Chapter 7
SEVEN
NOW: MARCH
Sam has no idea if he should expect Jake to take up the invitation to swing by for family meal.
He knows there’s every chance that Jake never will.
It was probably weird and presumptuous of Sam to even offer, in retrospect.
Jake’s from a wealthy family, and was semi-recently in what certainly looked, in Sam’s research, to be a long-term, monogamous relationship with an incredibly mean celebrity who got famous for being rich.
He’s probably fine, and doesn’t need a random mid-afternoon meal at the deli, and might even have been slightly offended by Sam’s offer.
That’s what Sam tells himself when Jake doesn’t turn up at the appointed time the afternoon following their conversation in the alleyway. That inviting him was stupid, a mistake, and Sam shouldn’t get his hopes up for ever seeing him in the deli again at all.
So he probably looks a little too excited—excited enough that Alphonse raises his eyebrows and hides a smile behind the back of his hand—when he hears the front doorbell chime a few minutes after three, and a familiar voice call, “Sam? Are you here? I know you said I could come by, but the sign on the door says, ‘Employees Only Until 4 p.m.,’ so if you’re, like, having a meeting or something… Oh. Uh. Hi.”
This last, slightly surprised, is because Sam has come dashing out of the back to meet him, only his nonskid shoes saving him from careening into the counter and being thrown over it by his own momentum.
Knowing it’s entirely doomed but committed to his bit anyway, he tries to sound casual as he says, “Hi.”
“It would seem you are indeed here, then,” Jake says.
A small smile bounces around his mouth for a moment, not seeming sure where it wants to land—it lifts first one corner, then the other, before dropping both into a slightly confused expression.
“Is that… Um. Are you supposed to be… holding that?”
Sam stares at him, uncomprehending, for a long moment.
Then he follows Jake’s gaze down his own arm, where he realizes, to his surprise, that the raw chicken he was seasoning for tonight’s special—Wednesdays are always the roast chicken dinner—is still in his gloved hand, dangling from its drumstick.
“No!” Sam says, with a somewhat forced joviality, and then, “You should come on back, and I should… uh, put this down. Follow me.” He lifts the folding counter with his non-chickened hand to let Jake through, and then, stepping in front of him, adds, “Oh! But stay on the rubber mats, yeah? You don’t have—”
“Nonslip shoes? I do, actually.” When Sam turns to glance at him in surprise, Jake shrugs, putting a hand to the back of his neck.
“I was a barista? When I first moved to LA? So I had to wear them then, and, uh.” Wincing slightly, not quite meeting Sam’s eyes, he shifts his weight, lifts his cane off the ground and wiggles it a little in the air.
“Turns out they’re not just helpful in a kitchen?
You’d be amazed how much wet ground can mess up my day. ”
“That makes sense,” Sam says, after the barest half second where he strangles back, I am history’s greatest imbecile, kindly have the mercy to kill me where I stand.
He proceeds far enough into the back to grab a bowl and slap the chicken into it; Alphonse passes and whisks it away in seconds, before Sam can even finish taking his gloves off, giving him a reproachful look.
It’s clear he’d also give Sam an earful if it weren’t for Jake standing just behind him.
“Also,” Jake says, “they’re helpful at the dance studio up the street, where I work. Madame Louisa likes a very specific finish on her floors, which I appreciated a lot more when I was a student.”
His chin tilts up defiantly as he says this, as though daring Sam to…
what, exactly? Say something asinine and insensitive about Jake’s disability?
Disparage teaching as a profession? Delve into their shared unspoken past by pointing out that he remembers Madame Louisa’s name, mostly because he’d spent a lot of time cursing it, since Jake regularly had to cut short stolen afternoon hookups to get to her studio?
Surely he knows Sam well enough to know he’d never do any of those things… doesn’t he?
Of course he doesn’t, a little part of Sam points out, sounding a lot like Deb. It’s been more than ten years, and you were kids back then. He doesn’t know what’s going on in your head any more than you know what’s going on in his. Do you want to be scared, or do you want to be curious?
“I didn’t know you were teaching dance,” Sam says, tossing his dirty gloves in the trash.
“Ballet, I’m assuming?” When Jake nods, most of the defiance drains from his expression, leaving something smaller, shyer.
