Jessica HongWade chuckles. “Can I sit down first?” He joins Martha on the bench. Last-minute holiday shoppers have flooded West Edmonton Mall.
“Bought you a coffee.” At twenty-six years of age, Wade has firmly entrenched himself in caffeine addiction. Martha removes the lid and sets the cup down beside her.
She pulls a packet of sugar from her purse. “Thanks. I’ll take it off of what you owe me. Now it’s only $1,999,997.”
“Is that all?” Wade removes his coat. “Double or nothing?”
“Of course,” says Martha. “How will the world end this week?”
“Climate change,” says Wade.
Martha swirls her coffee to mix in the sugar. “That’s a pretty boring suggestion for you. Usually it’s robots or alien overlords. You sure climate change?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Okay,” says Martha. “Hope you’re ready to pay me four million next Sunday.”
“If the world’s still here,” says Wade. They cheers. Wade eyes the crutches Martha has tucked under the bench. “How’s the leg? I could have picked you up, you know. You don’t have to take the bus to meet me here.” He doesn’t know much about the accident, but he knows her femur took the worst of it and he knows it’s pretty bad.
When Wade first met Martha, she was hobbling on her crutches along the path to the community hall where they were about to attend their first book club meeting. Ice, dotted with salt, coated the pavement. Martha refused to let Wade help her into the building. A wounded elk came to mind: sturdy build, dark eyes, tentative motion.
Martha shrugs. “Don’t worry about me,” she says. “The world is going to end this week anyway, remember?” She pauses for a moment as a woman laden with shopping bags drags her young, jam-covered daughter into Bath & Body Works. “Have you told Kim yet?” asks Martha.
“She doesn’t care much for speculating about the apocalypse,” says Wade.
“Not about that,” says Martha. “I mean have you told her about this — that you’re not really going to book club every week?”
“No. Not yet.” He knows where she is taking this.
“We’re just talking, Wade. There’s no shame in making friends.”
In the four years since he began dating Kim, Wade had never known her to “ just talk.”
“She wouldn’t understand, okay? You’re younger and — I don’t know — female.”
“I’m four years younger than you,” says Martha. “It’s not that weird.”
“How about you? Have you told your ski chums about me?” he says.
“You’re deflecting.”
“So are you.”
Martha sighs, frustrated. “Fine. No, I haven’t told my ski chums about you because you’re an unemployed accountant and there is nothing about that that’s not boring. I’m also not living with them.”
Wade takes a deep swig of his coffee. The cup is nearly empty.
“You do realize you’re going to have a heart attack before you’re thirty if you keep drinking all that caffeine,” says Martha.
Wade appreciates the change in conversation. He leans back a little as he gulps the rest of his drink. “Bring it on,” he says, smirking. “When I’m in heaven I’ll get myself a never-ending fountain of coffee, have another heart attack, and go to a better heaven with better coffee.”
He seems younger when he jokes like this. Martha notices how lanky he is beneath his grey-collared shirts —like a teenage boy wearing his father’s clothes. She chuckles. “All the wonders of the universe at your fingertips and you choose a fountain.”
“What would you want?” says Wade. “If you could choose your heaven?”
“Choose Your Heaven!” roars Martha in her best game-show voice. “One lucky winner will get all of time and space, coming up right after these messages.”
A couple passersby flash Martha a look. She winks at one of them, a professional sort of man, and he quickly looks away. Wade laughs.
“Anyway,” says Martha, “I try not to get my hopes up afterlife-wise. It’s a cute bedtime story and everything, but I’d rather focus on what’s going on down here.”
“Seriously?” says Wade. “You don’t believe anything comes after this?”
“No. When I die I’ll be dirt and so will you.”
“I disagree. If there’s nothing else, then life doesn’t mean anything.”
“Life means whatever meaning you give it.” Martha adjusts her injured leg. “If you’re going to get upset about it we can drop it.”
“I’m not upset,” says Wade. “I’m just curious about your reasoning.” He has lost that boyish look.
“People like you spend way too much time trying to figure out the next step in life,” says Martha. “It’s a waste of time, trying to figure out the meaning of life, the meaning of death.”
“People like me?”
“People like you. Predictable, think-inside-the-box university grads waiting for things to fall into place.”
Martha can sense that she has said something wrong. Wade’s smile fades and he furrows his brow in the same way he did when they first met, right before the argument. “You’ve known me for four weeks, Martha. You don’t get to decide how I live my life.”
“I’m not trying to!” She stares at him, incredulous, then frustrated. “Calm down, Wade. You asked me a question and I answered. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but that’s what I think.”
Wade leans forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. Somehow this irks Martha even further; she hates when he shuts down like this. She knows she shouldn’t push the subject, but her mouth gets the better of her.
“Why can’t some things be left unknown?” she continues. “We should just enjoy life without having to search for some higher purpose. You, everyone, you have this obsession with what comes next and it’s crap. Why bother? What is the point?”
Wade stares at a mark on the floor. “Kim is pregnant.” He exhales slowly like a balloon deflating, crumpling. “That has to mean something.”
Martha watches a group of teenagers weave past a slow-walking elderly couple. Her mouth is suddenly dry. She sips her coffee and asks softly, “How long…?”
