None of it’s a surprise, really, until she gets to the bit about the job and the apartment.
“Okay, so,” she says, dropping her voice low, “don’t tell anybody this—well, you can tell Joey. They already know.”
“Thank you,” Sam says solemnly, holding back, out of brotherly duty,If I find myself wanting to discuss my little sister’s relational issues with one of my barely-over-teenaged employees, especially one who I’m ninety-five percent sure is dating you, I think probably my best move is to go get checked for head trauma.
“Well…I kind of got. Uh. I guess you could call it a job offer?” Luce says, almost whispering now. “For next year? One of my professors is…you won’t know her, probably, but she’s a really famous sculptor. She runs an artists’ retreat down in the Cuyahoga Valley, about an hour from here? And every few years, she picks a graduating student, and, um.” Luce flushes, and, looking like she’s both uncomfortable and trying not to smile, mumbles, “I mean, they do kind of say she picks the most promising… Look, whatever, I’m not trying to brag, but she picks someone and makes them artist-in-residence? And they live at the retreat, and keep an eye on the place, and check guests in and whatever. And get paid, obviously, which is great. But the rest of the time they’re able to just. Work? And, um.” So quietly Sam almost doesn’t hear her, but excitement audibly thrumming through her voice, she says, “A lot…a lot of the people who have done it before have gone on to have pretty big careers, Sam. Like,bigbig.”
“Luce,wow,” Sam says, thrilled enough for her that even the deep, dark pits of his Jake-related unhappiness don’t dim his smile. “That’s huge! Or, I mean, what do I know about art? But it sounds huge. Congratulations!”
“Thanks,” Luce says, sounding upsettingly grateful to hear what’s surely the only appropriate response to such news. For a second a brief, bright grin slashes across her face, before she sighs and drops it. Her voice turns bitter as she says, “But, you know, Daisy and Iris want to stay here.Theylike the idea of getting an apartment downtown, wherethey’rehoping to work, and where a lot oftheirfriends are planning to live. In fact, they like that idea so much that yesterday, while I was hanging out with Joey, and without eventalkingto me, they went and…and….rented one!”
“What,” Sam says, blinking at her, “like, just for the two of them?”
“Ha! I wish!” Luce narrows her eyes, drumming her fingers on the tabletop of the booth in the back corner Sam led her to when she came in crying. “That would be fine, honestly. I don’t know what they want me hanging around for anyway! They couldn’t make it more obvious that I don’t fit, but they can’t just let mego, either, I don’t—ugh, but it doesn’t matter. No, Sam, not just for them. Three bedrooms! One for each of us!” Snorting down at her hands, Luce adds, “They hoped I’d be cool with taking the small one, because they found it.”
“So, wait,” Sam says, slow as he processes, in growing annoyance, what she’s saying, “they just found an apartment, liked it,assumedyou would live with them, and signed a lease?”
“A lease they can’t afford,” Luce says, giving him a slightly wild-eyed look, “without me paying ‘my share’! And when I said, ‘I can’t do that, I’m not staying in Cleveland, I’ve got this incredible opportunity,’ they said I was being selfish. ThatIwas! They never evenaskedme, Sam. But I’m the selfish one!”
Luce seems to be on the edge of tears again, though this time tears of rage; after yesterday, Sam can relate. He says the most comforting things he can think of and then, falling back on his natural instincts, offers to make her something to eat, which she gloomily accepts.
He makes her a plate of salami and eggs, because it had been her favorite when he was a teenager, when he was watching the triplets and making them dinner at least two or three nights a week.
Luce looks for a second like she might cry again after all when he sets the dish down in front of her, but she just mutters, “Aw,Sam,” and gives him a one-armed hug before devouring it.
She tells him about the actual fight that drove her here today while she eats; it sounds, as Deb would say, like a real humdinger. Much was said that should not have been said, and a fair amount of the things thatdidneed to be said probably wouldhave been better shared another time, another way. Daisy and Iris had called Luce stubborn, difficult, flaky; Luce had called Daisy and Iris self-involved, exclusionary, cold.
Sam attempts, as best he can, to provide some comfort. But it quickly becomes clear that Luce doesn’t want comforting—she wants a place to stay that she doesn’t have to share with her sisters. That seems only fair to Sam, so he takes her upstairs and gets her set up in the room that was his when he first moved here, the room he vacated when Deb left. Luce thanks him, hugs him, but is mostly subdued; she doesn’t even make a joke about the awful band posters that still adorn the walls, even though she’d usually die before passing up a chance to rib Sam about his terrible teenage taste.
