Chapter 7 #2
Sam’s never quite been sure how he feels about that: if it’s nice, a preservation of traditions that serve as guidepost for life, or stifling, a heavy stone from under which they’re all forever struggling to crawl.
Drawing in another breath of the complicated smell, familiar and new all at once but wholly delicious, he wonders if the answer is that it’s both.
As if hearing this thought, Jake steps up next to him and says, “Jesus Christ, okay, you either need to cook that faster or make it smell worse. Criminal, that’s what it is, to make me stand here and smell that without letting me try some—”
“Pastrami begs like this, you know,” Sam informs him solemnly.
She, curled up in her bed in Sam’s office across the hall and watching the proceedings in lazy, unbothered entertainment, lifts her head at the sound of her name and gives Sam what he feels is an unimpressed look.
It compels him to add, “She’s more subtle about it, of course. ”
“Yes,” Jake says thoughtfully, “that was my takeaway last night—that she’s a very subtle creature when she’s hungry. Discreet, some might say. I wouldn’t say it, since she immediately and utterly blew up my spot with absolutely no remorse at all, but some might.”
“In her defense, that was pierogies,” Sam starts, and then, remembering he’d meant to avoid drawing any attention to the concept of pierogies, tries not to look at the pan as he tends to the kreplach. “Which are her favorite, so. It’s hardly a fair sample.”
Damn; Jake peers down into the pan himself, and then flicks a glance up at Sam, and then smiles, small and pleased and…
something else, Sam thinks. Something that might be wishful thinking on his part.
Something he would, in any other context, categorize as hunger, and not for kreplach. Not, in fact, for food of any kind.
But that can’t be what it is. After everything that happened between them, Sam is lucky Jake’s speaking to him at all.
Still, there’s a new tone to Jake’s voice, one Sam can’t help but find thrilling. If he were any other person, Sam would call that tone flirtatious. “I mean, I’m not trying to be a dick here, but. Are these… not pierogies? Because, I’m just saying, they look a little bit like pierogies.”
“No,” Sam says, with as much dignity as he can muster.
It’s… not very much. “They’re kreplach. Fried kreplach.
” Jake raises his eyebrows, and Sam groans and admits, “All right, all right, yeah, fine, it’s basically the same.
But these were going to go out anyway, and kreplach usually go in soup, you know. ”
“I know what a kreplach is, Sam,” Jake says, sounding amused now.
He leans over to peer into the holding pan, keeping the ones Sam already fried off warm, and comments, “And actually, it is a cool ideal to fry them off like that. Looks like the texture’s a little different than on a pierogi dough—more shattery, like a gyoza with a skirt, right? When you do the little cornstarch—”
“Cornstarch slurry at the end, yeah!” Sam grins at him, pleased to have this recognized. “It’s just stock and a little Worcestershire sauce for the liquid, after they fry in the butter and schmaltz—well, browned butter and schmaltz.”
“Okay, seriously,” Jake says, crossing his arms and glaring at Sam, “it’s cruel and unusual punishment to keep saying things like that and not let me try one.”
“Who said you couldn’t try one?” Sam grins at Jake’s shocked-fish expression as he grabs a fork and spears a kreplach from the holding pan, then passes it over. “Go on, it’s basically time to serve up anyway; I’m finishing the last—”
“Mmm.” It’s a deep, almost guttural sound, one Jake makes with his eyes closed, and loud enough that it makes Sam smirk a little in spite of himself.
Then Jake’s eyes slam open and he flushes, though he just sounds enthusiastic, not embarrassed, as he says, “Oh my God. What the hell? Why is that so good?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Sam says, though he’s terribly, hideously pleased. “Just, you know. What was around?”
“You’re a liar,” Jake says, wide-eyed, swallowing another mouthful.
“I refuse to believe that you just whacked this together on a whim! It’s too well balanced.
” He takes the final bite of the kreplach Sam gave him, chews, swallows, shakes his head, and demands, “Why aren’t you serving stuff like this?
If you can make it so easily and you already have a restaurant and it tastes like that? ”
“That’s what I always say,” Eileen complains, “but no one ever listens to me,” which reminds Sam, abruptly and to his great shame, that he and Jake are not alone in this room.
