Speaking of lies, who were the mysterious unnamed sources who claimed they’d gotten multiple rounds of food poisoning from Sam’s kitchen? Why didn’t any of them call in andsaysomething? To the state, even, if not to the deli itself? What, exactly, had poisoned them? Sam’s fairly certain that on a batch-wide level, nothing has left his kitchen without his at least tasting it in months, and he’s a stickler on the food-safety rules to the point that his staff tease him about it. But nothing’s impossible—a tainted batch of something straight from a supplier, a one-off bad piece of chicken, things happen. Sam would just have liked to betold, if it was true, although he suspects very strongly that it wasn’t.
And, somehow worst of all, Endicott had hated the food. How could he have hated the food? Obviously, deep in his heart, Sam knows that not everyone likes his food. He can even admit that the menu is a little dated, to put it a lot more mildly than the article did. But the article talked about the flavors and the textures being wrong, the temperatures being off. He’d even suggested there was a whiff of rancidity to some of his dishes, which is just impossible. Silverman’s food is good! It has been good for seventy-five years! Sam would sooner die than serve a rancid batch of anything!
Mostly to himself, he mutters, “It must have been one of those delivery apps.”
“Isaidwe shouldn’t do the delivery services,” Eileen puts in, sharply, from the back. Silverman’s Head Baker for as long as Sam can remember, she had been a ferocious, graying terror of a woman even when he was a child. The only thing that’s reallychanged since then is her hair; the “ing” in “graying” has long since left the building.
Sam groans, but his voice is good-natured as he says, “I know you did, Eileen. We all know you did, because you remind us every time we get slammed.”
“Well! Just because I think you should listen to me sometime, that’s all!” She sniffs, clearly offended in spite of Sam’s best efforts, and disappears back into her half of the kitchen. That’s Eileen all over—she loves to dish it out but can’t even begin to think of taking it. Sam sighs, wrestles down the urge to go make peace. He’d tried that with Eileen for years, with inevitably frustrating and terrible results, until Deb had gently pulled him aside and told him that with some people it was best to leave things alone and let moments of discomfort flow away without further discussion.
So instead of giving in to his desire to smooth things over and make it all fine, Sam turns back to Alphonse and says, “I tried to call the magazine, you know. Have them retract it.”
Alphonse blinks at him, surprised. “Wait, really? I didn’t know that. You calledHearth? When?”
“Last month.” Sam rubs the palm of his hand briefly against his forehead, as though trying to force his growing tension headache up and out through the top of his skull. “I called to see if I could talk to Endicott and ask him what the hell happened, and they said he was out of town, so then I asked if I could talk to his editor and they connected me to some…well, some person!” Sam wishes that he had a more unfriendly descriptor to use, but he’s honestly hesitant even about “person,” since whoever he spoke to had been so flat and nondescript as to be essentially a robot. “They said, ‘On what grounds would you like the review retracted, Mr. Silverman?’ and I said, ‘It’s Adelson, actually, and on the grounds that it ripped us a new one over a series of things that I know aren’t true, and also, I’m pretty sure NormanEndicott’s never even been here! There was no fact-checking, and nothing about the seventy-five-year history of the place or the dying deli culture in Cleveland or any research or anything. I don’t think it’s fair to call us “an overrated, outdated stain on the otherwise delightful West Ninth Street,” especially in a column that usually focuses on places that charge hundreds of dollars per plate. Places with Michelin stars!’ And they said, ‘Well, it’s an opinion piece, Mr. Silverman, anyone can have an opinion,’ and I said, ‘Again, my name is Sam Adelson,’ and they said, ‘Oh, so sorry, I must have picked up the wrong extension then,’ and hung up!”
Sam is breathing hard by the end of this little speech. Alphonse is looking at him like maybe he thinks thatSamspends too much time at work, which, in all fairness, would not be wrong. This is one of the dangers of having your apartment directly above your place of business, especially when that apartment technically still belongs to your aunt, and you feel guilty about changing anything around from the way she’s always kept it.
Not wanting to share this with Alphonse, and hoping, at last, to set aside the topic of the Kiss of Death review, Sam sticks his head back into the building and yells, “Anyone need anything? Any new customers?”
“Doornail,” Joey—the deli’s current primary counter minder, cashier, and customer wrangler—calls from the front.
Sam knows all too well, especially after this last month, that by “doornail,” Joey means it’s as dead as one in there. He sighs hard, collapsing back a little against the brickwork. It’s noon on a Friday. This should be prime time, lunch rush. Alphonse should be sweating and swearing and begging Eileen to jump in and assist whoever was supposed to be slicing the meat; Joey should be howling for help as they’re mobbed by a horde of irascible zombies who can only be sated by corned beef. Samhimself should, right now, be experiencing the strangely blissful stress of being pulled in a dozen directions at once, with no time or energy to even consider his own problems.
