The Hour of Bad Decisions Read Online Free PDF Page B

down.” Work skids, and in the lunch room, they’re taking odds on how many weeks I’ve got left before someone pulls the plug.
    Sitting in the yard, drinking beer with Brendan. I figured I’ll have hit bottom when we’re actually sharing a bottle. Maybe by then, I wouldn’t have to worry about work.
    â€œSo what’s next?” I asked. I must have said it out loud: Brendan must have misunderstood.
    â€œAfter this? Terraces,” Brendan said “Gonna build terraces. Wit’ annuals. For when she’s prowlin’ around in my yard. Mebbe in the dark, she’ll fall off and break her freakin’ neck.”
    It was later in the summer then, and the fireweed that had sprung up all around the bottom of Brendan’s yard had gone to seed, long, filmy ribbonshanging from the pods, waiting for the first breath of wind to draw them away to find some other open ground. The stringers were all up for the new porch with wood he’d salvaged. Some pieces new, others left over and torn down from someone else’s reconstruction project, still studded with plaster nails and the occasional torn corner of gyprock wallboard. He’d been scrounging plywood for the walls, and it was stacked against the side of the house, some of it laced with staples from where it had been the backdrop for bar posters.
    I admit things were falling apart by then. That Brendan didn’t even smell so bad any more, that maybe, objectively, I smelled just as bad, that we could spend much of the day half in the bag, digging into whatever plan he had that day. Pounding nails and pounding fingers, swearing and dropping things, following through on things that didn’t really lead anywhere. Using up all my sick days at work, because I couldn’t be bothered to go in. Unplugging the phone, when the office became my first and only regular home telephone caller.
    Then one more night, one more copper-faced, slab-sided night, I was coming back up the street from downtown and I stopped by Brendan’s, where a feeble light shone in one downstairs window.
    I’d already had my usual night of blind hope and pragmatic despair. The bar is noisy on Fridays, much of the light from tangled ropes of small Christmas lights that stay up along the ceiling all year round like multi-coloured constellations. There are two regularbartenders, one blonde, one brunette, and they wear tight tops that bare perfectly soft and smooth stomachs.
    They are like small, jewelled, uncatchable tropical birds, thin-waisted and devastatingly pretty, and they flit back and forth, serving customers along the whole length of the metal bar. Every single night, I imagine holding one or the other of them in my arms, but they smile and speak to me only when it’s obviously time for a refill.
    â€œHow are you doing?” the blonde one says brightly, and a long explanation springs into my head that I can’t begin to say, and that, in truth, she has no interest in listening to.
    When she turns her back to me, I stare unabashedly at her and imagine dancing with her.
    But they’d no more consider dancing with me than they would dance with bedraggled Brendan, stinking of must and with his shirt-tails tufting out through the front of his trousers.
    So every night, just like this one, I dream hopelessly before staggering out to reality.
    Walking home, I remember thinking that the rooflines of the rowhouses looked like their shoulders were slumping – the eyes of their windows still wide, but also resigned.
    Bleary-eyed, looking in through Brendan’s ragged curtains, the only thing I could see at first was his candle, guttering on a table next to a pile of newspapers. And I could understand the neighbours’ fears, why they thought Brendan might well burn downthe whole block any day now. Then I could make out the shape of his sleeping body, stretched across a bursting, tufted sofa, his feet still packed into his sneakers,