Chapter 3
THREE
NOW: MARCH
“Jake!” The word bursts out of Sam’s mouth, startled and pitched a few octaves higher than his normal speaking voice, in the same moment that Jake whispers, “Sam?”
They stare at each other, and, on top of everything, Sam suffers a moment of horrible gratitude for whoever wrote the stupid Kiss of Death review; he’s glad the deli is empty right now.
He’s not sure what he’d do if he had to manage this with a fifteen-person line, hunched old Mr. Schecter somewhere at the back hollering that they better still have whitefish salad left when it’s his turn, even though they’ve never once not had a serving of whitefish set aside for him in thirty years.
Pulling it had been the very first thing Deb had tasked him with when Sam started working here in his late teens, and after meeting the man only once, he’d understood why she’d described it as “critically important for my sanity and yours.”
Hell, Sam can’t be thinking about old Mr. Schecter right now; he needs to focus. His mind is always doing this to him in the least convenient moments. He swallows, and squares his shoulders, reaches within the suddenly churning, writhing core of himself and grasps desperately for something to say.
Tragically, all he finds is a deeply ingrained, hard-earned sense of the rules of Midwestern politeness. This is why what comes out of his mouth is a jovial, if still slightly too loud, “Long time, man! How’ve you been?”
It’s a stupid, useless question. It’s been more than a decade since he’s laid eyes on this man. They’d both been boys: on the cusp of adulthood but still grasping for it, their fingers not quite catching the edge.
But it’s still the only thing he can think of to say.
He can’t very well go with, “You seem extremely not dead! I, for one, think that’s neat,” or, “I want you to know I haven’t stalked you on social media at all, which I think shows a lot of restraint, unless you acknowledge the reality that I would have stalked you if your accounts were not private, which they are.
Can you tell me what you’ve been up to and whether or not it aligns with what I’ve imagined, when I’ve allowed myself to imagine what your life might be like now?
” It would be weird, for one thing, and for another Sam doesn’t do stuff like that.
It’s the better part of dignity not to, and, honestly, only one person in his whole life has ever left him twitterpated enough to ramble on like that, like an overwhelmed teenager with a crush.
That person clears his throat, and shrugs, and drops his gaze down to the counter.
“Oh, I’ve been, uh…” Jake laughs, lightly and humorlessly, and, without looking up, says, “You ever see that meme? How does it go—something like, ‘You know a Midwesterner is having the worst day of their life when you ask them how it’s going and they say, ‘It’s going?’”
“Ah,” Sam says, sympathy creeping over him in spite of himself. “I gather it’s going, then?”
“Gone, actually,” Jake mutters, and then looks up, and offers Sam what looks like a fairly forced smile. “Sorry, that’s nothing. Just, ah, weird to see you. Good? Weird. Hi.”
“Hi,” Sam says slowly, wishing suddenly but profoundly that he could go stick his head into the sink full of clean water in the dish pit. “Good and weird to… see you, too.”
“Right,” Jake says faintly. “Right.”
Again, Sam finds they are staring at each other. This time he’s able to absorb some details; when they did this a few minutes ago, the only thing Sam retained was, OH MY GOD YES THAT REALLY HONESTLY IS JAKE ACTUAL THOMPSON, the truth of it blaring loud in his mind like an alarm.
Now, with marginally more of a grip, he’s able to take in things he missed the first time.
Jake is—older, obviously, of course he is, they both are.
So his structures and angles have changed a little, rounded cheeks hollowing down into a slightly narrower face than Sam remembers.
His chestnut brown hair is cut shorter, and has a looser, more matte, less gelled finish now than it did when he was in high school.
He wears round-rimmed glasses these days, which is a surprise, and carries a cane, which isn’t.
It would have been more surprising if he wasn’t carrying a cane, and the one he’s got makes the ghost of a smile tug briefly at the corners of Sam’s mouth; it’s covered in stickers, the way his water bottles and devices and the bumper of his crappy teen jalopy always used to be.
But there’s something… different about Jake.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that a lot is different about him, but they’re all expected things, normal things, except for one.
It’s in his eyes, Sam realizes, and the set of his shoulders, the twist of his mouth—something that had shimmered once is now barely glimmering, a hint of shine in the darkness.
