Chapter 2

Shirt-buying

Jeff woke up the next morning to the sound of a buzzing cell phone. Lindsay was returning his voice message from last night. No matter how urgently the phone buzzed, he was determined to let it ring through. His limbs felt heavy, his head was encased in concrete. Eventually, the phone quieted down and he was able to roll over and go back to sleep for another four hours.

He managed to pull himself out of bed at 1:00 in the afternoon, joints stiff, mouth tasting like a*s. As he pulled his comforter off and set his feet on the floor, he felt a chill. The temperature in his room was low enough to leave him shivering.

He walked out to the kitchen where he saw his mother and aunt eating grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch.

“Morning sleepyhead,” Jeff’s mom greeted her son like she would an 8-year-old.

“Hurngh,” Jeff replied.

“Thanks for the note, by the way,” his mother said, “After what you said last night, it was very considerate of you, and I really appreciated it.”

Jeff was confused, until he remembered vaguely dreaming of getting out of bed in the middle of the night, walking to the kitchen, and feeling the urge to scrawl something down on a sheet of yellow note paper.

There on the table was the note Jeff thought he’d dreamed writing. Written in utterly unintelligible scrawl was “Hey mom sorry I swore so much I’m drunk thanks for everything sorry I didn’t have any pork chops if you want pizza I left it in the fridge.”

Jeff rubbed his temples. He hated it when his drunk self apologized uncontrollably for things. He’d meant to swear and whine and order the pizza. It wasn’t his drunk self’s place to second guess those decisions. Still, he allowed the apology to stand and started to make himself a grilled cheese.

“Got any plans for today?” Aunt Kay asked.

“Hm, I’ll probably just go out drinking tonight, see friends from high school. Whoever’s around.”

“After the viewing, you mean,” his mother reminded him.

Jeff stood staring blankly in his mother’s direction for a while before remembering exactly what the viewing was. “Right, yeah. Grandma died.”

“Jeffrey,” his mother scolded, “Don’t say it so disrespectfully.”

“Mom, you’re the one who texted me. Grandma died. Bringing pizza. One of those turned out not to be true. I mean, you’re sure Grandma’s dead, right?”

“Jeff, I’m your mother, so trust me when I tell you: shut up. Have you got a dress shirt for tonight?”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t think to bring one back with me.” He dropped the spatula. “Oh F**K.”

“We have other spatulas.”

“No, I mean, I’m gonna have to go to the mall and get a new one. S**t. The f*****g mall.”

“Take it easy,” she said between bites, “I can take you back to the city, and we’ll get your shirt.”

“Well--” he said haltingly, “It’s dirty. No time to clean it, is there? F**k, f**k.”

Jeff’s mother brought her plate over to the sink and rinsed it off, then turned and kissed her son on the cheek. “I suppose not. Jeff, there are worse things in life than going to the mall on Christmas Eve. And if you swear in front of your Aunt again, I’m going to punch you.”

“I’m okay,” Aunt Kay laughed, “Just keep it limited to the occasional ‘b***h’ at the funeral home. Family language, you know.”

She went over and tousled Jeff’s hair while he looked away to hide his smirk. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be cool,” he said. She walked away, the crust of her sandwich on the table, where the cat quickly pounced up and began to nibble at the remains. He swatted at the cat to get him to move, but the cat just swatted back.

Jeff’s mom finally said, “Well I’ve got some errands to run anyway. You want a lift over to the mall?”

“Yeah. Great.”

“Okay, we’ll go over in ten. I want you to see about getting a haircut while you’re there. There’s going to be a lot of family at the viewing and they want to see how much you respected your grandma.”

“Enough to get my hair cut?”

“Enough to want to look nice. Enough to want people to look at you and think you care.”

As his mother went around the house gathering up the contents of her purse, Jeff slipped on his jacket and shoes, picking the ZipCar pen up from its place next to the drunkenly-scrawled note and putting it back in his jacket’s inside pocket. He waited nine and a half minutes by the door for his mother to get ready. The ride over was quiet, until she asked whether he wanted to say anything at the funeral.

“What’s there to say?” he asked.

