Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
NOW: JUNE
The night of the party, as a birthday gift to Joey, Sam lets the whole staff go early and promises to handle close himself.
They’re all going out to dinner before meeting up at a popular West Sixth Street bar, and Sam had tried his best to beg off from the whole evening, but no one he talked to had been willing to listen.
They all insisted that Sam hadn’t done anything for his thirtieth birthday, which was true, and that he owed it to himself to come out with them and make up for it, which was not.
Sam felt that what he owed himself was a nice quiet night where nothing much happened and he was able to get really excellent sleep, but when he said as much to Eileen, she just slapped him on the back and said, “Jesus, you sound older than I do.” This, in particular, shamed him, and he had no choice but to agree to come out.
But while Sam was invited to both halves of the night, he knows he’s only really wanted at the second.
It would have been different a few years ago, when Sam was just another employee; the footing would have been more equal, and the conversation, as a result, less awkward.
But ever since Deb left him in charge, Sam’s The Boss, and it changes the dynamic.
She’d warned him that it would, not that her warning made it any less jarring when it actually happened.
Sam’s used to it now, though. He waves them off, knowing as they shuffle out that the best thing he can do for Joey tonight is handle the closing tasks, have dinner by himself, and then drop in to the party for an appropriate, but relatively brief, amount of time.
That’s the professional way to approach this, even if it does put Sam in a slightly lonely position.
Or it would normally put Sam in a slightly lonely position. Instead, to his surprise and pleasure, he finds that after the staff have gone Jake is still lingering in the doorway, scuffing a shoe slightly awkwardly.
Sam raises a questioning eyebrow.
Jake grimaces. “Look, okay, it’s not that they’re not all lovely, right, it was so nice of Joey to invite me, I’m happy enough to stop in at the bar, but there’s only so much twenty-first birthday energy I can take?
It makes me feel old, first of all, but secondly, my own twenty-first was such a mess I feel like maybe I shouldn’t get too close to theirs in case I jinx it.
” He gives Sam a slightly pleading look. “Can I help you close up?”
“Sure,” Sam says, grinning at him, “if you tell me what happened when you turned twenty-one,” and Jake groans and pantomimes being shot by an arrow and dying an ignominious death, but then grins back.
Really, Sam is the one who should be offering thanks.
Jake seems to gravitate naturally towards the tasks Sam most loathes doing, like wiping down counters, wrapping the meats, and tallying inventory.
This leaves Sam to tackle the stuff he enjoys more, like dealing with the floors and ovens, and the things he can’t hand off, like entering the day’s take into their tracking software.
As it turns out it’s pretty wonderful to take what Sam thinks of as the Solo Close of Kindness—something he’s done many times over the years—and make it a Dual Close of Camaraderie.
He doesn’t have to hover around and make sure Jake knows what he’s doing in an unfamiliar area, because Jake has been documenting everyone’s daily deli tasks for weeks.
He doesn’t have to worry that he’s asking too much, being a pushy or overbearing boss, because he’s not Jake’s boss, and also, he’s not asking.
Jake just cheerfully turns to the next thing that needs doing every time he finishes something up.
He even runs Pastrami out when she starts scratching at the back door while Sam’s in the middle of drain duty.
And they talk the whole time they’re working, shouting to each other to keep the conversation going while they’re in separate areas.
They revisit the shared memory of Sam’s seventeenth birthday, which involved them both being thrown out of a double feature at a movie theatre after Sam had laughed so hard at Jake’s increasingly hysterically whispered defense of the film’s supposed villain that he’d spilled an entire large fountain drink over not only the two of them, but also the irate couple in front.
This part of the discussion, at least according to Jake, is meant to act as a grounding counterbalance to the story of about his own twenty-first birthday: an evening that he apparently spent at an incredibly high-end party that had nothing to do with him, drinking more Lemon Drops than one person should ever consume, and eventually collapsing into a bush in front of a wildly famous celebrity.
Jake won’t tell Sam who said celebrity was, so this diverges into a sort of guessing game, with Sam yelling things like, “Russell Crowe!” and “Meryl Streep!” across the restaurant, and Jake calling back, “Nope!” or, “Hah, I wish, it would have been worth the embarrassment to meet her.”
