A productive day. Daughter to camp, AMA, Maps and Health Insurance, Bank, deposit cheques, write up a years worth of child support, various other things...
Then Lunch with A*****. His last night, Saturday, he's on vacation with the rest of us, going back to Italy, but he's decided not to return. I don't blame him. Life here, in this restaurant, it's fucking shit. He misses his daughter, his common-law, well, there are problems there, but whatever battles he faces there are easier than the restaurant here. He's done.
So is the restaurant. Lunch, a cheap ethnic buffet, we talk about it, how tired it is, the faded and worn linen, dirty, old, it's over, it's time. The owner, the customers, the freeloaders and moochers, it was, still is, an institution, but it should be done. Over. Now. He's free, I still have a month left, and the impending vacation with the daughter, the trip (just passed) to Saskatchewan, they're all threatening my finances...
We talk, of his past few days, the going away parties, the people he saw, people he missed....he didn't miss much. In the two years he worked here he left the city maybe 3 or 4 times, always, only with me, to Waterton one weekend, Banff another, Prospecting, Drumheller another. His life, otherwise, was work, the classic immigrant-on-immigrant slavery, the Conservative sanctioned and thinly veiled "TFW" program, the 12 and 15 hour work days, 5 and 6 days a week...
The restaurant, we've been besieged as of late with Corporate Realtors, Accountants, he's making plans, we don't know what they are but we can guess, the Nephew, supposedly the "Inside Scoop", he isn't privy, he provides us with contradictory guesses as to what it's all about twice a day...
I'm envious of him. I don't want to go back, at all, ever, we've been through a lot, me and him, we and the nephew, he's been a sport, born all our innuendo and insults, dark gallows humor, he's been a good worker, a proper colleague, co-worker, another stand-up guy in the trenches, these are rare, and we talk about his job offers, opportunities back home, they are not so good, restaurants there are run much the same as restaurants here, shit pay, long hours...but there, there's no tipping, no compensation, it's worse, if it can be imagined...
Awkward, these goodbyes, he still has to pack, get to the airport, me, to pick up my daughter from camp...
But it's time, and he comes round the jeep to give me a hug, he's crying, and I feel it, feel every fucking inch of shit this country dumped on him, there's no reason for it, fucking hell, and a slight epiphany, selfish motives perhaps, mediocre financial gain, but I'm in the same boat, and why is it so fine that the restaurant so shit on me, and I double my resolve to leave...
...he's crying, leaves quickly, I promise to visit him, but time and paths weave and I think we both know better...
In a sporting good humor, good-naturedly wearing the boots, belts, cowboy shirt I picked up for him, he'd never been hit on by so many men in his life...