Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
NOW: JUNE
The next morning Sam unlocks the door for Alphonse and then, for the first time in years, goes back to bed.
He doesn’t sleep, of course—his body is too used to being awake and cooking at this hour—and after about twenty minutes of fruitlessly listening to Jake breathe, he gives up and makes them both breakfast in bed.
It’s worth it, though, for the way Jake looks at him when he brings it in, sleep-mussed and barely awake. Sam thinks almost anything would be.
There is a slightly strange moment just before they go downstairs together; Sam comes out of the bedroom and finds Jake standing rigid, staring down at the table by the front door.
Sam glances at it, bewildered—all that’s on it is a couple pieces of junk mail and his house keys—but he says, “Table haunted, then? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
It’s a joke, but for a second, when Jake turns to look at him, Sam almost thinks it’s true.
Jake’s face looks ashen, drawn thick with misery.
But then he smiles and brightens and says, “Sorry, all good, just having a flashback to going downstairs in your underwear. I’m wearing pants, right?
You see them, too?” So Sam laughs, and assures Jake the pants are indeed there, and forgets about it.
It’s easy to let go of, especially when Jake catches him against the doorframe, kisses him thoroughly, and insists they follow through on their postponed dinner at Johnny’s tonight after close.
He sails through the morning, in the best mood he has been in in years.
He sings along with the songs on the radio.
He laughs with customers who normally drive him up the wall.
When Pastrami jumps up and puts her paws on his chest, he dances with her like she’s a person, to her obvious delight.
He feels a singing new gratitude for every chime of the bell when the front door opens, having learned not to take it for granted; he feels a singing new gratitude for Jake, smiling at him from what’s become his usual table when he stops in for lunch.
So when Marty steps into the deli, Sam’s first thought is to be grateful.
Proof at last that he hasn’t commuted nitrate-related manslaughter; everything’s going his way.
And he’s smiling when Marty, holding his briefcase in front of his chest like a shield, cries, “I’m sorry I was weird last night!
Have mercy on an awkward soul! Don’t cast me back out into the grim, corned-beefless wilds! ”
“Nobody cast you out in the first place, Marty. You cast yourself out—it’s not my fault if you believed that stupid review.”
Sam glances into the dining room again as Marty makes a series of hesitant hedging noises, obviously struggling for the right words.
To his surprise, he notices that Jake has taken on a pallor and looks like he’s been replaced with a version of himself who died a few centuries ago.
When Sam manages to catch his eye, Jake stares back at him with an expression of such utter, panicked despair that Sam decides he’s going to have to cut the conversation with Marty short.
He becomes even more convinced of this when Jake immediately glances away, like he can’t bear to look at Sam a moment more.
“Listen, it’s fine,” Sam says, even though he’d like to be obnoxious about the gap in patronage for a few more minutes.
If nothing else, he thinks it’s what Deb would do.
But he’s still watching Jake over Marty’s shoulder, and increasingly certain something is badly wrong; it’s all he can do to continue the conversation at all.
“Honestly, I’m kind of touched to hear you couldn’t find better corned beef…
Actually, sorry, one second. Jake? Are you leaving? ”
It’s a rhetorical question; Jake obviously is leaving, because he’s throwing his stuff into his bag so quickly Sam’s a little afraid he’ll chuck his laptop to the ground by mistake.
But he looks up at the sound of his name, eyes wide and frantic, gaze flicking from Sam to Marty, who has half turned to see who Sam’s talking to—
“Oh, hey,” Marty says, sounding confused.
“I thought you were working this morning.” His face creases as Jake’s falls; after a second, he turns back to Sam.
“Rich of you to be giving me crap for keeping my distance, since the whole thing is his fault, and you don’t seem to have any issue with him.
But I am glad you two have connected and buried the hatchet; that’s nice to see. ”
“What?” Sam says, baffled. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, God, don’t say that,” Marty says, his eyes darting from Sam to Jake and back again, the color draining from his face.
