“I know what a kreplach is, Sam,” Jake says, sounding amused now. He leans over to peer into the holding pan, keeping the ones Sam already fried off warm, and comments, “And actually, itisa cool ideal to fry them off like that. Looks like the texture’s a little different than on a pierogi dough—more shattery, like a gyoza with a skirt, right? When you do the little cornstarch?—”
“Cornstarch slurry at the end, yeah!” Sam grins at him, pleased to have this recognized. “It’s just stock and a little Worcestershire sauce for the liquid, after they fry in the butter and schmaltz—well, browned butter and schmaltz.”
“Okay, seriously,” Jake says, crossing his arms and glaring at Sam, “it’scruel and unusual punishmentto keep saying things like that and not let me try one.”
“Who said you couldn’t try one?” Sam grins at Jake’s shocked-fish expression as he grabs a fork and spears a kreplach from the holding pan, then passes it over. “Go on, it’s basically time to serve up anyway; I’m finishing the last?—”
“Mmm.”It’s a deep, almost guttural sound, one Jake makes with his eyes closed, and loud enough that it makes Sam smirk a little in spite of himself. Then Jake’s eyes slam open and he flushes, though he just sounds enthusiastic, not embarrassed, as he says, “Oh my God. What the hell? Why is that sogood?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Sam says, though he’s terribly, hideously pleased. “Just, you know. What was around?”
“You’re a liar,” Jake says, wide-eyed, swallowing another mouthful. “I refuse to believe that you just whacked this together on a whim! It’s too well balanced.” He takes the final bite of the kreplach Sam gave him, chews, swallows, shakes his head, and demands, “Why aren’t you serving stuff likethis? If you can make it so easily and you already have a restaurant and it tastes likethat?”
“That’s whatIalways say,” Eileen complains, “but no one ever listens tome,” which reminds Sam, abruptly and to his great shame, that he and Jake are not alone in this room.
When he turns his head, already grimacing, to look at the staff, they’reallstaring at him in rapt attention, as though he is a sideshow act. Joey has their chin on their hands, and Alphonse is giving him a look that says, as plain as day, “You and I are going to be having a little talk later, and that little talk is going to be very, very funny for me, and excruciating for you.”
“Oh,” Sam says, glaring at all of them with absolutely no effect, and then turning back to the stove and Jake on the theory that it’s too late to do anything about their audience. “You know,uh. Tradition, and all that. It’s been the same menu the last seventy-five years, more or less. Part of the whole schtick, or at least that’s what my aunt says. The place lives and dies on being a stitch in time.”
“Hmm,” Jake says. It’s a sound of genuine curiosity, as opposed to one of doubt, and his face creases as though he’s seriously considering the logic. Thoughtfully, he says, “There’s definitely merit to that theory. The nostalgia angle plays, for sure. But at a certain point you have to strike a balance, don’t you? If nothingeverchanges, I think it’s easy to slide from nostalgic into boring, and once the joy is gone, the product—” He cuts himself off, and Sam, glancing sideways, sees his eyes bug out a little in alarm. “Jesus Christ, not that I’m saying this place is boring, or that the food is! At all! I’m just, you know, talking like, generally, as a rule of thumb?—”
“You’re fine, dude, chill,” Sam says, grinning at him, feeling abruptly and utterly sixteen. How many times had he said that to Jake, back in those early, easy days? How many times had he heard, from his own side of the fence, Jake puffing himself up like an enormous, anxious balloon, and reached through the slats in the wood with a tiny verbal pin?
It’s as satisfying now as it was then, to see Jake catch his breath, and then Sam’s eye, and smile back, and say, “Thanks.” Horribly, it might bemoresatisfying. Back then, Sam hadn’t known it would be such a rare feeling. He hadn’t known he’d spend twelve years searching for its like, for even a shadow of it, and never even brush the tips of his fingers across anything that came close.
He doesn’t get to say anything else, though. As he’s opening his mouth to reply, Joanie bursts in through the employees-only back door Sam has begged her a thousand times not to use and bellows, “Samuel Deborah Silverman! How dare you makesuch a delicious smell infiltrate my sacred space! I insist you compensate me with lunch at once.”
Sam, despite feeling himself flush, manages to sound calm and unbothered as he says, “Hello to you, too, Joanie. I think we can all agree that isn’t my name, and that of course you can have as much lunch as you want, and thatyou’re not supposed to use that door.”
“A witch uses whatever door she likes,” Joanie says haughtily, throwing her hand-dyed scarf over her shoulder, and then she glances at Jake. Sam sees her eyes widen very slightly, but he’s pretty sure no one else does, and when her gaze slams over to meet his, he can almost see the cogs working in her brain, sorting out the particulars. He panics for a second, kicking himself for not thinking this through. She’s a fan of Jake’s ex, so she’ll have seen Jake in photos and interviews with him, and have watched all the stuff Sam forced himself not to. Sheknowswho Jakeisand she’llsaysomething and Jake will panic and bolt andmoveand probablystarve to deathand?—
—and Joanie is smirking at him, and rolling her eyes, and Sam realizes in a wash of sheepish relief that he is underestimating her. Joanie’s odd, and off-beat, and believes in a lot of things that Sam himself is far too young a man to categorize as “hokum” and does anyway. But she’s shrewd, and smarter than she lets on by a wide margin, and more discreet than he tends to give her credit for. She enjoys gently embarrassing him—hence greeting him by shouting an inside joke that sources back to before Sam could legally drink—but she wouldn’t call Jake out, make him uncomfortable, because she isn’t like that. He’s a stranger, and one she’s bound to find interesting, so she’ll approach him carefully and curiously, in the interest of drawing more information out.
