When he opened his eyes again, there was a gleam in them Sam didn’t like at all.
“Out in the open!” Jake said, with a false, brittle brightness. “That’s right! Always better that way, isn’t it? To get things out in the open? That’s what this whole day wassupposedto be about!” His tone cracked into a snarl on the last sentence, and before Sam could stop him, he turned and wrenched the car door back open, throwing himself inside. “Come on, then, get in. We have a party to go to.”
“Jake, please,” Sam said, desperate, “please wait. I really don’t think you should be driving, let along driving that?—”
“Sam,” Jake said, stonily calm, as he turned the key in the ignition, “I am taking this car, and I am going to this party, andthere is nothing—do you hear me?—nothingyou can do to stop me. If you don’t want to go, fine. If you don’t want to be seen with me, fine! Stay here, if that’s how you feel. But I. Am. Going.”
Over the years Sam has relived this night many times and many ways, spun out all the things he might have changed to make it go differently. But the next decision he made, he has never bothered rethinking. Sam, then or now, could not have let Jake drive the Jaguar away in that condition by himself. He couldn’t have climbed into the passenger seat or thrown himself in front of the car, either. He’d heard too much from his parents about impulsivity and drunk drivers, and knew that doing either of those things was likely to end in injury or death for them both. So, although at any point before that moment he could have sent things careening down a different track, it was already too late when Sam said:
“God, fine, scoot over, then. If we’re doing this, I’m driving.”
Jake scooted down accommodatingly enough, clambering with drunken grace over the gearshift, but he smirked when Sam climbed in and slammed the door. “Do you even have your license?”
“Yes,” said Sam, who didn’t. What he had was a learner’s permit and parents who, between them, had not been able to bring themselves to give him more than three cumulative hours of lessons.
But those lessons were certainly enough to know how to return a car to a home which sat directly behind his own. And that was, in all honesty, the only thing Sam ever intended to do. His plan was simple and direct: drive the car back to Jake’s house, refuse to give him the keys, wait until he calmed down, and then invite him over to eat freezer-burned ice cream and watch terrible made-for-TV movies. It was well thought out, that plan. It should have worked.
They were halfway to Jake’s when disaster struck.
NINE
NOW: MAY
Sam tries Joanie first, on the theory that she will probably have the most to say but also be the least helpful, so getting her out of the way is efficient. The ensuing conversation takes about four hours, with breaks in between for them to tend to their respective businesses. It ranges over a variety of topics, including “What happens to my rent prices if Silverman’s goes under?” and “I mean it, Sam, what happens?” When Sam tells her, begrudgingly, that if it came down to it, Deb could always sell the building, the conversation turns into a discussion of Joanie’s hatred of corporate overreach in neighborhood development, which is a topic she has a tendency to really settle into. It’s ages before Sam finally manages to get her tocircle back to her advice on what to do regarding Kiss of Death recovery.
This advice is primarily the suggestion that Sam seek revenge against the bastard who reviewed him. When Sam explains, not for the first time, that Norman Endicott has made himself more or less unreachable, probably because people might have ideas like that, Joanie shrugs and suggests he ask the Dark Web for help. At this point things veer into a discussion of what, exactly, Joanie thinks the Dark Web is, and the discovery that it is wildlyincorrect, and after that Sam decides to wash his hands of the conversation and try someone else.
He tries a lot of other people, prioritizing seeking a solution over socializing, sleeping, and even celebrating his thirtieth birthday, which he shuffles past without looking directly at in mid-April. (Jake sends him a text with a balloon emoji and asks him when they’re having cake, but Sam manages to distract him with a video of a squirrel completing an obstacle course.) He runs the options over and over again with Alphonse and Eileen, goes to bother Dani at the West Side Market, and asks his barber, the restaurant’s new meat vendor, the restaurant’soldmeat vendor, a very unhelpful internet forum, and—to his great shame—all three of his sisters for their thoughts. Nobody has anything helpful to say beyond, “I’m sure it’ll turn around, man!” or “I’ll try to spread the word that people should come by!” Iris and Daisy don’t offer him even that; Iris shrugs, bored, and Daisy winces, uncomfortable, and they leave together for some exercise class that Sam can’t quite understand the name of.
But Luce says, “Let me think about that, okay?” and then turns up at the deli the next day with a huge canvas, her supply bag, and a collapsible easel. When Sam raises his eyebrows, she shrugs and says, “Listen, I have to turn in three paintings before June 1st or I don’t graduate, and I figure having an artist in the window might draw people in, so. Thought if you’re cool with it, I’d do them here, of the deli? Past/present/future sort of deal? What do you think?” She looks up at him with big eyes, and adds, in a slightly sheepish tone, “Not that you should let this sway you or anything but. I’d also, um. Love to spend a little less time at the old…apartment.”
