Chapter 4
FOUR
NOW: MARCH
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 speckles had 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 marked Breed with 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 his exact 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 writes Lucy on 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.
Then he buys the triplets some groceries, too, because he feels guilty about taking the dog back. Then, as an apology for arriving so early, he buys them all empanadas to have for breakfast.
Admittedly, most of the reason he decides on empanadas is that Dani, his best friend from ages nine to fourteen, usually works the early shift at the counter that sells them.
Though they grew apart over the years, dropping from “best friends” to just “friends” in a way that felt both natural and almost inevitable as Sam bounced from school district to school district, they never entirely lost touch.
It’s always nice to come and see her here, like it’s nice when she stops by the deli for lunch, which she does every once in a while.
It’s even nice, in a horrible way, that when Sam orders more empanadas than he usually would, she raises her eyebrows and waggles them suggestively.
“What’s this, Sammy? Entertaining an extra guest? Have you taken a lover at last?”
Sam makes a face at her. “Don’t use that word,” he commands, hopelessly, “especially not in this case, since they’re for—”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” Dani interrupts in long-suffering tones. “They’re for the triplets. And so is the coffee, and the groceries. Aren’t they?”
Sam nods. When Dani sighs dramatically, looking put out, he laughs. “Honestly, D, you should give up on me. My one true love is the deli; cut me open and you’ll find the Silverman’s logo stamped on my heart.”
“Now, see,” Dani complains, passing over his order with a shake of her head and clearly despairing of him, “that isn’t funny, Sam.
Just because you say it like a joke doesn’t make it funny!
You’re a perfectly nice-looking guy, solid job, a good head on your shoulders.
There’s a lot of men in this town who could do worse, that’s all I’m saying. ”
“Well, I’ll let you know if I meet any of them,” Sam says, with a slightly forced joviality, and starts backing up before…
“I could always set you up with one!” Dani says, raising her voice as Sam gets farther away. “You know, like I’ve been asking to, for years—”
“Bye, Dani!” Sam yells, and retreats, for the second time this morning, to the safety of his van. When he gets there, to his extreme displeasure, he discovers that it is only 9:45 a.m.