Giving him a slightly queasy smile, Jake says, “I think maybe don’t? Apologize to me? Since I’m the one who has…well. Moved into your backyard?”
“I mean, fair play to you; I basically moved into yours when we were younger,” Sam says easily, with a little shrug. “Look: Welcome to the neighborhood, okay? And seriously, don’t worry about it—I get that it was a coincidence. Things happen. It’s fine.”
Jake’s face twists into a complicated expression for a second, but he sounds genuine enough, like he really means it, when he says, “Okay, um. Cool, then. Thank you.”
“Sure,” Sam says again, not even sure why this time, and Jake turns towards the door in earnest, and Sam expects that to be that.
But when Jake’s halfway out of the restaurant, he pauses, shakes his head, and turns around in the doorframe. His tone and his expression both suggest that he can’t quite help himself when he asks, “Would your biggest concern with me inflicting a real-life version ofThe Birdson youreallybe the health code violations?”
Sam grins, a little sheepish. “I mean, yeah, probably, honestly. Do you have any idea how hard it is to fully sanitize a place like this after something like that? It would be a nightmare.”
“Christ,” Jake says, shaking his head and looking oddly pleased, “you really did grow up, didn’t you? Became a full-on adult? Incredible.” Then his expression shifts to an amused one, and he laughs as he turns back around and finishes leaving, calling, “Those birds murder people, Sam! They murder people!” over his shoulder.
Sam watches him go, not sure exactly what he feels. Then, like he does every night, he closes the restaurant, picking up any tasks his employees have missed. He shuts off the lights and,in the dark, grabs some of whatever’s about to go out in the deli case, which looks to be roast turkey and mac salad tonight. He goes upstairs, and sinks onto the couch, and eats while he watches… well,usuallyhe eats while he watches something, anyway.
Tonight he stares out the window at the tiny brick apartment building behind his, wondering which unit is Jake’s, and doesn’t realize he’s forgotten to turn on the television until long after his food is gone.
FOUR
NOW: MARCH
Sam sleeps fitfully that night, in and out of the past, his dreams merrily ripping things he buried years ago up out of his internal earth. He wakes for good after a merciless, brutal nightmare; it might be more accurate to call it a flashback, but whatever it was, itsucked, and it propels Sam up and out of bed immediately. Even being up for his day at—God help him and his entire staff—3:28 a.m. is better than an encore of that particular show.It might still be pitch-black outside, and the chilled March air might be slipping in through the building’s old windows, but that’s still an improvement over what was happening in his sleep.
He keeps early hours anyway. The deli opens at 8 a.m., and deliveries start coming in as early as 6:30 a.m., so it’s only two hours or so before his alarm would have gone off. That should, in theory, be fine. Sam should be able to operate with perfect functionality on two fewer hours of sleep than usual, even if what sleep he did get was a little broken. He’s not even thirty, for God’s sake; a few years ago he was cheerfully pulling all-nighters! Granted, it was mostly to do things most people would not find very exciting, like keeping an eye on the smoker while it was full of briskets, or rendering down a freezer full of chickenfat scraps into proper schmaltz, but so what? Sam had still done them and, importantly, stayed up all night to do them, and he’d always been fine the next day. Perfectly fine.
It becomes apparent fairly quickly that today Sam is not going to be perfectly fine.
He trips walking down the hallway to the bathroom, first of all, over a rug that’s always been there and that he habitually steps around to avoid going flying. He goes flying, landing with a winding “OOOF,” on his stomach despite trying to catch himself on a nearby side table, and only notices when he gets up a few embarrassed moments later that he scraped his knuckles raw in the process. Annoyed, he wraps a paper towel around his hand to stall the bleeding and then tries to get on with his morning.
Sam makes toast, which he burns, and then, figuring he has the time to do better and he might as well use it, makes pancakes instead. He burns those, too, his attention so consistently drawn to staring out his window at Jake’s building that he keeps missing his opportunity to flip them. In the end he eats the two that are least charred and, after a particularly unpleasant bite, attempts to wash it down with the power of coffee.
The coffee, too, is burnt. It’s still only 4:37 a.m. Sam despairs briefly of being alive.
He decides, in the circumstances, that he has no choice but to go and get Pastrami.
Pastrami plays a variety of roles in Sam’s life; it is, of course, a meat available for purchase at the deli, and one about which, if he happens not to have it in stock, a few specific people will get really annoying. But Pastrami is also the name of Sam’s dog, chosen because, when she was a puppy, she’d looked as though she planned to grow into a small-to-medium-sized white dog, with a thick coating of black speckles. When Sam found her digging around in the trash behind the deli four years ago, she’d been skin and bones, barely a few months old, and the speckleshad reminded him of the pepper on the outside of a piece of pastrami.
