Chapter 13 #2
But abruptly, full of the warm glow of Jake’s praise, Sam wants to be truthful. “Honestly? My aunt—this place—they saved my life. If I change things from the way they’ve always been, what kind of thanks is that?”
Jake stares at him.
Sam bears this with good enough grace, at first. After all, Jake does this semi-regularly, the dramatic incredulous look followed shortly by a series of questions; Sam is used to it.
Except this time, no questions appear to be forthcoming. Jake just… keeps staring at him. Eventually, Sam has no choice but to say, “Um. What?”
Jake blinks and seems to shake himself, reminding Sam briefly but fervently of Pastrami after a bath. He must remind Pastrami of this, too, because she mimics him, with a wide doggy grin like she thinks it’s a game, before settling down in a crescent shape on the floor.
But Jake sounds completely serious when he says, “Sorry, I just genuinely need every brain cell I have to formulate a response to that. It’s taking most of them to wrap my head around how you could even begin to think—and your aunt sounds so chill, I can’t imagine she wants…
No!” Jake is very clearly saying this final word to himself, since he picks up his last bite, adds, “Food first, it’s too delicious and thus distracting; I need all my thinking power,” and shoves it in his mouth.
There is a long pause, in which Jake’s face goes on a long and arduous journey.
Trying not to laugh, Sam says, “Slightly too big a bite, then?” When Jake nods, pained, his mouth still visibly full, Sam half grins and says, “Betrayal’s in the name, really. Since it isn’t exactly eggs Benedict, I’ve always thought of it as… Pastrami Arnold.”
Jake’s eyes go wide and his chewing becomes frantic.
After another few seconds he swallows, takes in a huge gasp of air and then, sounding crazed and almost furious: “Pastrami Arnold is genius! Your whole menu should be like this! This should be your entire thing—you’d be raking it in; why are you even selling the creamed herring salad? !”
“What did the creamed herring salad ever do to you?” Sam, having also finished his own dinner, takes Jake’s empty plate and starts washing up. “People like the creamed herring salad!”
“Two people, Sam!” Jake is waving a hand animatedly enough that Sam can see it from the corner of his eye even as he washes the dishes.
“I’ve only ever seen two people order it.
The same two people! And they’re both, I’m sorry to say it, old as balls.
I’m not trying to be ageist here, you understand.
I just don’t think creamed herring salad is set to be the next big thing in the food scene! ”
“Well, why does it have to be?” Sam doesn’t know why he’s feeling defensive over the creamed herring salad, an unholy concoction of sour cream, pickled fish, and an assortment of spices that do nothing to conceal the taste of either previous element—he’s hated it since he was a child.
“What’s so wrong with tradition? With doing things the way they’ve always been done? ”
“What’s wrong,” Jake repeats, slow with incredulity, “with doing things the way they’ve always been done? Oh my God, Sam.”
For the next twenty minutes—as they wrap up the last of closing, get Pastrami settled for the evening, grab their coats, and head out into the night—Jake presents Sam with a non-exhaustive list of things that humanity would not have if that attitude had won the day.
This list includes enormous points like essentially all modern medicine, running water, and the internet, and also smaller but more personal ones, like the original leap into the unknown starting Silverman’s had been for Sam’s grandparents seventy-five years ago.
Then Jake veers left, and points out that “We’ve always done it that way” is commonly trotted out as an excuse for a whole bevy of horrors—racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, on and on—even though it’s never actually been true even once.
“After all,” Jake declares, loud and emphatic, as they wait for the crosswalk at the corner of West Sixth and St. Clair, “Humans haven’t been around for always!
There was a Big Bang, wasn’t there? And a lot of years this planet was here without us?
And even if you say, ‘Okay, Jake, but that’s taking it a bit far,’ like—we’re not cavemen, are we?
We’re here with our cell phones and our central heating because nothing is ever the ‘same as it always was.’ That’s not how it works! ”
As the light changes and they start walking, several passing Clevelanders give Jake odd looks. He ignores them.
“Look, it’s not that I don’t take your point,” Sam says, thinking privately that it would have been very difficult not to take it after Jake went to these lengths to lay it all out.
