Chapter 7 #3
Joanie just says, “Oh! A new face. Who’s this, then?
” She sounds for all the world as if she really doesn’t know.
Sam gives her a grateful look as he introduces her to Jake, and they start chatting, and then the food is cooked and Sam’s serving it up and then they’re all talking, exchanging stories, complimenting the kreplach, joking and laughing.
Family meal isn’t always like this. There have been a lot of days lately, in the wake of the Kiss of Death review, where they’ve all hunched over their plates in miserable silence, eating for sustenance instead of joy.
But Jake, just as he always did, has this effect on people.
Sam thinks it’s partially his willingness to throw himself on the sword of looking a bit foolish, and partially the sheer irrepressibility of his personality.
It’s hard not to like someone being so obviously dragged by the ankles behind his own peculiar nature.
The staff must agree, because Jake fits in well for the whole meal, and leaves having eaten two helpings and promising quite cheerfully to return.
He fits in well again two days later, swinging by before his afternoon class of middle school dancers, and the day after that, dropping in exhausted after a morning spent teaching the under-six group, and then suddenly he has become such a regular part of family meal that Sam has a hard time imagining it without him.
He starts to look forward to it, that hour where he’s all but guaranteed a chance to bask in the warmth of Jake’s presence, and then to rely upon it.
Upsettingly quickly, it becomes the linchpin around which his whole day is constructed, the carrot he uses to lure himself through difficult moments.
Maybe that’s why the next month evaporates like water on a hot griddle, a flash of billowing heat in the blink of an eye. Or maybe it’s because, aside from the highlight of Jake, there are quite a lot of difficult moments.
For the first couple of months after the Kiss of Death review, Sam tried to stay positive. He told himself it was the slow season anyway, that traffic was always lower in that weird, slushy period between winter and spring.
But in the weeks Sam spends getting used to seeing Jake every afternoon for family meal, he also has to get familiar with the quarterly earnings reports.
They are… grim. Or, more accurately, they’re perfectly flat and normal, in fact slightly higher than usual year-over-year, right up until the Kiss of Death review.
Then they start to tank. Hard. Scarily hard.
Many businesses, Sam knows, are designed to carry with them a certain amount of insulation against financial ruin, a layer of cushioning stuffed with money.
But Silverman’s isn’t like that, because restaurants, by and large, aren’t like that.
There are too many moving parts. Traffic and demand are both highly variable; the product you produce is perishable, and so must be sold or lost in a tight window; ingredient costs fluctuate based on a market over which you have no control; the list goes on and on.
It’s an industry of slim margins, and part of being a good manager is learning how to weave through the gaps like an otter through an angry river, darting and diving and never losing track of the essentials.
Sam likes it, usually, the thrill of knowing things could go snarled up and wrong if he let them, if he didn’t have a firm grip on every interwoven strand of this place.
It makes him feel necessary, fulfilled, in a way he’s accepted but isn’t entirely proud of.
But if Sam doesn’t find a way to turn things around soon—like, in the next month or two—they’re going to hit a point he’s not sure they can come back from.
As it is, he’s already changed suppliers on more than half their ingredients, axed all their chocolate desserts (to Eileen’s shrieking fury) because the price of cocoa was killing him, cut his own salary down as low as he can take it without running out of money for his and Pastrami’s basic bills and upkeep, and cancelled a number of large, long-standing backstocking orders.
He’s also convinced Casey, their apple guy, to let them float a few months on credit.
Unfortunately, Sam’s pretty sure the only reason he does this is because a few years ago, before Casey met his now-husband, Deb set them up, and they went on one of the most awkward dates of Sam’s life.
There was so little chemistry between them that, halfway through the appetizer, three strangers slid into their booth, assuming they were the business associates they were meant to be meeting; to say things have been awkward ever since is an understatement.
But, on the plus side: In times of trouble, Sam can always count on his apple delivery, even if he knows they’ll all taste vaguely of pity.
It isn’t enough. But all he can think of otherwise is raising prices—a terrible idea when they’re trying to lure spooked customers back in—or firing someone, which is just. No. He can’t do that. There has to be another way.
Technically, Sam knows there is one. He’s painfully aware Deb’s gotten offers to sell the building over the years, lucrative ones.
The neighborhood has changed a lot since his grandparents invested their life savings here, and the building sits on what is, these days, fairly prime real estate.
There’s even a local restaurant group who has mocked up a concept for what they’d put in the space if Silverman’s was gone, which Sam knows because they send over a copy every month, along with an offer to buy if they’re ever interested in selling.
He and Deb had talked about it, just once, right before she left town.
She’d offered to give him some of the profits if she sold; he refused.
She pointed out that he could start his own place with the money, call it Adelson’s, do everything the way he wanted to do it; he refused.
He’d been a little afraid that she wanted to sell, was feeling him out in the interest of moving forward, but she’d grinned at him with tears in her eyes and hugged him, whispering, “I knew you were my favorite nephew for a reason.” Sam, touched, had refrained from pointing out that he was her only nephew.
It hadn’t seemed like the right thing for the moment.
Sam has spent his life, with a few brief blips of teenage exception, trying to be a helpful person.
It’s at the very core of who he is, that burning drive to do something for someone, to feel useful and important.
Overall, it’s one of the things Sam likes best about himself, but, like everything, it has its drawbacks.
Being helpful is a joy, something Sam wishes he could do every minute of the day, but asking for help?
Sam would rather, in all honesty, tell Mr. Schecter they’re out of whitefish.
It turns out that when push comes to shove, Sam would rather do something personally excruciating than destroy his family’s legacy and lose his home and cost a bunch of people he loves their source of income, so. He decides, hating it, to put his damn hat in his hand and ask around.