And then, suddenly, they’re laughing together in the kitchen, and everything is done except the stove, which Sam left for last because—
“Oh, right,” he says, suddenly sheepish, putting a hand to the back of his neck. “I was going to, uh. Make dinner? If you want some?”
“Oooh, sure. If you don’t mind, that sounds great.” Jake doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the offer. After all, why would he be? Sam has been feeding him for weeks now.
But, as he gathers ingredients from the fridge and freezer, Sam is intimately aware that this is not like all the other meals he has prepared for Jake.
And that’s because every other time, they haven’t been meals he prepared just for Jake.
It was always family meal, or something off the line, or the occasional thrown-together sandwich, but that didn’t count.
Anyone could slap corned beef on bread and spoon a mound of potato salad next to it on a plate—that wasn’t the same as cooking a whole meal specifically for one person, let alone sharing that meal with them.
Sam is… nervous, he realizes, a little shocked by it. About cooking dinner! In the Silverman’s kitchen! It’s absurd, that’s what it is, that Jake can manage to wrest that out of him just by standing there, patting Sam’s dog and looking pleased by the idea of eating.
Nothing to do but brazen it out, so he continues to guess celebrities as he toasts and sears and poaches.
It’s not a complicated dinner, but something he’s made for himself many times before.
Hollandaise sauce is fast enough to make, and Eileen’s fresh Kaiser rolls are always around, and combined with thinly sliced pastrami, they become something greater than the sum of their parts.
It’s not exactly eggs Benedict, because eggs Benedict is on an English muffin with ham, not pastrami, and served open-faced instead of as a closed sandwich.
But it hits in a similar strike zone, and honestly Sam thinks his version tastes better than the standard, which is why he’s been making it for years.
The celebrity guessing winds up being a fruitful line of conversation: Sam doesn’t land on the right one, but Jake has, separately, met a number of the ones he mentions, and those stories carry them through Sam poaching the eggs, toasting the buns, searing off the pastrami, and finishing the hollandaise with a pinch of cayenne pepper.
He has a moment of panic as he’s plating. Should he ask Jake to join him out in the dining room? Pull down two of the chairs from where Sam put them, twenty minutes ago, on top of their table for the night, and sit down to properly eat together? Like a—
“Here,” Sam says, shoving the plate awkwardly towards Jake, who blinks and takes it, looking slightly baffled.
But he just says, “Thanks,” and then repeats it when Sam passes him a napkin, now looking a little amused. But then he takes a bite, and his whole face changes; his eyes go wide, stay wide as he chews, swallows, takes another bite. “Dude.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Okay, listen, I know I say this about six times a week, but I’m really serious this time, Sam: You have to put this on the menu,” Jake says. “Oh my God, it should be the special tomorrow—why am I eating it; I should be photographing it.”
“Oh, come on,” Sam repeats, sure he’s blushing. “It’s just an egg sandwich with pastrami, basically! No, not you,” he adds to Pastrami, who gives him a slightly woebegone look in response, as though he’s taken her name in vain, before turning back to Jake. “It’s not like it’s anything special.”
“It is, though.” Jake takes another bite and, nodding to himself, says, “Crispiness from the hard roll! And sweetness from the poppy seeds, and richness and acidity from the sauce—and it’s a really nice hollandaise, too, which is impressive, because the deli doesn’t serve anything with that, right?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter except that it’s well-seasoned on its own, and then the smoky pastrami and the creamy yolk from the poached egg…
God. It’s really good, Sam. I’m not just saying that!
I—” He pauses, and his expression twists for the barest second into something closed-off and wretched that Sam doesn’t entirely understand before it smooths out again and he finishes, “Wouldn’t just say it. I don’t. As a rule.”
“Well,” Sam says, smiling at him, “if it’s a rule, I guess I have to accept the compliment, don’t I?
Thanks.” He takes a bite of his own. It tastes how it always tastes, which is of course good, because Sam wouldn’t keep making something if it tasted bad.
Still, he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about.
“Seriously, why don’t you put this kind of stuff on the menu?” Jake asks. It’s not the first time—he’s asked after a number of the family meals Sam has cooked, and Sam’s always given him half an answer, or one that was only partially true, or, most often, dodged the question entirely.