“It’s just that I’m not sure it’s that deep?
I mean. I’m not looking to, like, hold up the progress of humanity here, but I don’t think honoring my family’s traditions is really at risk of doing that.
” Jake just scowls at him in response to this, an exaggerated, Muppety quality to the expression, and Sam snorts out a laugh, shaking his head.
“Why do you care so much, man? Does it really matter to you what’s on the menu? ”
Jake groans and throws up the hand that isn’t on his cane, but he doesn’t reply; Sam assumes it’s because they’re only a few steps from their destination, and the conversation is going to be tabled.
But then, just before they’ve reached the door, Jake stops.
He looks hard at Sam and says quietly, “If you don’t change, you don’t grow, that’s all. Awful but true. Ask me how I know.”
Guilt twists in Sam’s chest, his heart a lidless blender, splattering shame and regret across everything he can see.
Sam doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to ask Jake that question.
He learned the very same lesson that very same night, if in different ways, with different consequences, than Jake did.
Sam wouldn’t have phrased it like that—he would have said that life doesn’t care what you want, but you have to keep living it anyway—but he knows immediately that Jake’s framing is the truth of the thing.
Sam thinks he’d know that even if he hadn’t been there, the one driving, the night of the accident.
Although it must have hurt to get here, Jake’s face is calm, certainty radiating out from him.
The expression reminds Sam of how he used to look when he was dancing: as though he was exactly where he was supposed to be, and finding joy in it.
It’s a relief, honestly, to see it again.
For years, Sam’s been haunted by the thought that it was one of the things that night cost Jake, along with so many others.
Sam wants to apologize. He realizes, stunned, that he’s wanted to apologize for thirteen years.
Not to Jake’s parents, or even to his own—though he did many times—but to Jake himself.
It won’t change anything; it won’t do any good; it’s probably selfish of Sam, really.
He probably just wants some sort of absolution, permission to put the guilt down. He wants to do it anyway.
But instead of giving Sam the chance, Jake smiles crookedly and slips away into the bar.
It takes roughly forty-five seconds for Sam to remember that categorizing Callahan’s as a bar was pure wishful thinking on his part.
There is a bar—several, in fact—in Callahan’s, but the place itself is more club than anything, especially on a night like this.
Most of the times Sam’s been in here, it’s been to grab a quick bite to eat on a weekday evening, when the place has more of a sports-bar-with-food vibe.
But on the weekends, with tables pushed away to make a huge dance floor and strobing, multi-colored lights flashing in every direction, the energy becomes something else entirely.
Sam can’t spot Jake in the throng, nor Luce, Joey, or any of the rest of his staff. He decides, for fortitude, to order a drink, and gets lucky; Eileen is at the bar, looking grim.
“Hi!” Sam has to shout to be heard over the thrumming, badly balanced bass in the nearby speaker.
“Bye!” Eileen shouts back. “Can’t take it! Like torture! Sweet kid, but I’m too old for this!”
Sam, who at thirty is roughly half Eileen’s age, also feels too old for this, so he can sympathize. Still: “Why are you at the bar if you’re leaving?”
“For the Uber ride!” Eileen says, as the bartender hands her a rocks glass containing a double, neat, of something brown.
She grimaces at Sam and says, “In case the bastard tries to talk to me.” She throws the drink back easily, and then smiles, looking briefly happier than Sam’s ever seen her, and pats him on the cheek.
Jerking her head, she says, “They’re back that way. Have a good night, Sammy.”
Flush with an unusual affection for her, Sam asks the bartender to give him whatever she had as she steps away.
This turns out to be a mistake—it tastes like having all the smoke from a whole bonfire blown directly into your face, and costs a lot more than Sam was expecting—but having gone through with paying for it, he feels he has to press on and finish it up. He winces, wary, down into the cup.
But Jake rescues him, sidling up next to him with something that looks like a vodka tonic in his hand. He asks to try Sam’s drink and seems to find the taste exceptional, as opposed to akin to drinking a bottle of liquid smoke, and they swap beverages as they approach the party.