Sam wonders, in a distant and somewhat fatalistic way, how bad it is that he’s already feeling this protective of Jake. Ona scale of one to ten, one being, “Perfectly healthy, fine and normal, well within the bounds of reasonable things to feel, not setting yourself up for heartbreak at all,” and ten being, “As completely, disastrously bad as the filthy dreams I keep having where we break into Horseshoe Heights High and end up having sex in the locker room,” Sam thinks it’s about an eight.
Joanie just says, “Oh! A new face. Who’s this, then?” She sounds for all the world as if she really doesn’t know. Sam gives her a grateful look as he introduces her to Jake, and they start chatting, and then the food is cooked and Sam’s serving it up and then they’re all talking, exchanging stories, complimenting the kreplach, joking and laughing. Family meal isn’t always like this. There have been a lot of days lately, in the wake of the Kiss of Death review, where they’ve all hunched over their plates in miserable silence, eating for sustenance instead of joy.
But Jake, just as he always did, has thiseffecton people. Sam thinks it’s partially his willingness to throw himself on the sword of looking a bit foolish, and partially the sheer irrepressibility of his personality. It’s hard not to like someone being so obviously dragged by the ankles behind his own peculiar nature.
The staff must agree, because Jake fits in well for the whole meal, and leaves having eaten two helpings and promising quite cheerfully to return. He fits in well again two days later, swinging by before his afternoon class of middle school dancers, and the day after that, dropping in exhausted after a morning spent teaching the under-six group, and then suddenly he has become such a regular part of family meal that Sam has a hard time imagining it without him. He starts to look forward to it, that hour where he’s all but guaranteed a chance to bask in the warmth of Jake’s presence, and then to rely upon it. Upsettingly quickly, it becomes the linchpin around which his whole day is constructed, the carrot he uses to lure himself through difficult moments.
Maybe that’s why the next month evaporates like water on a hot griddle, a flash of billowing heat in the blink of an eye. Or maybe it’s because, aside from the highlight of Jake, there are quite a lot of difficult moments.
For the first couple of months after the Kiss of Death review, Sam tried to stay positive. He told himself it was the slow season anyway, that traffic was always lower in that weird, slushy period between winter and spring.
But in the weeks Sam spends getting used to seeing Jake every afternoon for family meal, he also has to get familiar with the quarterly earnings reports. They are…grim. Or, more accurately, they’re perfectly flat and normal, in fact slightly higher than usual year-over-year, right up until the Kiss of Death review.
Then they start to tank. Hard. Scarily hard.
Many businesses, Sam knows, are designed to carry with them a certain amount of insulation against financial ruin, a layer of cushioning stuffed with money. But Silverman’s isn’t like that, because restaurants, by and large, aren’t like that. There are too many moving parts. Traffic and demand are both highly variable; the product you produce is perishable, and so must be sold or lost in a tight window; ingredient costs fluctuate based on a market over which you have no control; the list goes on and on. It’s an industry of slim margins, and part of being a good manager is learning how to weave through the gaps like an otter through an angry river, darting and diving and never losing track of the essentials. Sam likes it, usually, the thrill of knowing things could go snarled up and wrong if he let them, if he didn’t have a firm grip on every interwoven strand of this place. It makes him feel necessary, fulfilled, in a way he’s accepted but isn’t entirely proud of.
But if Sam doesn’t find a way to turn things around soon—like, in the next month or two—they’re going to hit a pointhe’s not sure they can come back from. As it is, he’s already changed suppliers on more than half their ingredients, axed all their chocolate desserts (to Eileen’s shrieking fury) because the price of cocoa was killing him, cut his own salary down as low as he can take it without running out of money for his and Pastrami’s basic bills and upkeep, and cancelled a number of large, long-standing backstocking orders. He’s also convinced Casey, their apple guy, to let them float a few months on credit. Unfortunately, Sam’s pretty sure the only reason he does this is because a few years ago, before Casey met his now-husband, Deb set them up, and they went on one of the most awkward dates of Sam’s life. There was so little chemistry between them that, halfway through the appetizer, three strangers slid into their booth, assuming they were the business associates they were meant to be meeting; to say things have been awkward ever since is an understatement. But, on the plus side: In times of trouble, Sam can always count on his apple delivery, even if he knows they’ll all taste vaguely of pity.
It isn’t enough. But all he can think of otherwise is raising prices—a terrible idea when they’re trying to lure spooked customers back in—or firing someone, which is just. No. He can’t do that. There has to be another way.
Technically, Sam knows there is one. He’s painfully aware Deb’s gotten offers to sell the building over the years, lucrative ones. The neighborhood has changed a lot since his grandparents invested their life savings here, and the building sits on what is, these days, fairly prime real estate. There’s even a local restaurant group who has mocked up a concept for what they’d put in the space if Silverman’s was gone, which Sam knows because they send over a copy every month, along with an offer to buy if they’re ever interested in selling.
He and Deb had talked about it, just once, right before she left town. She’d offered to give him some of the profits if shesold; he refused. She pointed out that he could start his own place with the money, call it Adelson’s, do everything the way he wanted to do it; he refused. He’d been a little afraid that shewantedto sell, was feeling him out in the interest of moving forward, but she’d grinned at him with tears in her eyes and hugged him, whispering, “I knew you were my favorite nephew for a reason.” Sam, touched, had refrained from pointing out that he was her only nephew. It hadn’t seemed like the right thing for the moment.
