Offcuts: Happy Valentine’s Day, Pete By: Don Heisz

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Pete. Got any special plans for you and the wife?”

This was how Pete was greeted one morning upon reaching our destination for the day, which was a small service building on the lot of a sewerage treatment plant.

“I plan on not answering if she calls, but I doubt she’ll call.”

“Oh,” said the other guy. I don’t remember his name, but he was almost seven feet tall and was running the job. However, he was a carpenter, like us, and normally would have been doing the work we were there to do.

“So you’ll be sitting on your hands today, keeping warm?”

“I have to leave in a couple of hours. We’re having a site meeting over there where it smells a lot worse.”

“It’s got to be better than this,” I said. It was way below zero (Celsius, that is. I can’t even spell fair-in-height).

“It smells good here today. The stink falls to the ground when it’s this cold.”

We worked there for just over nine hours. There was no heat in the building whatsoever. It was just a bit bigger than a dog house and we should have been done very quickly but nothing went right. Everything takes longer when you’re trying to stay warm, too. Every forty-five minutes, Pete and I spent fifteen minutes in the truck with the heat on, listening to the radio.

“Looks like you guys are spending a beautiful Valentine’s Day together,” said the other guy, when he came back from his meeting.

“Why were you gone so long?” asked Pete, “It doesn’t take that long to tell them you’re clueless.”

“Haha,” he laughed, “Yeah, I got nothing to say to them. They just want to be able to write down when someone says he can’t get something done on time.”

“Hmmm.”

“Oh, but I brought you guys back some presents. Come over to the truck.”

We walked through the cold wind over to his truck. He opened the door and we were knocked back by the smell of cinnamon and chocolate. “Here,” he said and handed us each a cup of hot chocolate all decorated with red hearts. “Oh, and these,” he gave us each a pink box of chocolates. The hot chocolate had a heavy cinnamon flavour to it.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, sweethearts,” he laughed and slapped Pete on the back.

Pete glared at him and took a sip of his hot chocolate and wrinkled up his nose. “Why on earth is there so much cinnamon in this?”

The other smiled.”That place over there smells like the inside of a camel’s rectum after forty days in the desert. The uppity-ups don’t like it very much, so one of them brought all this stuff in to beat down the stink. Oddly enough, none of them ate any of the chocolates.”

“These are pretty good,” I said.

Pete glared at me, then. “You’re not getting mine.”

“I wouldn’t take your Valentine’s chocolates, Pete.”

“Yeah,” said the other guy, “It’s not like you’ll be getting any more.”

The hot chocolate, incidentally, was almost as cold as milk by the time we got it.