her that it was over.

Despite her suspicions, it only momentarily suspended her shock. She was mystified, and angry: how could he go so long without telling her things were wrong? That he was so unhappy? Didn’t he think that she would do everything she could to keep them together, if she knew beforehand this was how things would end up?

Arthur couldn’t answer. To him, there was no point: he had been telling her. She wasn’t the one listening. He had fought with her before about how little sex they were having. One of the first fights they had, Arthur had instigated. Not a fight – more, one yielding to another, as was the natural order his upbringing had instilled in him.

Like that evening, it was the two of them, sitting side-by-side on the futon, and he told her that they needed to have more sex, or he was done. “Excuse me? This is a joke, isn’t it?” He didn’t want to come across like a creep, but if it were up to him, they would be fucking every night. First of all, she wouldn’t let him go down on her: he wasn’t trying to hurt her, he just wanted to make her happy. Next, she wouldn’t role-play. She didn’t even humour him by thanking him afterward, on occasion. It was like she didn’t respect him. He told her all of this to her face. That was six months in to their cooperative. She succame to tears, and swore she would do better. Now, twelve-and-a-half-years-later, he looked as deeply as he could into her eyes. Arthur knew what he wanted, and he wasn’t willing to compromise anymore. He told her about the sex.

When Arthur confessed, he could see the face of his now-former live-in girlfriend contort in subtle ways, puzzling out what had just taken place. But when she did figure it out, clear as day, she stood up, scowled, and slapped Arthur across the face with such force that a bruise would metastasize there.

The next day, his now-ex was gone: presumably to stay with family who Arthur knew lived close-by. She was nice enough to e-transfer Arthur her half of the following month’s rent, but after that, he was on his own – just like he wanted. It was one week before Easter.

vii

To Arthur, his trial of finding a new place to live over the coming March seemed to transpire as if per universal allowance: an inevitable choice in the fabric of his space-time, finally materialized.

While he was lucky to get full-time hours at the restaurant over the slower winter season, summer was back, and his hours would be cut to make way for new hires. The recessionary status of the Western world meant he wouldn’t – couldn’t – be able to continue living so close to the city core, as he had over the last decade: it was too damned expensive for someone with no degree, and a minimum wage income. Not that him and his partner – ex-partner – ever took advantage of being downtown anyway. Not that they could, when everything was closed for COVID. That was the excuse.

Moving for Arthur meant living in the Valley. It meant taking the bus. It meant possibly sharing a co-op situation, until his was figured out. Every step Arthur took in stride, as atonement for the abandonment of his former life. He had spent enough precious time coming to that justification – and grieving that relationship’s abrupt, yet lengthy, conclusion – that he irrevocably felt he didn’t need to dwell on his ex anymore. His life now was about moving forward.

He found a five-hundred-square-foot suite in a suburb, forty-five minutes away from where he lived before, and a half-hour from his job. He could have looked for work closer to his new home, but after the gauntlet of finding his current job he was grateful to have one at all. He didn’t have a car of his own yet, but he would. That he left his last relationship didn’t mean he’d also left the lessons along the way: he’d budget and save up for a used vehicle, just like he would everything else. He’d rebuild. And lucky for him, summer’s new hires meant school ending, and young girls starting their first job waiting tables.

The previous summer, during his first few months working at the fish-and-chips place, he had never seen anything like it in his then thirty-seven years – not since working at Wal-Mart when he was a teenager, too young to realize its gravity then. Beautiful girls. Ones that made his jaw drop like a wolf in a Warner Bros cartoon. Ones that made his mind rich with possibilities in the bedroom. Ones that made him a pervert.

He never would have stood so close to giants such as these in his youth, and to do so now after so much wanting was like manifestation. There were a few grey-haired older women, and some men, trying to get back into the job market post-COVID like he had. But management always hired the hot, young girls for front-of-house staff. Some of them only lasted a couple of shifts. A few a single night. But every time he turned around there was another one, like a revolving door of twenty-first century goddesses – until September, when the business slowed and the hiring froze. For that first season, it wasn’t just the guilt he felt of being in a relationship and chatting up the cute girls he worked and wanted to sleep with: he couldn’t ever justify leaving his position in the kitchen to converse with them how he wanted to. He was just too damn busy. He had never worked at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, and his shifts were always at the dinner rush, turned facing the wall where the hood fan & fryers oppressively operated, as he seethed and envied his co-workers in the kitchen who could see out through the open counter onto the “meat show” on the floor, raucously laughing in communal unison. Some would even walk away from their station and usher them over for a chat and a laugh.

