Sam finds, to his detached amazement, that he almost wishes Jake would. This has already gone too far—Sam has already said a dozen things that he will regret saying later, no matter how deeply Jake’s hurt him—and yet he’s almost hungry for an escalation, for the tension to reach such a devastating snapping point that it tears them both in two. It might feel good, Sam thinks, in the way there are certain things that only can feel good when you feel very, very bad. A root canal, for example, is something nobody wants, right up until the minute they need one—then it’s the thing they desire most in the world, to be rid of that ruined, agonized nerve.
But on the other hand, maybe escalation isn’t necessary. After all, Sam feels in pieces already, every bit as crumbled inside as the slice of Swiss he crushed. He can’t fathom what Jake’s thinking—what a fool he’s been, to ever imagine he could—but the man certainly looks less whole than he did in Sam’s bed just this morning.
Jake sounds it, too, when, blankly, he says, “Oh. Mud. Right.”
Whether it’s Jake’s hollow tone or the thought of this morning, and the associated cognitive dissonance of realizing that was merehoursago, all the fight drains out of Sam. He’s exhausted, suddenly; he feels almost sick, as though expending so much emotion at once has burned out some critical internal engine, and nothing can run without it.
“Just…go,” Sam says, putting a hand over his eyes and gesturing towards Jake’s building. “I don’t want to see you right now. Please just leave.” Then, all but snarling it in his abrupt anger at remembering it’s necessary, he adds, “You can send Joey our social passwords, by the way. Thanks for all thehelp.”
“Sam,” Jake says. It’s the smallest voice Sam’s ever heard him use, and for a second Sam wavers, wanting to fix things. Wanting to make this okay for Jake somehow, except…except, Sam remembers, resolve washing over him again, it’s not hisjob to make things okay for other people. Especially when those people have made things far, far less than okay for him.
“Fine,” Sam says, tight. “I’llgo, then.”
He turns around and walks into the deli without looking back.
SEVENTEEN
NOW: JUNE
Sam gets exactly twenty-four hours to be furious. Without entirely meaning to, he spends nearly all of them cleaning.
More specifically, he spends them cleaning the deli, giving it the sort of deep, multi-step scrub-down even health inspectors don’t call for. The drains, the ovens, the deep fryers—even the grease trap, which is such a disgusting job that Sam usually hires someone in to do it. Not today! Today he stomps upstairs, hearing each of his footfalls ring through the building, and puts on the clothes and shoes he wears for really nasty work before stomping back down again. He’s pretty sure he hears a collective sigh of relief when he steps out the back door to access the grease trap from the exterior panel, which Sam can’t blame anyone for. He doesn’t want to be around himself right now, either.
A few months ago, the algorithm that controls Sam’s digital life fed him a video of some food celebrity; Sam doesn’t remember who he was now, only the concept he laid out. He called it the Restaurant Rancidity Index: a system by which one could rate the energy in any given eatery. There were a variety of tiers of rancidity, along with guidelines for identification of said tiers, and suggestions for each one as to whether or not it’s worth eating there. And there was also a long segue about howone single person could tip a whole place into a bad energy, which involved a lot of emphatic hand gesturing and, eventually, an off-screen man laughing and saying, “Dude, you gotta chill, or people will think you’re talking about someone specific.”
Sam’s own personal Rancidity Index rating is currently the highest it’s ever been, off the charts to a degree that his mind is still struggling to map. And so, for all he knows he should be containing them—for all he tries to force them into cleaning, which is at least productive, something with a tangibleresult—his feelings seep out into the restaurant anyway, poisoning everyone’s mood.
Or maybe the poison would have been there regardless, and isn’t entirely Sam’s fault. Maybe they’re angry, too, or hurt, or regretful about growing attached to this person who turns out to have betrayed them all. It wouldn’t surprise him, but he doesn’t know, because for the rest of the day nobody really talks to him. That’s probably because from the time Sam returns to the deli until the last closer leaves for the night, there are essentially no moments in which he is not grunting, groaning, or grumbling to himself while he disassembles and scrubs every piece of equipment that isn’t actively in use. This is on purpose: Sam doesn’t want to talk, not to them, not to anyone, and is relieved when they leave him alone.
Instead they try to talk to each other, not that it goes well. Alphonse ends up snapping at Eileen, who turns around and snaps at Joey, who storms out fifteen minutes before the end of their shift exclaiming, “I don’t need this! It’s still technically mybirthday week,” as though the honoring of a “birthday week” is a holy writ the entire staff has violated. Sam watches them go without saying anything, cold and empty, as though his rage has burned through everything inside of him and left nothing behind but charred earth.