“Months I haven’t come in here! Months! In order to avoid doing this exact—but, wait.
You’re pulling my leg or something, right?
You have to be. He must have told you. You already know he wrote that review, and this is all… a joke…”
Marty keeps talking. Sam sees his lips move, but doesn’t hear a word.
His ears have filled with static; his mouth has been stuffed with ash.
As he watches Jake collapse back into his chair like his strings have been cut and drop his head into his hands, Sam knows with chilling certainty that it must be true, that it has to be.
If it wasn’t, Jake would be putting up some sort of protest, not looking as though someone just told him he only has twenty-four hours to live.
“Sorry,” Sam says, interrupting whatever Marty was talking about. His voice sounds strange in his own ears. “Jake… did… what?”
There is a long pause, in which Marty looks from Sam to Jake and back again, and then, into the sudden, ringing silence, says, “Oh, God.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Sam sees several heads pop up on the other side of the service window to watch the show.
Another long pause. Then Marty tries, in doomed tones, “Seriously, any chance that in five minutes you’re going to say, ‘Ha ha, Marty, we really had you going, you thought you’d made things so unbelievably awkward, but in fact—’”
“Marty,” Sam says through gritted teeth, only giving him this much on the strength of his many years of loyal patronage, “either order your goddamn sandwich, or get out.”
To his questionable credit, Marty has the audacity to immediately reply, “Corned beef and Swiss on rye, extra juicy, hold the mustard,” and hold out his credit card beseechingly.
Woodenly, Sam takes the card. He punches a random number into the register—certainly not the price of the sandwich, which Sam cannot currently remember despite setting it himself, but less than twenty dollars, anyway.
Marty doesn’t complain, just takes his card back and, as Sam begins making his sandwich, steps smartly to one side of the counter.
Everything about him suggests he will be revisiting this whole encounter for some years in those awkward moments just before sleep, when the human brain will sometimes decide to pull up a cruel highlight reel of personal worsts.
Though it’s not kind, he hopes Marty does have to relive this moment over and over. God knows Sam’s going to.
“Sam,” Joey says, in an urgent tone of voice. “I think you should let me make that sandwich, and you should take a fifteen.”
“I’m not due for a fifteen,” Sam says. He’s not looking at the counter, but then, he doesn’t have to look to correctly assemble a corned beef and Swiss cheese sandwich.
He’s perfectly free to continue to stare at Jake, who is still slumped over the table with his head in his hands, as though literally frozen in horror.
“I think you should take one anyway.” Joey’s tone is so concerned now that it pulls Sam’s gaze to their face, and then, curious about what they’re looking at in such obvious horror, to his own hand.
He realizes, startled, that he’s holding a piece of Swiss cheese—or something that was one a piece of cheese, anyway.
Without noticing, Sam seems to have closed his fist tightly around it.
When he opens his hand, little broken crumbles rain down onto the floor.
They remain there for several seconds before, relying on the sixth sense for dropped food which is possessed by all dogs, Pastrami bursts excitedly into the room and gobbles it up.
Normally, such an event would be followed by a victory dance, and then perhaps a series of tricks intended to elicit more exciting floor cheese to rain from on high.
Today she looks up at Sam, whines from low in the back of her throat, and butts her head against his leg.
When he doesn’t move, she walks over to her dining room pillow, curls up on top of it, and puts a paw over her eyes as though she can’t bear to watch.
“Fifteen,” Sam repeats, staring at his own palm, the cheesy film across it. “Right.” He turns on his heel without saying another word—not to Jake, not to anyone—and walks out, letting the back door slam behind him.
For the first five minutes, Sam is alone in the alley between Silverman’s and Jake’s building.
This is for the best; it’s an interval in which he more or less loses the power of speech, at least for anything beyond muttering incoherently to himself.
He paces in a long, tight, furious oval from one end of the alley to the other, occasionally mumbling fragmented, unhelpful things like, “This whole time!” or “Not a word!” or “We slept together!”