“I think it’s a great idea,” Sam says, smiling at her, even if deep down he doubts the power of art to move the financial needle. “You go ahead and get set up, okay? Let me know if there’s anything you need.”
Luce nods at him, grinning, and then strides right out the door. He watches her stand out there for a minute: framing the building with her hands, taking a few photos with her camera, reviewing them, repeating the process. Finally, she stares up at the building with one hand on her hip, the other shading her eyes, unwittingly imitating a photo of their grandmother that hangs across from Sam on the wall.
Sam takes a breath, turns around, and almost trips on Pastrami, who has curled up around his feet while he stood staring and fallen asleep. Stepping over her carefully, he goes into his office and calls Deb. His pride means a lot to him but isn’t worth the deli.
She’s warm from the moment she picks up. Of course she’s warm. She’s always warm, and Sam always forgets until he’s talking to her that his internal version of her is a lot harder on him than she’s ever been herself. Sam thinks probably it’s all those years with his mother, preparing himself for coldness or indifference so it wouldn’t hurt so much when it arrived.
It’s a comfort, if a chilly one, that Sam knows he’s not the only one who experienced his mother as something of an icebox; it was a joke, back when the sisters still spoke, that Deb and Mara were like fire and ice. Certainly, that had spilled over into the fight that ended their relationship for good, the one his father, afterwards, would sometimes refer to as the Great Yom Kippur Schism, although only when Mara was out of earshot. The two of them had battled out every grievance over the table: their childhood frustrations with one another; Deb’s sense of betrayal over Mara’s abandonment of the deli; Mara’s rage at what she perceived as Deb’s judgement of her parenting and life choices; the ways each felt the other had failed them while their parents were dying. Everyone else had quietly eaten their bagels and kept their eyes on their plates, and what Sam remembers more than anything either of them said was the way they were astudy in opposites. As Deb pleaded and shouted and gripped the table so hard Sam thought she would break it, Mara grew colder and more clipped, until she seemed to radiate a cloud of frost like dry ice.
Maybe that’s what it comes down to, then: Deb burns where Mara freezes, and so is warm more than she’s not. Whatever the reason, her softer, easier energy is still a bit shocking to him even now, a delightful surprise every time.
It’s obvious from “Hello” that she knows why he’s calling, but she does him the courtesy of letting him work up to it. When he asks about how things are going on the dig, she answers at length, telling him about Talya’s latest discovery and their funding struggles and the new graduate student on site who has, according to Deb, an “Indiana Jones complex.”
After that conversational topic is exhausted, and after she’s pointedly reiterated the birthday wishes Sam had demurred away from on the actual day, she does ask about the deli, but not in the way shecouldask. She could say, “So, how are…things going…at work,” with the loaded, heavy pauses of someone who knows the answer and doesn’t like it. Sam knows she gets the same quarterly budget reports he does, and that she reads the daily roundup emails he sends her, and that she saw the Kiss of Death review. It would be easy to come at him from a tense, combative place.
But instead, breezily, she says, “How’s work, then?”
Sam swallows, knowing he’ll never get a better opening than this, and bites the bullet: “It’sterrible, Deb. It’s so terrible, oh my God, it’s never been this terrible, I didn’t know! That one review! Could just send everything off therailslike this!” He takes a deep breath, reining it in, aware that this is not the way to present himself as someone worth trusting with his family’s seventy-five-year-old business. “I’m sorry, I really am, but I need. Some help? If you have any thoughts or ideas or anything,I can’t—I can’t figure it out on my own.” He hangs his head, ashamed of himself but knowing it’s the truth, and his only move. Hedoesneed help, and she’s the most qualified person he knows, at least when it comes to keeping the doors open at Silverman’s.
There is a long pause at the other end of the line. Then, thoughtfully, Deb says, “Do you know what, kid? I gotta jump off right now, but I’m really glad you asked me that. Not that I have an answer for you, except to tell you that this is an insane situation and you’re doing all the right things, the things I would do, but still. Real glad you asked. I’ll see you soon, Sammy, okay? Keep your head up; haven’t I told you what Gram always said?”
Sam sighs, smiling a little in spite of himself, and recites: “‘Even the best restaurants are at least thirty percent luck’?”
“That’s the one,” Deb says, with a little chuckle. “So sometimes, it’s about having faith that yours will turn around.”
This is a lovely sentiment. A sweet one. It does not, however, change the facts, and Sam finds that there is only so much faith he can muster in the face of numbers so low.
