Chapter 5
FIVE
NOW: MARCH
Sam makes it another three days without looking Jake up on the internet.
In total, he has more or less resisted the impulse for over ten years, which Sam feels is a lot more impressive.
He has, a few times, looked Jake up on various social media platforms, found his accounts to be private, and then sat and stared in agonized indecision at the “Request to Follow” button for longer than he cares to admit.
But that only happens in particularly grim moments, and it’s been ages since the last time. Months, if not years.
He never did hit the follow button, on the theory that it wouldn’t be sporting. Sam’s theory was always that he, himself, wasn’t difficult to find, and if Jake had never found him, it was because he didn’t want to.
But he’d never gone so far as to type Jake’s full name into an actual search engine and click enter.
Type it, sure, dozens of times; stare at the letters and feel as though they were accusing him of a crime, absolutely; close the tab feeling deeply ashamed of himself, of course.
That was as far as Sam had ever let it go, because it had been made clear, when it all fell apart, that Jake wanted to be left alone.
Sam could do that much for him, at least.
However, Sam cannot help but feel, now, that Jake has changed the terms somewhat.
He came into the deli, and then back into the deli, and also is living basically a few yards away, closer than he was even in high school.
Maybe he’s trying to rationalize his own curiosity, but Sam keeps butting up against the argument that it wouldn’t be so awful to see what’s out there and publicly accessible.
Things simply are not as they were even a few days ago.
Still, when he finally cracks it’s by accident, his subconscious playing a nasty trick on him.
He’s at Harmonious Realms, the odd little shop next door to the deli.
Joanie, the owner, has been there since the late nineties selling, as far as Sam can tell, whatever she feels like.
About half the store is crystals and bundled dried herbs and tarot cards, books with titles like Witchcraft and You or Could You Be Psychic?
The other half is densely packed with a rotating assortment of fascinating items she finds at thrift shops and estate sales.
The store is never particularly crowded, and Sam thinks she’d probably have been driven out of the neighborhood decades ago if she was subject to the same dramatic rental hikes the rest of the street faced, over the years.
But Joanie’s shop is technically part of the building housing Silverman’s, which Sam’s grandmother had purchased outright after years of scrimping and saving—mostly, according to family lore, to get one over on the previous landlord, whom she despised.
And Deb and Joanie have been best friends since basically the day Harmonious Realms opened its doors, so as long as Silverman’s survives, Joanie’s does, too.
Of course, that means the reverse is true, too, a fact that’s been sitting like so much lead in Sam’s gut since the Kiss of Death review.
Joanie’s more or less family, and he loves her in spite of her erraticism and sincere belief in an assortment of ideas he himself would never entertain.
He doesn’t want to ruin what she’s built any more than he wants to ruin Silverman’s, and he knows her foot traffic is down, too, with fewer customers stopping by after lunch at the deli.
The guilt is eating at him, even if she does wave him off any time he tries to apologize.
Regardless, he’s dropped off a turkey sandwich for her, and he’s waiting while she “takes a quick second” to grab something from the back she wants to show him.
However, because he knows “Let me take a quick second to find something” is Joanie-speak for “I will be at least ten minutes, get comfortable,” he pulls out his phone to get some work done.
He’s deep in a search spiral, pricing out a potential switch of the restaurant’s launderers to save a little extra money, when Joanie calls, “Nearly found it! One more second! Don’t go anywhere! ”
Sam looks up, amused, fully aware that this means, “I have no damn idea where it’s got to and I’ll be ten minutes more.
” And it’s at this moment that he catches sight of Jake across the street, chatting pleasantly with someone holding a clipboard.
They must be collecting voter registrations or petition signatures or something, because after a second Jake takes the clipboard, scribbles on it, and hands it back.
He says something that makes the other person laugh and then walks on, out of Sam’s eyeline.
When Sam looks down, all traces of professional restaurant launderers have vanished from his phone. Instead, his treacherous thumbs have typed “Jake Thompson” and hit enter for him, without bothering to ask him if that’s what he wanted.