He leaves her to get settled, intending to think over the problem and find a way to approach it while he works through the rest of the morning. He’s expecting a fairly light day. Jake’s social media work has definitely driven traffic back up, but not quite to the levels it was before the mass exodus that was, as it turns out, also a direct result of Jake’s work. During the weekdays they’re nearly back to standard play, and even exceeding it sometimes, but that’s running on foot traffic from nearby office buildings. It’s always been comparatively dead on the weekends, when the various suburbanites who work nearby have no interest in coming back downtown just for a bite. That’s been even more true since the Kiss of Death—so, Jake—tanked all their traffic. For the last few months, Sam’s been lucky to see three or four customers, total, in the whole run of a Sunday. He’d even been semi-considering closing the deli on the weekends, and had held off only because the lost hours would cause issues for his staff.
All in all, Sam should have plenty of time to think through a plan of attack for dealing with the triplets. He’s even intending to send Joey upstairs to cheer Luce up when they arrive for theirshift at eleven. But to his surprise, when Joey does step through the door, a customer comes in behind them. Then another. Then another, and another, and another. Two of them, Sam realizes with surprise, are people he recognizes from the recital the other night.
By 11:30 a.m., they’re fully in the weeds, Sam hollering orders over his shoulder from the register so Joey can scoop salads and slice lunch meat. The volume of humanity inside the space quickly becomes oppressive, taking the space from Sunday-morning dead to a fever pitch Sam associates with the High Holy Days, large nearby sporting events, and the nightmare that is Labor Day Weekend, when seemingly everyone in Ohio descends on downtown for the annual Cleveland National Air Show. It’s not that he’s complaining; it’s great to have a rush like this, and Sam can tell within the first hour that today’s take will go a ways towards covering the gaps Kiss of Death directly caused. It’s just…
“Doyouhave any idea why this is happening?!” Sam asks Joey, after they’ve been at it about an hour with no signs of traffic slowing. Some of the traffic is people he recognizes, but most of it is obvious strangers and new customers, many of whom seem to be taking pictures of themselves in front of the counter. “Not that it’s not great and all, but where are they allcomingfrom?”
Instead of answering, Joey pulls out their phone and starts scrolling. This annoys Sam so deeply that he almost breaks one of his cardinal managerial rules—better to be curious and make genuine asks of his employees than to be harsh or demanding—and snaps at them about being too busy to text right now. He doesn’t, if only barely, and is rewarded for his forbearance, in a way. After a second of scrolling, Joey makes a pleased sound, passes their phone to Sam, and groans, “All right, allright, I’mgetting there,” when the person they’re currently serving insists they put their phone down and focus on scooping potato salad.
Normally, hearing a comment like that would make Sam feel a little frisson of validation vis-à-vis his own methods of management: Anybody who talks to anyone else with that kind of insistent, demanding condescension comes off looking like a huge asshole.
But he’s not paying enough attention to get even the inconsequential hit of self-satisfaction he would have received if he’d fully noticed the conversation. Instead, he’s looking at a post on their socials from a few weeks ago, the one Jake had filmed of Sam talking about the deli’s history. His heart wrenches in his chest to see it. The version of Sam captured within looks so happy and hopeful, and keeps glancing besottedly just off-screen to where Jake was filming him.
The Sam of today feels, for the Sam in the video, something between pity and embarrassment. It couldn’t be clearer from the footage, even with the sound off, that the poor guy has no idea what he’s in for.
But, also: “I don’t get it?” Sam says, glancing back at Joey, who has moved on from potato salad to macaroni. “Jake posted itweeksago; why would it be bringing people innow?”
“For God’s sake, Sam, look at thenumberson it,” Joey says, in the weary tones of the young talking to the ancient about technology. Sam, at thirty, resents this in the extreme, but he doesn’t mention this as he glances at…
“Holy crap!” Sam says, staring at the tiny, stylized numerals as though they might scurry off if he were to glance away. “When did this blow up this much? I scrolled through a few days ago and everything looked relatively chill!”
Joey shrugs with one shoulder. “A couple of big-time celebrities reposted it this morning.” There’s an awkward pause in which Sam can tell they’re both thinking the same thing,so he’s not surprised—unhappy, but not surprised—when Joey says, cautiously, “I kinda think that. Well. I don’t know how much you’ve talked about there, or worked out, or whatever? But wedoknow someone who knows a lot of folks in this kind of space. I think maybe Jake?—”
“You know what?” Sam says, too loud, handing the phone back to them. “Who knows why this happened? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, that’s what I say.”
Joey looks, for a second, like they’re going to say something else, push back. Then they sigh. “All right, Sam. You’re the boss.”
The rush runs for several hours before it finally peters out to a slow trickle of customers. At some point in the middle Luce comes downstairs and, seeing they need it, starts helping; Sam’s able to train her up quickly, leave her on the register, and go into the back to help the prep crew. That night he teaches her how to do several of the closing tasks, and has her fill out some paperwork so he can pay her for her time. She’s grateful, excited, and agrees to help out as needed while she’s staying upstairs.