Then he disassembles the dish room faucets, one at a time to make sure the staff can still work, and cleans each piece so thoroughly that each one looks, upon reassembly, like he just picked it up from the store. It should be satisfying. It isn’t.
He growls low under his breath and moves on to the next project.
Sam should sleep. He doesn’t. Or, at least, he mostly doesn’t. Around four in the morning, he passes out on his living room couch in the middle of trying to fish one of Pastrami’s toys out from underneath it, and wakes up to the piercing scream of his alarm only an hour or so later.
As he shuts it off, a jolt of such agonized heartbreak shoots through Sam that it shocks him. He had forgotten, under the anger and emptiness, that he was capable of other emotions, and he can’t even place what’s caused this one for a second. He just lies on the couch, reeling with the intensity, for a long moment until it comes back to him: Jake—God, it was onlyyesterday—smiling up at him and sliding a hand into his hair, saying maybe there was something to these restaurant hours after all.
For all this last week was, in the grand scheme of Sam’s life, the space between one breath and the next, for a minute there it had felt like… God, Sam can hardly bear, now, to even think it. It felt like maybe, foronce, it wasn’t just going to be him looking after everyone else. Like maybe this one time it was going to bemutual.
But Jake, Sam reminds himself harshly, isn’t the person he seemed to be, so. Any conclusions he might have drawn were based on false information, and are thus useless to work from.
A little part of Sam, one which has been out cold since Jake’s secret was revealed, stirs slightly at this point. It asks in a querulous voice whether Sam thinks that’s entirely fair. He’s known Jake a long time, hasn’t he? And he knows, if mostly by inference, that Jake’s had a difficult year. Isn’t he, Sam,intimately familiar with what it is to be so unhappy you lose track of yourself, that you can’t be honest even when you know, deep down, you should be?
He crushes the voice into silence and goes back down to the deli, where he glowers at roughly everyone and everything in his eyeline.
At least, he glowers until just before 10 a.m., which is when Luce bursts, sobbing, through the front door.
It takes Sam nearly forty minutes, and a copious amount of snacks, to calm Luce down enough to tell him what happened. For a while, all he can get out of her is tears; then there’s a few minutes where all she’ll say is, “I’m not a triplet anymore, Sam, all right? You’ll back me up with Mom and Dad? They can betwinslike they’ve always reallywantedand I can be an emancipated sibling!” Then, to Sam’s sympathy, but also increasing frustration, tears again. This does, at least, clue him in to the general area of the problem, but leaves him at sea in terms of specifics. The triplets have always fought amongst themselves, but it’s contained and insular, all three of them closing ranks if anyone else tries to get involved.
Luce has apparently let this allegiance go, because when she finally runs out of tears, she tells Sam everything. It takes her a while.
Some of it is stuff Sam already knew, either by witnessing or inferring it over the years. Daisy and Iris are closer with each other than with Luce. Daisy and Iris have never quite understood Luce (and, though Luce doesn’t say this and Sam suspects she doesn’t know it, vice versa). Daisy and Iris are a matched set, and signal in a lot of subtle ways that Luce should consider herself lucky to be along for the ride.
Sam also already knows the broad strokes of the old fight Luce fills in as backstory: how angry Daisy and Iris had been a few years back, when Luce first said she wanted to go to art school. He lets her tell him anyway because it’s so obvious she needs to, but he could hardly have forgotten. It had been the Adelson Family Bone to Pick for the better part of a year, David and Mara pushing for a more “traditional degree” while Daisy and Iris insisted that they were triplets and meant to do things together. Sam had not been in attendance for more than a handful of the conversations about it. That was when his sisters were in high school, and the uneasy détente he’d reached with his parents at that point extended to birthdays, holiday dinners, and the occasional weekend cookout. He’d never had much to contribute to the general discussion, beyond the never well-received, “I think Luce’s art is really good, and it’s her life, so. Maybe she should just do what she wants.”
She had done what she wanted in the end—or, at least, she’d gone to art school. But she’d stayed in Cleveland, turning down an offered spot at a prestigious program in Rhode Island to do so, and lived in off-campus housing with Daisy and Iris. She’d said at the time that she’d thought about it, that staying local was what she wanted, but Sam’s not surprised to hear now that she had desperately wanted to accept the Rhode Island offer.
