Nobody’s Business

We were living like frat boys then. Empty pizza boxes on the floor. Beer cans in the trash instead of the recycling bin. Justin was too depressed to clean and I was too lazy. The toilet had a ring inside of it. In elementary school, we used to dye paper with tea to make it look old. That was the color of the toilet ring. A vintage, sepia circle of poop remnants. Thinking of the stain that way gave the toilet a little class.

Justin had lost his job, and not just any job, but a job at the very store that he’d founded with a man who was very much his brother. Justin wanted to serve beer and sell records. Chuck didn’t want to bother with a liquor license. Justin wouldn’t let it go. It was his vision: Vinyl Coaster Brews & Beats. Chuck had the business mind and their financial backer, their mother, had declared him in charge. It was Chuck’s way or no way. So Justin lost his job, and by lost I mean stormed off in a huff and tattled to his mother about his older brother. She stopped talking to Chuck for a while and Chuck stopped talking to Justin and Chuck’s wife stopped talking to me. We all lived in the same town which meant we were in constant danger of exchanging uncomfortable glances over a pile of potatoes at the Shop ‘N Save. Originally that was why we started ordering pizza on the regular. It was better than going to the grocery store and being on edge the whole time. You could get a large pie plus a liter of Coke and a dozen buffalo wings for just over twenty bucks. Even better, it meant we didn’t have to cook, which Justin was too depressed and I was too lazy to do.

Good thing we didn’t have kids. I was born with only one ovary anyway. The left one, in case you care. Justin’s sperm aren’t exactly little Michael Phelpses either. The odds were against us from the start, almost as strong as our unwillingness to nurture another being. As I said, we were barely taking care of ourselves at that point. One day I dropped an earring on the bedroom floor and, while bending down to pick it up, I caught a glimpse of the slate-colored piles of dust and hair that had accumulated under the bed. It was probably why Justin’s allergies seemed to get triggered whenever he lay down to sleep. I left the dust where it lay.

Like my husband, I too was an entrepreneur, the owner of an Etsy shop. I sold handmade bookmarks for five bucks a pop. Some were cross stitched and others were collages of paper. Cathy’s Crafts. My shop didn’t bring in a lot of money but it didn’t bring in nothing either. At any rate, it kept us stocked with the pizza/wings combo deal which felt like a grand contribution to our household.

“Let’s write shitty online reviews for Chuck’s place,” Justin said one night. It was the most excited I’d seen him get about anything in months. We’d been drinking rum and Cokes for several hours at that point so this all seemed like a good idea.

“Yelp or Google?” I asked.

“Let’s start with Google.” I sat down at our laptop. Justin couldn’t type for shit, not even if you let a stenographer manipulate his hands like a puppet. We pulled up the page of Justin’s business which was now Chuck’s business which was now renamed Chuck’s Music.

“So one star, obviously,” I said, clicking the rating bar. “Now the review.”

“Mention that the records are all overpriced. That Chuck likes to gouge his customers. Say that he’s a terrible brother and a tax cheat and that he cheats on his wife too.”

“Slow down,” I said. “What did you say after ‘terrible brother’?” Justin repeated himself and I got most of what he said typed out or at least a pretty good approximation of it. It was a long review but it may have been the best thing we’d ever written.

The first thing Justin and I did the next morning, before we’d even made coffee or split the last donut in the box that had been on the table for a week, was check Google reviews. Below our scathing assessment of Chuck’s Music was a reply: “I’m sorry you had such a bad experience at our business. How can we make it right?”

“Hire better people,” I wrote back. “People who are better than you.”

“This is good but we need to do more,” Justin said.

“Well, we can’t keep posting from the same IP address,” I replied. A lifetime of avid Dateline watching had given me knowledge of the ins and outs of not getting caught at something.

“Let’s go to the library then,” Justin said.

Our town library is old and small. They get precisely one copy of one new book per month. Everything else was written at least twenty years ago. Justin and I sat down at opposite computers, the slowest ones still left in the world it seemed, and began writing new reviews. I’d finished mine while Justin was still using his middle fingers to clack through his first sentence. My review this time was all about animal abuse and an allegation that Chuck liked to tell fat mom jokes. The mom joke thing was true and I had heard him yell at his dog once. I figured the dude would be canceled by lunch time. Justin posted just one sentence for his review: “Chuck steals from people who love him.”

Every morning we’d eagerly jump out of bed, ready to go post business-tanking reviews from a new IP address. The farthest away we drove was thirty miles to the shore. The closest we went was Justin’s mom’s house. After a couple of weeks, Chuck’s once 4.8 rating was down to a 3.2. At night, Justin and I lay in bed together and read that day’s fake work out loud.

We could have gone on this way forever if the pizza place hadn’t run out of Coke liters one night. Justin couldn’t eat wings without something fizzy to wash them down, and we sure as hell weren’t going to imbibe the Mountain Dew they’d offered as a substitution. Against our better judgment, we stopped at the Shop ‘N Save. Justin and I went in together because neither of us trusted the other to be left alone with the pizza.