Wade sits back up. “We found out yesterday. I guess I’m a bit on edge. I’m sorry for snapping at you like that. She’s only a few weeks. We’re not telling anyone yet, we want to be sure.”
“So that’s it then,” says Martha. “No more book club.”
“Who says?”
“Your baby says. You’re going to have a kid. You can’t hang around your apartment anymore, you’ll need a job. I assume Kim is going to want to get a house, probably in Sherwood Park or Terwillegar or some other fancy suburb, and —”
Wade interrupts, exhausted. “Does everything have to be an argument with you?”
“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t argue,” says Martha. When Martha met Wade she knew right away she didn’t like him. He wore one of those double-breasted jackets that men wore pretentiously Downtown or along Whyte Ave.
“Do you remember their faces?” says Wade, a grin beginning to twitch at the corner of his mouth. “All those old book-club ladies must have been horrified by us.”
Martha giggles. “That one lady with the cat purse looked like she was about to have a stroke when you started shouting.”
“And then you stole all their sugar packets on the way out….”
“They were right there!” exclaims Martha in a playfully defensive tone. “They had the whole tea set out and nobody was drinking it.”
“No wonder they didn’t invite us back.”
“I don’t think we weren’t invited back because of the sugar,” says Martha with a laugh. “I think we weren’t invited back because you wouldn’t shut up about the apocalypse.”
“The book was about the apocalypse.” Wade had read it in a day. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. He was surprised by how much he enjoyed it.
“Really?” says Martha.
“You didn’t read it?”
They look at each other and then both laugh. Wade feels relieved to laugh with his friend. She is gentler when she is smiling.
“I’m impressed. You argued very well for someone who had no idea what she was talking about. Why would you join a book club and not read the book?” he asks.
“I was bored, I guess. I’d just gotten out of the hospital and I couldn’t ski anymore so I thought I’d try something new. I didn’t think they’d be so uptight about it.”
“Well. I’m glad we decided to do this instead,” says Wade. They cheers again with empty cups.
“You could babysit,” says Wade.
“That would require you telling Kim I exist,” says Martha pointedly.
“I will. Eventually.”
“I hate being a dirty little secret. It’s weird.”
“You’re not a dirty little secret,” says Wade. He places a hand on her shoulder. “I just have to figure out what to say.”
Martha shakes his hand from her shoulder. “Say you got kicked out of book club for being an obnoxious ass and now you go to the mall instead to be an obnoxious ass where nobody will mind. And to gamble away all of your money betting double-or-nothing on whether the world will end this week.”
“I wouldn’t have acted like an ass if you hadn’t provoked me.”
“Uh huh.”
Wade picks at the cardboard sleeve on his coffee cup. “Kim doesn’t see things the way you do. If I tell her I go to the mall every week to meet with a younger woman she’ll think it’s something it’s not. With everything that’s happening with the baby, the stress of it — I just don’t want her to get hurt.”
Martha bristles. “You know what that is? It’s an excuse,” she says. “Anyone with eyes can see we’re just friends. If you don’t want to do this anymore that’s fine, but don’t place the blame on your girlfriend.”
“This is harder on me than it is on you, Martha. You might be the only real friend I have. At least you have other people in your life to talk to, to hang out with. Me? I have an accounting degree, a tiny apartment, and a pregnant girlfriend I’m not even sure I love.”
The word love tastes foreign in Wade’s mouth. He has used it before, but only as a syllable, never as a concept. He used it when it was fashionable to do so. Today it bears meaning, consequence, weight.
“I don’t have friends either, Wade. Until I met you I’d never had a conversation that lasted longer than a chairlift.” Martha hesitates, considers whether she should trust him with the secret she’s been hiding for the last month. “Do you know how many people came to visit me in the hospital when I broke my femur? None. They never even apologized for putting me in a car with a drunk driver.”
It’s strange, feeling her words hang in the air after so many weeks of going over this conversation in her head. “I know a lot of people, Wade, but they’re just tourists — they all leave.” She waits for Wade to answer. He doesn’t. She adds, “And now you’re leaving me too.”
Wade sets down his cup with the now shredded sleeve. “Your leg… I thought, well assumed, it was a ski accident.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not.”
A subtle pain pulses in Martha’s leg when she thinks about the crash. The memory is hazy. She remembers the smell of booze, the sound of laughter, the red and blue lights, and the cold air. Did it snow that night?
An employee at Bath & Body Works slides the metal gate across the entrance. The stores will be closing soon.
“I’m not going to abandon you, Martha,” says Wade. He puts an arm around her in a sideways hug. For a brief moment she allows herself to lean into him.
A vague heaviness settles in Wade’s legs and in the space under his eyes. He realizes that he is terrified. What if the world doesn’t end?
Martha pulls away and Wade lets his arm fall to his side.
“What happens now?” he says.
Martha reaches for her crutches. “I should catch my bus.”
“Please let me drive you,” says Wade. Martha stands.
“Not yet.”
Wade stands, collects the empty coffee cups, and tosses them in the trash. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not yet.”
An unfamiliar awkwardness hovers between them. “Same time next week?” asks Wade.
The mall is quieter now. The elderly couple Martha saw earlier walks by in the other direction. They are not carrying any shopping bags.
“If the world’s still here,” says Martha.