So this year Arthur thought – perhaps overconfidently – that now, with his intentions clear, maybe he’d be the one initiating some ‘chat & laughs’. But thirteen years was a long time to not be single. Now that Arthur was actively paying attention to more than just their looks, coursing for a connection, it seemed these eighteen and nineteen-year-olds may have been prettier, but brattier than ever before. None of them liked to work: always hanging around the counter or sneaking a peak at their phones, while Arthur had to constantly wipe the sweat off his forehead with his long-sleeved shirt, standing over eight deep fryers six hours a day. He quickly realized that a lack of work ethic was a huge turn-off for him. None of these girls knew what real work was! They were slow: slow at taking orders; slow at giving them; and stupid, too. At least he could have actual conversations with his ex-girlfriend – not with these ‘things’, who only ever seemed interested in themselves and their own three feet of immediate space.

If that weren’t bad enough, where he thought the other guys in the kitchen would offer their support – like they did amongst themselves & the senior staff – they actually took things a step further, poking & prodding Arthur any time he let slip how nice one of the servers looked: “There goes some more jailbait for Arthur!” “Arthur, remember, you got to look at their mother!” “Hey Art, if your hand isn’t too sore from masturbating, maybe you could speed up your station, huh?” He knew they were joking. But these guys weren’t his friends. If they were, they would be listening to him. Who cares if a busy restaurant kitchen wasn’t a conducive environment for counselling? This is what Arthur felt he deserved. He gave up a whole life for this train of intent.

He had enough. He withdrew with every rejection, every shattered expectation, and every snicker. Arthur’s now-sunny disposition made way for an in-and-out routine that kept him his job, but kept him and his supposed machinations from moving forward. Finally, he stopped saying hello to anyone and everyone. This transition happened slowly over the three months before Cassidy arrived, and when she did, on a hot afternoon in August, it happened to be the shift after Arthur cursed the idea of ever finding a sex partner at work again.

viii

Cassidy had been stood up. Again.

It wasn’t going to be anything huge: just dinner at McDonald’s. She sat in her SUV in the parking lot, with a take-out bag in the co-driver seat. Chicken nuggets were her go-to. She wasn’t prepared to eat by herself in the dining room.

She really tried this time. Mom told her she wasn’t going to get far in life looking the way she did with her long, messy hair and her dirty fingernails. There was no denial from Cassidy: no push-back; no blow-up. She tried tonight. She clipped her fingernails and washed her hands. She got a last-minute spot at the salon to get two inches taken off her hair, and she braided the rest into pigtails. The braids weren’t great: they were too tight – in her defence, she had to watch a how-to TikTok to avoid asking Teri – but there was a first time for everything. And she wore the new jeans she got from Costco in the lighter denim, and a white, faded Nirvana graphic-tee with their smiley-faced logo on the front and their name in purple, which accentuated her bosom in a way she hadn’t consciously since she was 16.

She waited an hour in her car for him to show up, and he never did. He didn’t text. Nothing. Completely ghosted. She was hungry, and went inside to order on the off-chance he was already in there waiting. And all she got besides her meal were some creepy looks from the old farts having coffee and mini donuts at a booth. It was 8PM.

She pulled a portable metal straw from her car’s console and stabbed the large Coke, taking a sip. She reached into the take-out bag and pulled out the large fries and a packet of McChicken sauce. She set the fries standing up in her cup holder, opened the sauce with her teeth, and concentrated all of her emotion on squeezing it out on top of one, single fry. She didn’t know why she was still waiting for this douchebag. She didn’t know why she even said yes to this in the first place. Boys didn’t like her for her. She ate the fry. Not even the creamy saltiness of her concoction could comfort her.

She pulled out her phone. She didn’t know why she was born with such large breasts. She didn’t know why she took a year off. She didn’t know why Christine wasn’t talking to her anymore… she never did anything to her… she didn’t know what she wanted to do. She didn’t. She just didn’t.

She opened Facebook involuntarily, only to see a picture of Tyler from an hour before, standing with other members of his college fraternity and posing with other girls, half-naked in thong bottoms. None of the girls were taller than the boys. None of their cleavages looked like their mammary glands were ready to explode. All the men in the photo were smiling, including Tyler. He could have whoever he wanted: he was a beautiful boy. He definitely wasn’t coming now.

She tried not to, but she cried.

ix

“Phew, look at that! Here comes another one!”

“Beautiful hair. I’d wrap that around my dick.”

“Hey Arthur, look! Nice yum-yums this time!”

Arthur just shook his head. He could hear the entrance doors swing open, as Cassidy looked around for Joshua, the manager, and the one Arthur blamed for putting these innocents through their paces. The boys in the kitchen all said hello in unison and Cassidy smiled & waved to them. Rodolfo, the self-compelled kitchen head, pointed her toward the office. She knocked, and Joshua let her in, shutting the door behind him. When the door shut, Rodolfo turned around and said something obscene in Tagalog to his compatriots.

In the two seconds Arthur took to look over his shoulder, he had already made up his mind about Cassidy. He was a very good judge of character, if he did say so himself. First, she was not Arthur’s physical type. She was too tall: like, Amazonian tribal girl tall, with big, thick thighs he noticed even through her baggy jeans. It looked like she could play lacrosse, and he didn’t need to get crushed in the heat of his moment.