“God, that’s cool. I bet you’re a really great teacher.
How long have you been doing that?” He gives Jake a tour of the back of house, gesturing at his/Deb’s office, and towards the walk-in fridge and freezer, as Jake explains that it’s his first teaching job.
It’s part-time, Madame Louisa taking a chance on him.
Though Jake doesn’t say the next bit out loud, it’s pretty clear that she’s doing this because he’s had such a rough few years, and that he would rather do anything than detail those years to Sam right now.
Sam doesn’t make him. It’s not any of his business, and anyway Jake’s clearly skittish, nervously glancing around like he’s expecting someone to tell him to get out at once.
The last thing Sam wants to do is push him.
When they finish the tour in the main section of the kitchen, Sam looks around and realizes it was a lucky thing that Jake chose today to come by.
Sam wasn’t exactly lying when he said members of the community drop in—he does his best not to do that kind of thing anymore—but it might have been a bit of a stretch.
It was a well-polished version of the truth, of which the unvarnished edition might sound something like, Well, Joanie usually comes, because we cook ninety percent of the food she eats, and occasionally this weird guy Gerald who works at the fish place around the corner?
A lot of other people around here have been invited, technically speaking, but if you want to talk technically, most of those people don’t usually…
show up. Usually, it’s just me and the restaurant staff on shift that day, but that sounds a lot more awkward, doesn’t it?
Today, however, a few off-duty staff members have swung in for a bit, and a couple of the delivery guys from the sandwich joint up the block have also decided to drop by.
Sam introduces Jake, slightly nervous about how he’ll be received, which is stupid.
It’s not as though his staff is ever anything less than lovely, excepting Eileen, and Sam somehow can’t imagine that Jake, in the last twelve years, has completely lost his almost preternatural gift for making friends.
Sure enough, Joey grins at him and says, “Oh, hey, it’s you!
Weird guy!” and pretty soon they’re chatting it up like they’ve known one another for years.
Sam leaves them to handle the rest of the introductions and turns back to the food.
It’s his turn to cook family meal in theory, although in practice he’s sort of flipping back and forth between actually doing it and helping Alphonse prep the special.
He’s making a bastardized, improvised version of kreplach, and he finds himself relaxing into it, the way he always does when he’s doing this kind of cooking.
Mostly what’s made in the Silverman’s back of house are the same classics they’ve been making for seventy-five years, tried and true favorites that have stood the test of time.
These days Sam isn’t doing much of the Silverman’s cooking, only hopping in to cover when there’s a call-off or a rush, but over the years he’s probably made enough blintzes and open-faced brisket sandwiches to feed an army.
But at family meal, Sam gets to cook with what’s around and, within those confines, make whatever the hell he wants.
Today what he wanted to make was kreplach, only fried in a pan instead of boiled in soup, which he’s realizing only now is probably because his conversation with Jake last night got him thinking about pierogies.
A kreplach and a pierogi aren’t so different, really.
The doughs aren’t quite the same, and, obviously, neither is the cooking method, but a dumpling is a dumpling, after all.
When he’d noticed they had a bunch of them lying around, premade in the standard quantities for a pre-Kiss of Death review week, and they didn’t have room for them all in the freezer, he’d immediately decided he was better off frying them in onions and butter for the staff than letting them go to waste.
Slightly embarrassed, and hoping Jake won’t pick up on the connection, he evacuates the latest batch out of the pan and into the waiting tray and replaces it with the next round.
It smells good, at least, onion and garlic and mushroom and fresh thyme, the nutty undertones of the butter Sam browned, the rich note of schmaltz he added to the pan, even the scent almost coating the tongue.
And the kreplach themselves have a deeply familiar aroma, since Sam has made the fillings hundreds of times over the years: Some are ground beef and onion, some chicken and mashed potato.
All of them are seasoned with garlic and freshly cracked pepper and the dried shallot powder they make in-house, because it was Sam’s great-grandmother’s secret ingredient in about a third of her dishes, and neither Silvermans nor Adelsons excel in the art of changing or letting things go.
That’s why the menu has stayed basically the same for seventy-five years: the family tendency to stick with what works.