After a long, uncomfortable silence during which Jeff forgot what his original statement was, his mother said, “You used to be so good with words.” He declined further comment.

The silence kept on until he mentioned, “By the way, is the whole house cold, or is it just my room?”

“Your room shouldn’t be cold. Check the vent.”

“Yeah, maybe the vent’s closed or something? I’m not getting any heat.”

“I don’t know Jeff, I haven’t touched anything in there since you left. The house isn’t cold. Maybe you’re just imagining it.”

“I don’t think so. It’s cold in there. I’ll show you when we get back.”

She pulled up to the east entrance. “Text me when you need a ride home. I’ll be about an hour, I think.”

“Funeral stuff?”

“Christmas stuff. It’s still the holidays, Jeff.”

Fair enough, he thought. He stepped out of the car, walked through the automatic doors, and back into the fray.

The mall was even busier than it had been the day before. You would think, he wondered, people would realize how hellish it is shopping on December 24^th, and do whatever they could to avoid it. Nobody should be able to force these people to be here. But here we are. It’s like a prison of our own making. He marched single-mindedly toward the barber shop.

The barber at the west end of the mall was a good, consistent, fairly-priced place where Jeff had been getting the same haircut since he was 12. Good and short. A man’s haircut, his dad had once proudly said. Since he deliberately didn’t agree with anything his father had ever said, he preferred to let his hair grow wild and tangly. So since he was 12, the haircut itself had never changed, but the length of time between them grew longer each year. Without the funeral, he wouldn’t even have glanced at a barber until February. Then the scissors probably wouldn’t have touched his hair until March.

Jeff got to the barber shop and saw it overloaded with customers. The three haircutters on duty were all in the middle of casually blowdrying, combing or shampooing customers, while twelve or sixteen people waited in the small sitting area. The receptionist at the desk looked sceptically up at Jeff with eyes that said “Are you serious?”

Intimidated, Jeff decided just to back away slowly.

He meandered through the crowd down to the men’s fashion store. Shirts, shirts, shirts, all on display row after row. Blue, green, white, purple. Fifty bucks, thirty bucks, a hundred bucks. He wasn’t sure what a shirt was worth, but he knew what was too much. He looked at collars and cuffs and buttons and pinstripes and sleeves and just thought about where he’d rather be. He grabbed the least offensively-overpriced white shirt he could grab and bought it on credit.

He stepped back out of the store and sat on a bench down the way. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and remembered he’d gotten a call back from Lindsay. He dialled his voicemail and heard a static-filled voice message:

“Hey Jeff �" looks like you called me last night. I’m kinda locked out of my voicemail right now, so if it’s important �" I mean, you called me at 2 AM, so... yeah, just drop by the store or something, I’ll be working all day, and then maybe we can... well, whatever. ‘Kay, bye!” A pause, and then, “It’s Lindsay.” Click.

Jeff sat on the bench and tried to get himself excited about “Well whatever.” She seemed enthusiastic enough, but modest so as to not want to be specific. Yes, that was settled: it almost certainly meant sex. Considering their history, “well, whatever” couldn’t really mean anything to Jeff other than sex. He stood and began to walk in the direction of MusicSource.

Again, Jeff fought his way through oncoming shoppers, exhaustedly shuffling their way from store to store, lugging shopping bags along behind them inches off the ground. He wondered why anyone would do this to themselves and then he remembered it was Christmas and that he still hadn’t bought those gift cards.

On his way to MusicSource, Jeff stopped off at the Mall’s gift center and bought four $20 prepaid Credit Cards. It was such a minor gift, as far as the people receiving them were concerned, that he might as well have given nothing at all, but he was hoping for a heavy splatter of “It’s the thought that counts” to be poured all over this gesture.

When he finally arrived at MusicSource, he found Lindsay on the sales floor negotiating between three different groups of people. There was one young couple whose request she was trying to fill, an elderly couple who insisted on delivering a list of immediate requests, and a young girl who wanted to know which CD by her chosen teen pop singer had the particular song. This question was presented as crucial despite the fact that even if she weren’t busy, the answer would be written on the back of either CD, both of which were readily available on display and �" as soon as Jeff’s face popped into view at the corner of her eye, yet another distraction threatened to ruin her flow.