The name had stuck, even though Pastrami herself had seemingly decided that she was not interested in being a white dog with black speckles, or indeed in being either small- or medium-sized. She had, instead, grown up to be quite a surprisingly large black dog with white speckles, long, slightly floofy fur, and one ear that was constantly flopping over her eye while the other one stood ramrod straight. Her veterinarian, after some thoughtful consideration, had filled in the section of her file markedBreedwith eight question marks.
Sam had not intended on getting a pet of any kind, let alone one so big that she took up half the couch he once promised Deb he’d never let her sit on, but…she was a good dog, that was all. And she’d needed his help.
She’d been the helpful one, in the end. Pastrami is good with people, laid-back and happy to entertain anyone, chill about nearly everything. After a while, Sam had started bringing her down to hang out in the deli during the day, and then, at the suggestion of one of his customers, had her certified as a therapy dog. Now, a couple of times a month, Sam takes Pastrami to entertain kids in the cancer ward, or hang out with people struggling with their mental health, or very gently rest her head on the laps of a variety of old folks. It’s….nice. Or, at least, Pastrami clearly enjoys it, and it allows Sam to feel obliquely as though he’s making up for something.
Right now, Pastrami is at the triplets’ apartment, because it’s finals week, and Sam always lets his sisters borrow her for finals week. This, too, allows Sam the relieved sense of making up for something, although in their case it’s probably moot, since he’s pretty sure Luce, at least, would break in and kidnap Pastrami if she wasn’t freely lent.
Sam paces around his apartment waiting for it to be a reasonable hour, and then goes downstairs, does a variety of opening tasks for the deli that aren’t even his job, and starts pacing around again. Eventually, he finds himself prowling the front of the house, peering dramatically under tables as though that will tempt fate to put an interesting problem below one of them. Fate doesn’t oblige. All that’s underneath the tables is the perfectly clean floor, which Sam mopped himself last night after sending Joey home in a fit of mortified desperation.
But when Sam turns around at the sound of the back door creaking as today’s openers arrive, Jake is walking past the deli’s large front window, a backpack over his shoulders. He’s moving quickly, his cane looking more like an extension of himself than an assistive device for a second; he’s clearly so used to using it that he’s moved past perfecting the art and into not thinking about it at all, the way you don’t have to think about using your hands.
And the way he moves…That same old dancer’s grace, Sam thinks, a little shocked to remember it, and thus to realize he’d somehow forgotten. Jake had been like that even as a sixteen-year-old. Not always, but in certain unpredictable moments, his movements would take on this hideously distracting elegance, a control and grace that Sam could only dream of. It’s not like he was out doing pirouettes on the lawn or anything—it was in little things, mostly, but there whenever you looked for it. The way his hand moved when he picked up a glass; the way he’d leap over an obstacle in his path and then wince, automatically, like he knew he wasn’t supposed to; and the way he walked, something so inimitable about it that nothing has reminded Sam of it in twelve years.
It’s not that it’s such a distinctive walk, even. It’s just that it communicates so clearly Jake’s utter, pinpoint awareness of hisexact position in space that it has always made Sam’s mouth go a little dry.
Jake turns, now, as Sam stares at him. He almost flickers, for a second, in Sam’s vision—younger, as he was, and then back to normal again. He waves.
Sam waves back, then turns on his heel, and goes to get the van.
The triplets live in University Circle, on the other side of downtown; they also aren’t generally at home to visitors before roughly eleven in the morning. Since it’s still not even nine, Sam drives the deli’s delivery van a few minutes in the wrong direction, crossing over the Cuyahoga River as he makes his way to the West Side Market. The whole place was a train station once, all elegant, intricate brickwork and high ceilings, but it’s been a public market for more than a hundred years, and it’s one of his favorite places in the city. He takes his time wandering the narrow, packed aisles between stands, visiting the butchers and bakers and spice merchants and fishmongers and other vendors fairly aimlessly. Without thinking about it, he picks up coffee for his sisters—iced vanilla lattes for Iris and Daisy, cold brew and a splash of cream for Luce, stealing the Sharpie from behind the counter to correct it when the barista writesLucyon the cup. Technically that is her name, but she started asking to go by Luce when she was about thirteen, and Sam takes seriously being the only member of their immediate family who has bothered to consistently do so. He also picks up a red eye for himself, not that he imagines it will help.