We were walking past rows of bruised apples when we heard our names shouted from across the store. “You weasels! I see you,” Chuck’s wife, Susan, yelled. She came marching towards us, pushing her shopping cart hard and fast. A few more inches and she would have run right over Justin’s Crocs. “I know it’s you leaving those reviews,” Susan said as she pointed at us.

“Us?” Why would we do that?” I said.

“Because that’s the kind of trash you are.” I just gave her a big smile. “Trash,” she repeated.

“We’re not doing anything Chuck doesn’t deserve,” Justin said.

“You keep it up. You just keep it up. We’ll sue you.” Susan read a lot of John Grisham novels and thought she knew her way around the legal system. “You hear me. We’ll sue you,” she repeated and then stormed away. Justin and I knew Susan was all talk. For years she’d been threatening to take a hairdresser to small claims court for cutting her hair too short but charging her full price. Still, seeing Susan and being called trash made us lose our appetites. Insulting us was one thing, but ruining our pizza dinner was taking things to another level entirely.

The frozen tilapia was my idea. Justin got an economy-sized box of the fish from Costco, on sale no less. We paid the teenagers that lived next door a case of beer to bring the slabs of fish to Chuck’s store and hide them wherever they could find a good nook or cranny. That night we wrote another review. “Yar. We love your store. It smells like the salty seas.” We signed it “Captain Fishbutt.” The name was Justin’s idea.

We didn’t even hear the knock at our door. Or maybe Chuck never knocked but just let himself in. We only knew he was in the house when we heard him swear from the kitchen. “Holy shit. This place is fucking disgusting.” There were probably a few pizza boxes stacked up on the table and we hadn’t taken out the trash in a week, but it was none of his business. Justin and I walked into the kitchen.

“This is your fault,” I said. “We’re barely scraping by ever since you betrayed us.”

“This has nothing to do with me. You’ve never taken out the trash in your life, Cathy.” Chuck used two fingers to pick up a dirty napkin and drop it into the sink.

“That doesn’t go in there,” I said.

“Nothing goes anywhere in here.”

“Why are you in my kitchen, man?” Justin interrupted. He was barefoot and I hoped that Chuck didn’t notice Justin’s yellow, fungus-infected toenails.

“To give you the news you’ve been waiting for. Chuck’s Music is in danger of going out of business.” I cackled but Justin held up one hand to stop me.

“That sucks, dude.”

“Is it because of the fish?” I asked.

“The what?”

“Fucking lazy kids,” I said. “I bet they didn’t hide the fish.” Chuck looked at me like he always did, as if I was a meteor that had fallen to earth and landed on his family.

“Anyway,” Chuck continued. “It’s no fun without you, bro. I wanted to do this together.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, man. Also mom said she’s sick of us fighting. She’s not floating me money for operating costs until I partner with you again.”

“We did it,” I said as I punched the air with one victorious fist.

“Cathy, can you shut up?” Chuck said. For as long as I had been able to speak, people had been asking me to stop talking. Sometimes they were polite about it. Sometimes they were Chuck about it. “Anyway,” he continued. “I want you to come back. But do it right this time. Whatever you want.”

“We can get a license to sell beer?” Justin asked.

“Sure. Sure”

“Good shit too. Like on draft. Not in bottles. I want to be upscale.”

“Fine,” Chuck replied. “And you have to take down all the bad reviews.”

“How do you know that was us?” I asked. Chuck rolled his eyes.

“Fine. We’ll take them down,” Justin said. “But you have to promise we’re going to sell Cathy’s crafts. On a little table. Near the register.”

“Come on, dude,” Chuck sighed. “That shit looks like a kindergartner made it.”

“The fuck,” I said but no one was listening to me. Chuck was holding out his hand to shake with Justin and Justin was pulling his brother in for a hug.

A few months later, C&J’s Brews and Beats had its grand opening. Chuck promised Justin that they’d make all decisions together from now on. My mother-in-law told them that if they didn’t, she’d fire them both and hire cousin Dan to take over everything. Dan drives a Beamer and thinks his family is better than Chuck and Justin’s family. The only thing we wanted him to take over was a case of explosive diarrhea. Their mom knew this too which is probably why, five years later, Justin and Chuck are still working together. And it turns out that people love homemade wares. Cathy’s Crafts does a steady business these days. Justin still picks up the pizza and wings special on his way home, but now we spring for extra dipping sauce and cinnamon rolls too. Our place is a mess, that hasn’t changed, but there’s a reason for it. We’re business owners and we don’t have time for such minor concerns as dust and poo. Someday we may hire a maid. We’re fucking job creators, me and Justin. We’re the goddamn American Dream.

KATIE MAZZA-PHILLIPS’s short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in Failbetter, Lunch Ticket Amuse-Bouche, The Dawn Review, Monkeybicycle, and Gargoyle Magazine. She earned an M.F.A. in film production from Boston University and a degree in creative writing and psychology from Bryn Mawr College. Currently, Katie is a Creative Director at an advertising agency in New York City.

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