It is what Sam wanted, though. He knows it the minute his eyes lock on the screen; a hunger for the information blooms wild and insatiable within him, only intensifying the longer he scrolls.
Searching Jake’s name did not, as Sam had always rather expected it would, produce a string of random articles and corporate biographies about various wrong Jake Thompsons.
Instead, he finds himself confronted with both a wide selection of photos of the correct Jake Thompson, and a series of links to celebrity gossip websites discussing him.
In the photographs, Jake is always featured alongside a middle-aged man whose very appearance suggests sharp edges; in the articles, Jake’s name is always accompanied by the name “Walter Gallagher.” And in every place it appears, the name “Walter Gallagher” is always clickable.
Sam clicks. And then clicks again. And then clicks and clicks and clicks and clicks, so many times that he loses track of himself and where he’s standing and what he’s supposed to be doing until Joanie, returned now, very pointedly clears her throat.
“Oh!” Sam jumps, so badly startled that he accidentally tosses the whole phone in the air.
It whips in a nerve-wracking arc through the shop, narrowly missing two large crystal displays and a delicate porcelain baby before landing, luckily, in a basket of crocheted bat plushies next to Joanie.
Wincing at Joanie’s raised eyebrows, he adds, belatedly, “Sorry.”
“What for? Not like it broke anything.” Joanie’s small, pointed face is entertained under her curly blond-and-gray hair, which has been cut into a springy bob for as long as Sam’s known her.
She fishes the phone out of the basket and, glancing at the still-illuminated screen, laughs.
“What, are you embarrassed to be caught reading TMZ, Sammy? I’m hardly going to judge you.
Although, I will say, if Walt Gallagher is what does it for you, then we have very similar taste in men, and I’m sorry. That’s a real tragedy for anyone.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s…” Sam pauses, frustrated, trying to think of a way to explain this incredibly bizarre situation without having to get into any of it. He is, however, distracted almost immediately, because: “Wait. You know who Walt Gallagher is?”
Joanie rolls her eyes. “You think I’m that old? That I rode a dinosaur to school each morning? That I learned the alphabet from cave paintings on the wall and—”
“I didn’t know who he was until just now,” Sam interrupts, because if he lets her get going, it’ll be five minutes of riffing.
“I’m still not sure I do, except that it looks like he’s, uh.
Some kind of media mogul?” It also looks like he’s Jake’s ex, he adds, to himself.
Jake’s rich, famous, handsome, professionally styled ex. Hell.
“Did you seriously never watch Fund or Fall?” Joanie demands, crossing her arms over her chest as though the very thought of this offends her. “I thought everyone had seen that show. I thought they pumped it into every doctor’s office waiting room in America.”
Sam shrugs instead of saying, I wouldn’t know, Joanie; I’m the product of two doctors, and so I’ll do almost anything to avoid going to see one. “Don’t know what to tell you. If I have seen it, it didn’t leave a mark.”
“Well,” Joanie says, in the gleeful-bordering-on-menacing tones of someone who is about to explain their favorite television show to you whether you like it or not.
“Basically, it’s sort of like Shark Tank, right?
Except that the people who go on have to be so willing to stand behind their product that they agree to jump out of a plane if they don’t get funded—”
“What?”
“With a parachute, with a parachute,” Joanie says hastily. “It’s a skydive, not… murder. Makes for good television, though, I tell you what.”
Sam thinks it sounds like exploitative television but decides not to say so. He doesn’t want to spoil her fun; he knows she’s not naturally inclined towards it. Instead, he says, “And what, exactly, does this have to do with Walt Gallagher?”
“Oh, he’s one of the judges!” Joanie’s eyes have lit up with enthusiasm, and she sighs slightly wistfully as she says, “He’s the mean one.”
“Great,” Sam says, trying not to sound as sarcastic as he feels. Both that statement and the way she said it bode fairly ill for Jake: Joanie really does have tragic taste in men.