Sam cannot, obviously, say this. “What happened to your effervescent sparkle, my guy? You misplace your joie de vivre somewhere?” would be unhelpful.
Jake clears his throat, looks away again, and says, “So, uh. You work here, I’m guessing?
Unless I’m, like, interrupting you in the middle of some kind of bizarre, complicated con job—” He chokes himself off, eyes bugging behind his glasses, and then hastily corrects, “Not that I’m suggesting that you would be doing something like that! I wasn’t—”
“Chill, man, it’s all good,” Sam says, lifting a hand, amused in spite of himself.
This, at least, is familiar. Jake was often one little inconvenience or badly landed joke away from tilting into a frenetic verbal tap dance, as though throwing enough new syllables at a problem would make it go away.
“And yeah, I work here. I run it, actually, although it’s kinda a trial period situation, for now. It’s my family’s place.”
For some reason, this makes Jake look at him as though Sam’s not only grown a second head, but one from an entirely nonhuman species. Housefly, maybe, or anaconda. After a long second, blinking hard on it, Jake says, “No it’s not.”
This, admittedly, throws Sam for a proverbial loop. “Yes it… is,” he says, his brow furrowing as he watches Jake’s face crease into a mulish expression identical to the one he sometimes wore as a teen.
“No,” Jake says sharply, the old light seeming to flare in his eyes if only in annoyance, “I know for a fact that David and Mara didn’t quit the medical profession to start a deli, they’re the scariest doctors I’ve ever met, it makes no sense!
And—” He looks wildly around him, mutters something under his breath that sounds like, “God help me, there’s not even any branding in here,” and then his gaze seems to land.
Jake stalks over to the wall of photos that’s practically required at an old-school deli like this and points, with the flair of the high school drama student, at one in the center.
Sam squints at it; it’s from the early seventies, when the sign had last been updated.
With his finger hovering over the sign, Jake intones, “Silverman,” and then, turning to point at Sam, “Adelson! So! Check and mate, I think you’ll have to agree! ”
Sam is torn. On the one hand, this is… odd, even for Jake, who always was a little odd, in a fun, distracting sort of way.
What does he care who owns this deli? On the other hand, Sam’s more than a little touched that Jake’s remembered his parents’ names all these years.
He’s even a little pleased Jake’s remembered his last name, an upsetting realization he files away to review later, at a better time.
So he shrugs, and says, “It’s, uh, my aunt’s place? For now, anyway; hopefully, mine soon. She’s Deb Silverman, and my mom was a Silverman, too, before she married my dad.”
“So you’re… here,” Jake says, staring at him. “In this building. Like. Every day? It’s not just that you have, uh, specific shifts or whatever, you’re running the place. I mean. You’re probably a pretty regular visitor, right?”
“I live in the apartment upstairs,” Sam says, cocking his head slightly in surprise at this reaction. “So less a visitor than a… resident? But, yeah, I’d say I’m here pretty regularly regardless.”
This is neutral information, strictly the facts, but Jake cringes so drastically it changes his whole face. “Oh my God, I have to go,” he says, and before Sam can even reply, he’s turned on his heel and power-walked right out the front door.
Sam blinks, startled, after him. He’s not sure what part of that conversation he should attempt to parse first; actually, he’s not even sure he has the necessary mental equipment to parse it at all.
When he’d been a teenager, being around Jake had often made him feel as though a giant was wandering across his mental landscape in steel-toed boots, gleefully kicking at particularly load-bearing areas and things he had, up until that point, been certain of.
But, in retrospect, Sam had chalked that up to a side effect of being a teenager.
Until now, it hadn’t occurred to him that the problem would persist into adulthood, if only and specifically with this one man.
Of course, Sam hadn’t imagined he’d ever get the opportunity to test it out.
Until five minutes ago, Jake was as much a part of the past as VCRs and Sam’s long-dead Digipet.
Even in his wildest imaginings, the embarrassing, maudlin nights where he was maybe a little overserved at one of the West Sixth Street bars and let himself consider What Happened To Jake, Sam never imagined them meeting again.
It had seemed so unlikely as to be unworthy of the effort; surely if Jake ever did see Sam out anywhere, he’d hurriedly turn the other way and pretend not to have seen him, or, if there was no escape, refuse to talk to him.