Next, his ex was voluptuous, and what Arthur sought was someone the polar opposite. He didn’t want a chonk this time. He didn’t think it selfish that he had a wish list: in his own mind, their manager hiring Cassidy did Arthur a favour. Sure, she had soft-looking, young, ivory skin, and nice teeth, but as Arthur felt the texture from the acne off his greasy forehead on the back of his hand as he swabbed off the sweat, and the tartar coating his yellowed enamel against the top of his tongue, he knew flesh, too, would disappear with time. Arthur also had a third point, about his being ‘unsatisfactory’, but beyond the corporeal there wasn’t anything else.

*

When she did manage to catch his glance the first time, a week after she started, Cassidy honestly assumed she had something on her face: a big, gross pimple with a whitehead begging to be squeezed. Why else would Arthur now, suddenly, be looking at her? She scampered over to the bathroom as fast as her long strides could take her – concerned about being away too long from her diners – but when she looked in the mirror, there was nothing. She looked fine. So why? Why was he being flippy-floppy? Did she know him from somewhere? She didn’t think so. It was all just so odd: he didn’t even try and look at her. There was this four-foot shield of negative energy surrounding him, rebounding her. She usually only ever saw his back, and his t-shirts, as their sweat stains looked progressively more like ink blots throughout his shifts. She had a laugh to herself a couple of times when she spotted them and tried to guess what they looked like this time.

But she tried to be empathetic, and figured everyone had something going on that one may not be entitled to know. It probably didn’t even have anything to do with her. Oh well. She was in the front, and he was in the back. There wasn’t any further back you could go, aside the bathroom. And someone would have to clean that during their shift eventually, too.

Or not. She didn’t want to think about the odd time she’d walked in to a disgusting bathroom while she was closing at the end of a long night, cleaning it herself by virtue of her not having to do the kitchen in return. Who knew what those boys got up to in there.

Time passed, and meanwhile, Arthur zoned, and made his toxicity about the work. He was a glorified fry-cook. He just wanted to keep his head down and do the job. He didn’t need to be another creepy guy working in the kitchen, like the other losers there – like he was once, weeks ago – pining for something that he obviously wasn’t going to get. The universe was being very kind, and giving, with this new beginning, but obviously that well had run dry so, thank you very much for what I did get, and See Ya. This new girl – Cassidy was her name? – would learn soon enough about older men, men of any age, and human nature. He reminded himself of Ghislaine Maxwell, Karla Homolka, and Cleopatra, and how rapacious behaviour didn’t just extend to those with a penis. He thought about this all as he worked.

So. Anyway. This “girl” didn’t need another goof with a dick complicating things. Arthur felt entirely justified in alienating Cassidy this way: she was just extra help on the floor; he didn’t need to interact with her if he didn’t need to; she’d be gone by the end of the summer; she was ugly, by his standards; he hated that stupid fucking laugh that made it sound like she ran out of breath after every chuff; and the list of excuses kept compounding.

In the background, however, the insidious nature of attraction was entwining Cassidy’s physical returns into Arthur’s thoughts, taunting it, invading it as it does before one really gets to know an infatuation from inside.

*

Summer ended, and so did the revolving door of new hires. In a blink’s time, Joshua was putting out jack-o-lanterns, and Cassidy was right there, helping him angle it toward the front door. Arthur was a little choked that Cassidy got full-time hours over him. He took that personally, as he did everything now. Through eavesdropping on her conversations, Arthur found out she had decided to take another year off and save some money. Shocker for her: real life is hard. Arthur laughed normally to himself as he gathered his things and started for the door, ending a rare afternoon shift before the dinner rush. Cassidy glanced over at him as he beelined to the door.

He froze. They kept looking at one another, and Cassidy kept her smile. In fact, Arthur could swear it brightened. Arthur stood dead in his tracks, his gaze unbroken. Why was she smiling at him? She did glance back at Joshua for a moment, but quickly looked back at Arthur, and softened her expression.

Arthur had a recollection: an e-mail newsletter he had signed up for in high school about the “secrets of attraction”. It made him roll his eyes, thinking this far back: before he had met his ex. Even though these ‘free’ guides were just gateways to a hundred-dollar thirty-step program that boiled down to ‘stop being a coward’, the guy who wrote them seemed to know what he was talking about – a self-professed modern day Don Juan for 2005. One of Don’s suggestions was to maintain your gaze with a woman, even if she broke it first. That way, if she looked back, there was a ninety-two percent certainty that she would be open to having a conversation with you. This was also right around the time Arthur first saw the Kevin Trudeau infomercial, and couldn’t believe you could stop acid reflux with a spoonful of white vinegar. What else was the FDA keeping from him?

He honestly didn’t know what to do. Arthur’s own inertness finally woke him up, and he left the restaurant without acknowledging Cassidy. She thought he was being weird, but that was his normal.

Click Here for Part Three!

//wd 10.3.2024

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