Instead, in direct violation of his own intention from only moments ago, he mutters, “That stupid review, I swear to God. Did you know this could happen? That some jackass critic could just write up a hit piece based on basically nothing and kill your traffic like this?”
Alphonse winces. “I mean…yeah, man. I’ve never seen anything go quite as, uh, wide as this has, but crappy Yelp reviews killed the last two places I worked at.”
Sam freezes, briefly stunned into loaded, unpleasant silence. Silverman’s can’tdie. Individual Silvermans, of course, could die, and did all the time. The deli’s history is pockmarked with loss, like any place that’s handed down through a family. But Silverman’s, the location, theinstitution, has loomed so large across Sam’s life as to become something unkillable, beyond such petty concerns as mortality. It’s like suggesting a mountain could die, or a continent. The very idea rocks Sam’s internal landscape to a degree he’s a little embarrassed by.
“Let’s try not to get ahead of ourselves,” he says instead. “Maybe it’s just an…unrelated slump. It wasn’t this bad last month after the review came out, right?”
Alphonse winces; Sam knows why. While it’s true that traffic had taken a few weeks to start dropping, it’s hard to agree with the idea that last month wasn’t bad. It was differently bad, that was all. So many regulars coming in to say they were sorry to hear the deli was closing, and then looking at Sam with pity when he insisted it was not, would be hard for anyone to describe as “good.”
With forced brightness, Sam says, “Okay, last month sucked, too, but it’s just a couple of quiet weeks, and it’s probably the weather anyway. People are easily convinced to stay inside bythis point in the winter, you know that. But it’ll turn around, you’ll see! It might not be from the review at all, and even if it is, just because the stupid column is called Kiss of Death doesn’t mean it actuallyisone.”
“Yeah,” Alphonse says doubtfully, “maybe not,” but Sam can tell his heart isn’t in it.
Sam goes inside, because it’s high time he walked away from this conversation, and cloisters himself in his office. Well, it’s not really his office, not technically. Like the deli, like the apartment above it, this is really Deb’s office. They’re her books on the shelves, and her files in the cabinet, and her framed photo of Talya, her wife, on the desk. It’s her name on the door, even, although about six months ago Alphonse did stick up a Post-it below that reads,+ Sam Adelson!
Every time Sam looks at it, it embarrassingly makes him feel a little burst of…well, of something, anyway. Not entirely pride, certainly, since it’s a Post-it note, butsomething.
But if he wants more than the Post-it—if he wants his name to really be on the glass windowpane of this office door—he’s going to have to do more than sit here and woolgather. That’s the deal he made with his aunt, who, understandably, had some hesitations about handing over the reins of the family establishment to her then freshly twenty-nine-year-old nephew, the one she originally took in as a troubled teen. This whole last year has been an audition of sorts, and while it’s just Sam’s luck that something would go haywire in the last few months before she’s due back to town, he can’t let it all slip away from him now. He wakes up his computer—Deb’s computer—abruptly flush with noble intentions of getting a jump on next week’s payroll documentation.
He finds himself, instead, pulling up the stupid horrible life-ruining Kiss of Death review, a moth to a raging inferno. He’s read it so many times, first in shock and then in horror and thenin rage, that he more or less knows it by heart. Still, he skims over it now, his eyes lingering briefly on choice phrases as he scrolls. “Like eating a mouthful of fishy cement” whizzes past, followed shortly by “Couldn’t have been more poorly seasoned if they were trying” and “If this place ever had the juice in the first place, you can rest assured it is long, long gone.”
He stops scrolling when he gets to the bottom, his gaze settling, as it always does, on the little italicized paragraph after the article’s close. It sits next to a thumbnailed headshot of a round-faced white man in his mid-fifties—a larger copy of which is currently pinned to the dartboard in the break room—and reads, “Norman Endicott is a restaurant critic and reviewer based on the West Coast. To protect his safety, his inbox, and the integrity of the review process, we do not share his contact information publicly. Please direct any questions, concerns, complaints, or tips to [email protected], subject line ‘Kiss of Death.’” This, above all else, irks Sam. The integrity of the review process, fine, whatever. But Endicott’s safety and privacy? Sam wants to talk, that’s all. Just talk. Nice, normal talking, at a reasonable volume, with absolutely no throwing of pickled herring, or hosing him down with a squirt gun loaded with expired clam juice.
God, maybe theHearthpolicy has a point.