When he turns his head, already grimacing, to look at the staff, they’re all staring at him in rapt attention, as though he is a sideshow act.
Joey has their chin on their hands, and Alphonse is giving him a look that says, as plain as day, “You and I are going to be having a little talk later, and that little talk is going to be very, very funny for me, and excruciating for you.”
“Oh,” Sam says, glaring at all of them with absolutely no effect, and then turning back to the stove and Jake on the theory that it’s too late to do anything about their audience.
“You know, uh. Tradition, and all that. It’s been the same menu the last seventy-five years, more or less.
Part of the whole schtick, or at least that’s what my aunt says.
The place lives and dies on being a stitch in time. ”
“Hmm,” Jake says. It’s a sound of genuine curiosity, as opposed to one of doubt, and his face creases as though he’s seriously considering the logic.
Thoughtfully, he says, “There’s definitely merit to that theory.
The nostalgia angle plays, for sure. But at a certain point you have to strike a balance, don’t you?
If nothing ever changes, I think it’s easy to slide from nostalgic into boring, and once the joy is gone, the product—” He cuts himself off, and Sam, glancing sideways, sees his eyes bug out a little in alarm.
“Jesus Christ, not that I’m saying this place is boring, or that the food is!
At all! I’m just, you know, talking like, generally, as a rule of thumb—”
“You’re fine, dude, chill,” Sam says, grinning at him, feeling abruptly and utterly sixteen.
How many times had he said that to Jake, back in those early, easy days?
How many times had he heard, from his own side of the fence, Jake puffing himself up like an enormous, anxious balloon, and reached through the slats in the wood with a tiny verbal pin?
It’s as satisfying now as it was then, to see Jake catch his breath, and then Sam’s eye, and smile back, and say, “Thanks.” Horribly, it might be more satisfying.
Back then, Sam hadn’t known it would be such a rare feeling.
He hadn’t known he’d spend twelve years searching for its like, for even a shadow of it, and never even brush the tips of his fingers across anything that came close.
He doesn’t get to say anything else, though.
As he’s opening his mouth to reply, Joanie bursts in through the employees-only back door Sam has begged her a thousand times not to use and bellows, “Samuel Deborah Silverman! How dare you make such a delicious smell infiltrate my sacred space! I insist you compensate me with lunch at once.”
Sam, despite feeling himself flush, manages to sound calm and unbothered as he says, “Hello to you, too, Joanie. I think we can all agree that isn’t my name, and that of course you can have as much lunch as you want, and that you’re not supposed to use that door.”
“A witch uses whatever door she likes,” Joanie says haughtily, throwing her hand-dyed scarf over her shoulder, and then she glances at Jake.
Sam sees her eyes widen very slightly, but he’s pretty sure no one else does, and when her gaze slams over to meet his, he can almost see the cogs working in her brain, sorting out the particulars.
He panics for a second, kicking himself for not thinking this through.
She’s a fan of Jake’s ex, so she’ll have seen Jake in photos and interviews with him, and have watched all the stuff Sam forced himself not to.
She knows who Jake is and she’ll say something and Jake will panic and bolt and move and probably starve to death and—
—and Joanie is smirking at him, and rolling her eyes, and Sam realizes in a wash of sheepish relief that he is underestimating her.
Joanie’s odd, and off-beat, and believes in a lot of things that Sam himself is far too young a man to categorize as “hokum” and does anyway.
But she’s shrewd, and smarter than she lets on by a wide margin, and more discreet than he tends to give her credit for.
She enjoys gently embarrassing him—hence greeting him by shouting an inside joke that sources back to before Sam could legally drink—but she wouldn’t call Jake out, make him uncomfortable, because she isn’t like that.
He’s a stranger, and one she’s bound to find interesting, so she’ll approach him carefully and curiously, in the interest of drawing more information out.
Sam wonders, in a distant and somewhat fatalistic way, how bad it is that he’s already feeling this protective of Jake.
On a scale of one to ten, one being, “Perfectly healthy, fine and normal, well within the bounds of reasonable things to feel, not setting yourself up for heartbreak at all,” and ten being, “As completely, disastrously bad as the filthy dreams I keep having where we break into Horseshoe Heights High and end up having sex in the locker room,” Sam thinks it’s about an eight.