Just as Lindsay was about to have a meltdown over her inability to focus on one customer at a time, Jeff edged his way into the conversation brandishing a Christmas Classics DVD. “Excuse me,” he said to the confused older couple, “I couldn’t help but overhear. I think this is the DVD you’re looking for.”

“Do you work here?” asked the confused 70-year-old woman in the thick glasses and winter coat with fur trim.

“No, I just thought you could use the help.”

“Well aren’t you sweet, young man!” the woman nudged him playfully, “Trying to look like a hot shot in front of this girl here, aren’t you? Hee hee!”

After squealing this impossible laugh, the older lady pulled her husband toward the cashier area as Lindsay zipped off to find the last possible version of the first couple’s request. When she returned, Jeff had also placated the 11-year-old girl’s quest for the exact right dance mix for her first-ever Christmas boy-girl party.

Lindsay returned breathless to Jeff and finally asked, “What was that about?”

It was true that Jeff had come into the store utterly dumbfounded the day before. They had changed the entire orientation of the shelves in the time since he’d last been home, and the prospect of spending all day digging through the trenches for that one CD that turned out to be insignificant was dreary. So he asked, pled for help from the redheaded employee, and even felt the desire to get violent when he couldn’t get his way. But in the time it took redhead to get Jeff’s CD, he had managed to take note of his surroundings and re-learn where everything in the store was. This all paid off when he was, in fact, desperate to look cool in front of Lindsay.

“Just thought I’d help,” he said summarily. “Looks like everyone in here is busy.”

“Crazy-busy, Jeff!” she insisted, “My God, you’d think people forgot we existed the rest of the year, and then suddenly it’s Christmas Eve and everyone needs everything! Did you get my message?”

“Yeah! I mean, I know it’s Christmas Eve and everything, but I was hoping we could, you know, hang out... or whatever... while I’m still in town.”

“I would love that. Seriously, I need a break. I close my eyes and all I see is CD cases and receipt paper and it’s just... it’s awful, Jeff!” she was kidding, but not. “We close up early. Do you have anything going on tonight?”

“No, I’m open.” He said. Then, remembering the very, very important viewing he was to attend at 8, he corrected himself, “After something. You know, family. Uh, how’s 10?”

“That should be good,” she said, “Will anything be open? Or should we just go to your place?”

Jeff thought about his family: his mom, his Aunt, the cat, and thought how badly he’d like to avoid being anywhere near them while this-whatever-it-was was going on.

Then he thought about Lindsay’s family, specifically her dad, “Mean Old Man Cahill.” It was a joking name (in fact he looked rather decent for 52) with a serious meaning. Jeff had coined it for him when he and Lindsay dated in high school, due to Mr. Cahill’s highly negative stance on boys being in his daughter’s room pantsless.

Lastly he thought of potential meet-up places within walking distance of both their houses that would still be open on Christmas Eve. That left one option: Finnegan’s Pub.

“Finny’s?” Lindsay winced.

“Yeah, I mean, if you don’t want to go, that’s fine. We can do something else after Christmas.”

“No, it’s fine,” she said, “I mean, after all this I’m really gonna want a drink, I just. God, that place.”

Finny’s had the reputation of being “The only bar in town.” It wasn’t, in fact there was a pretty decent crawl territory down by the lake where one could drink in a different pub every night of the week. But Finny’s was closer to the housing properties where all the high school kids grew up, and they tended to gravitate toward it. It was impossible to drink at Finny’s without running into someone you didn’t want to see.

However, it was too cold outside to go as far as necessary to get away from all that, especially on Christmas Eve. It was going to have to be Finny’s.

“Awesome. Great. Cool.” Jeff nodded politely. Lindsay smiled. Jeff awkwardly stretched out his hand for a handshake. Lindsay, with a pile of DVD’s in her right hand, fidgeted as she tried to shift the contents over to her other hand, and while she was doing this, Jeff abruptly switched it to a high five, which she very weakly participated in. “All right. Okay then. See you tonight.”

It was a very unpleasant gesture to be involved in. Jeff turned and walked embarrassedly out of the store.