He Doesn't Deserve Her

He doesn’t deserve her. Benign is about the best thing I can think of to call Tim. He gets maybe a third of my jokes, those delivered with a wink to make clear they’re jokes. He drinks Bud Lite. He roots for the home team, and is rarely seen outside the house without his ball cap bearing its logo, though in fairness the first time we met he wore a white shirt and tie and no cap, presumably to convey respect. He’s an assistant produce manager at the big Stop-n-Save over on Highway 23, but Suz tells me it’s harder getting him than their two-year-old, the grandson I finally met five weeks ago, to eat anything green.

When we went out together for a man-to-man bonding session, he chose Round Robin, home of the million-calorie chilli cheeseburger, referred to on the menu as The Mighty CCB. When I took Suz to our local one when she was around 11, she called it their instant obesity special, and I shrieked with laughter, embarrassing her nearly as much as pleasing her. I always tried to instil in her a dry sense of humour based on irony and hyperbole, but it wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t had the gene for it, which I like to think she got from me. When Tim and I went, and I said, “So, having the instant obesity special?” he didn’t get it. “Oh,” he said, “you mean the CCB.” He doesn’t have the gene. I’d guess there’s a 20-point chasm between his and Suz’s IQs.

I couldn’t get him to talk about himself very much. He kept shrugging, and looking around. “They’ve sure got some cool signs in here,” he marvelled. Round Robins’ decoration style is faux nostalgia, heavy on reproductions of metal soft drink, motor oil, and other signs. I stopped asking him questions after a while to see what effect it would have. Crickets. We wound up talking about — you can guess! — sports.

He asked if I minded his having a Bud Lite with his CCB. He’d driven us over. I was more worried about his having exactly the same taste in beer (or, more accurately, beer-flavoured soda pop) that his ball cap would have suggested. I couldn’t keep from telling him, “Hey, knock yourself out.” I needn’t have worried. He took it at face value. And my little girl’s going to marry him.

He and Suz had been an item during my and Suz’s estrangement, but had broken up because of his apparently prodigious consumption of cannabis. He credited Jesus with having helped him beat it. I asked whose fault his “addiction” had been. He said his own. I wondered aloud why he blamed himself for the problem, but gave Jesus full credit for his having solved it. His face said he wanted to change the subject, fast.

You might have thought he’d ask me something about myself at that point. No such luck. If intellectual curiosity were water, Tim wouldn’t have enough to wash a grape in his little corner of the Shop-n-Save. I felt that my initial impression of him as a hopeless dullard was fully confirmed. But after six years of our not speaking, I don’t dare say so to S. Who was going to marry him.

No dad and his little girl could been closer than Suz and I were the first 13 years of her life. Then she hit adolescence and began comfort-eating herself into obesity at exactly the moment a kid most wants to be seen as hot by the opposite sex. (She wasn’t a lesbian, though I’d always told her I’d love her just the same if she were). I could barely stand to witness the pain she was causing herself, and invited her to start coming with me to the gym. What she heard, apparently, was, “You’re fat and disgusting, and I don’t love you.” She didn’t speak to me for 73 months, one week, and four days. It tore my heart out. And now she’s going to become a Bud Lite-drinking dullard’s wife. This time I’ve got to keep my mouth shut.

The white shirt he wore when we first met was short-sleeved, short-sleeved shirts being to supermarket chain assistant produce managers what corduroy sports coats with fake leather elbow patches are to academics, and hideous tattoos to National Basketball Association stars. He didn’t wear a real tie, but one of those clip-on jobs. He’d put mousse (he’d probably have called it styling gel) in his hair to make it spiky. Every stop, pulled out!

He’s waiting for us at the altar, fidgeting to beat the band. There’s gel in his hair again. I walk my beautiful, hilarious, smart, stylish daughter toward him, and feel myself about to burst into tears. Tim’s very dull parents, off whose block he’s a definite chip, and with whom I have found it nearly impossible to converse, beam at us as we pass, as too does a large contingent of Tim’s…buds, who probably feel naked without their own ball caps. My ex-wife, Suzs mom, is staring a death-ray at me. Do not fuck this up for her, you! I must pretend to be pleased by what’s about to happen.

I must somehow contain my tears.