Larry’s Party. Carol Shields

off. One by one they were going out, like Christmas lights on a string, only there weren’t any replacements available.

      “Why don’t you switch to coffee?” she said, and that’s when Larry started dropping into Cafe Capri, which is just around the corner from Flowerfolks. A nothing place, but they’ve brought cappuccino to this town. Nobody knew what it was at first, and some people, like Larry’s folks, still don’t. Larry’s tried it, and now he’s on a streak with double cappuccinos. They start making it when they see him come through the door at five-thirty.

      He likes to put on his own cinnamon. He likes it spread out thin across the entire foam area, not just sitting in a wet clump in the middle. You take the shaker, hold it sideways about two inches to the right of the cup and tap it twice, lightly. A soft little cinnamon cloud forms in the air – you can almost see it hanging there – and then the little grains drift down evenly into the cup. Total coverage. Like the dust storm in Winnipeg last summer, how it coated every ledge and leaf and petunia petal with this beautiful, evenly distributed layer of powdery dust.

      Lots of coffee places have switched over to disposable plastic, but Cafe Capri still uses those old white cups and saucers with the green rims. You put one of those cups up to your mouth and the thickness feels exactly right, the same dimensions as your own tongue and lips. You and your cup melt together, it’s like a kiss. Customers appreciate that. They’re so grateful for regular cups and saucers that they carry their own empties up to the counter on their way out. That’s what Larry must have done. Taken his cup back up, put his fifty-five cents by the cash, and picked up a jacket from the chair. Only it was someone else’s chair. Or maybe the other guy had already made off with Larry’s jacket at that point. A mistake can work both ways. Larry was probably busy thinking about meeting Dorrie, about the movie they were going to see that night, Marathon Man, their third time, and then coming back to her place after, his prick stirring at the thought.

      When they first started going together they’d be lying there on top of her bed and she’d say, “Let’s fuck and fuck and fuck forever.”

      “Do you have to say that?” Larry said to her after he’d known her a couple of months. “Can’t you just say ‘making love'?”

      She got her hurt look. Parts of her face tended to lose their shape, especially around her mouth. “You say ‘fuck,'” she said to Larry. “You say it all the time.”

      “No, I don’t.”

      “Come off it. You’re always saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.'”

      “Maybe. Maybe I do. But I don’t say it literally.”

      “What?” She looked baffled.

      “Not literally.”

      “There you go again,” she said, “with those college words.”

      Larry stared at her. She actually thinks flower college is college.

      It was sort of a mistake the way they got together. Larry had taken another girl to a Halloween party at St. Anthony’s Hall. She, the other girl, had a pirate suit on, with a patch over the eye, a sword, the whole thing. And she’d made herself a moustache with an eyebrow pencil or something. That bothered Larry, turning his head around quick, and looking into the face of a girl wearing a moustache. A costume is supposed to change you, but you can go too far. Larry was a clown that night. He had the floppy shoes and the hat and the white paint on his face, but he’d skipped the red nose. Who’s going to score points with a red nose? There was another girl, Dorrie, at the table who’d come with her girlfriends. She was dressed like a Martian, but only a little bit like a Martian. You got the general idea, but you didn’t think when you were dancing with her that she was some weird extraterrestrial. She was just this skinny, swervy, good-looking girl who happened to be wearing a rented Martian suit.

      “You in love with this Dorrie?” That’s what Larry’s father asked him a couple of months ago. They were sitting there in the stands. As usual the Jets were winning. Everyone around them was cheering like crazy, and Larry’s father said to Larry, not quite turning his face: “So, you in love with this girl? This Dorrie person?”

      “What?” Larry said. He had his eyes on the goalie all alone out there on the ice, big as a Japanese wrestler in his mask and shin pads, putting on a tap-dance show while the puck was coming down the ice.

      “Love,” Larry’s father said. “You heard me.”

      “I like her,” Larry said after a few seconds. He didn’t know what else to say. The question set a flange around his thoughts, holding back his recent worrying days and nights, keeping them separate from right-now time.

      “But you’re not in love?”

      “I guess not.”

      “You just like her?”

      “Yes. But a lot.”

      “You’re twenty-six years old,” Larry’s father said. “I married Mum when I was twenty-five.”

      Like a deadline’s been missed, that was his tone of voice.

      “Yeah,” Larry said. “Twenty-six years old, and the kid’s still living at home!”

      He felt his bony face fall into confusion. And yet he loved this confusion, it was so unexpected, so full of thrill and danger. Love, love.

      “Nothing wrong with living at home,” Larry’s father said, huffing a little, looking off sideways. “Did I say there was anything wrong with that?”

      Larry was running this conversation through his head while he walked along Notre Dame Avenue in his stolen Harris tweed jacket, seeing himself in his self’s silver mirror. The fabric swayed around him, shifting and reshifting on his shoulders with every step he took. It seemed like something alive. Inside him, and outside him too. It was like an apartment. He could move into this jacket and live there. Take up residence, get himself a new phone number and a set of cereal bowls.

      That’s when he realized he was in love with dopey smart Dorrie. In love. He was. He really was. Knowing it was like running into a wall of heat, his head and hands pushing right through it. This surprised him, but not completely. You can fall in love all by yourself. You don’t have to be standing next to the person; you can do it alone, walking down a street with the wind blowing in your face, a whole lot of people you don’t even know going by and they’re kind of half bumping into you but you don’t notice because you’re in a trancelike state. He forgot, suddenly, how Dorrie had this too-little face with too much hair around it and how he always used to get turned on by girls with bigger faces and just average hair size.

      He looked at his watch, worried. He knew she’d still be standing there, though, next to the cash with her arms full of shoes and she’d be pissed off for about two seconds and then she’d get an eyeful of Larry’s jacket and before you knew it she’d be rubbing her hands up and down the cloth and fingering the buttons.

      The problem, though, was tomorrow. Larry and his new jacket weren’t going to make it tomorrow. He could go to work in this jacket, but no way could he go back to the Capri at five o’clock. They’d grab him the minute he walked in. Hey, buddy, there’s a call out for that jacket. That jacket’s been reported.

       Wait a minute, it’s all a mistake.

      A mistake that led to another mistake that led to another. People make mistakes all the time, so many mistakes that they aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re just positive and negative charges shooting back and forth and moving you along. Like good luck and bad luck. Like a tunnel you’re walking through, with all your pores wide open. When it turns, you turn too.

      Larry remembers seeing a patient in the Winnipeg Chronic Care Unit when he delivered the flowers after the mayor’s banquet. This guy didn’t have any arms or legs, just little buds growing out of his body. He was one bad mistake, like a human salt shaker perched there on the edge of a bed. Larry, set the flowers down on the table next to him, and the guy leaned over a couple of inches and