“It’s less distracting with everyone else there. They keep my mind on the prayers.” He retrieved his kippah from a side table and headed toward the door.
Aaron had a kitchen shift today, even if it was only the lunch service. “If the restaurant is wearing you out maybe I should spend more time in the kitchen,” Yael suggested. “I don’t mind.”
“It’s nothing! Let’s just take it easy, like we’re supposed to.” He turned around to smile at her as she followed him out the door.
At the synagogue, they said hello to the dressmaker, who admired her handiwork and looked suitably proud when Aaron showered her with compliments, and to Nava, who was the other woman there who was like Yael. There would have been three of them if Chana was there, but she claimed she preferred to go to the more traditional services at the synagogue near Quiet Lake—and then often skipped anyway. Poor Chana. Yael hoped she was back to normal after the incident with the stray dog.
Yael and Aaron sat down in their usual spot all the way over on the left near the potted lime trees, and soon the rabbi started everyone off with song. How sweet, as the song said, to worship together with your community. Yael let the repetition roll around in her mind, blocking her workday cares. What a lovely thing Shabbat was, that someone should come and gently take your rolling pin from your hands, your chef’s knife, set them down carefully and lead you to the soul’s nourishment.
Shabbat wasn’t impenetrable though. Aaron stood slowly and with great effort whenever the congregation was called to rise, and Yael tried her best not to react to his quiet but alarming huffing and puffing.
“Blessed is our God who separates day from evening,” Aaron’s deep voice bellowed beside her, as if nothing was wrong. And maybe nothing was, but still, when they reached the Mishebeirach, the healing prayer, it was Aaron’s name Yael infused into it—even if she did so without announcing it, to save his ego.
♡ ✡ ♡
The restaurant wasn’t open the following evening since Shabbat had only just ended at sundown, but Yael and Aaron came in anyway to get things ready for the next morning. Yael was taking inventory of the dry goods when Aaron poked his head into the kitchen, a rag in his hand from cleaning tables. “Sarah’s here.”
“Oh.” They’d had such a wonderful peaceful Shabbat, and Yael wasn’t really ready to go back to the conundrum.
“We’re really going to keep putting up with them?” He meant Jacob and Daniel.
Yael paused. “I don’t know. I really do need a few more days to think about this.”
Aaron shrugged, his hands out to both sides. “We need that semisweet Aram and Swan.”
“I know.” She wiped her hands on a clean cloth and went to go meet Sarah.
The wine seller waited patiently in the torchlights of the street just outside the restaurant. “Good evening, Yael!”
“Peace, Sarah,” said Yael. “I’m not sure that I need anything for tomorrow, unless you can promise me my semisweet red.”
The flickering torchlight revealed a smile trying desperately to cover a frustrated emptiness on Sarah’s face. “I don’t think there’s any there.” She licked her lips. “I’m sorry.”
“Look, I feel bad for you,” said Yael, “and you’re a big help when we’re in the weeds. I’d hate to lose that. But the biggest thing I need from a wine seller is wine, and…”
“I understand, and I’m sorry,” said Sarah. “I’ll talk to them.”
“I wish you were them,” said Yael. “You’re the only one around there who actually gives a shit.” An impulsive thought landed on her tongue. “Aaron works too hard. What if I offered you a job here? Would you come and work at the Frangipani Table?”
“Oh, Yael!” Sarah laughed sadly. “That’s so sweet of you. I… I don’t really want to work in a restaurant. But if I ever get stuck, I may take you up on that. I know you’d be a fair boss.”
“Thank you.” Yael looked down at the tiny woman and saw her past selves, from last week and the week before and so many other weeks, rushing back to them in the afternoon with armfuls of lettuce, of live chickens, of a stack of pita bread half as big as her own height. “Look, I’ll give you an order, but I’m not lying when I say I know where Asher lives.”
“I understand.”
“What happened?” asked Aaron when Yael was back inside with the door closed.
“I think I’m giving them one last chance.”
“You’re getting soft in your old age,” he remarked.
“Not really,” Yael countered. “This way, when they screw up it’ll be easier for me to make my decisions. Oh, and by the way? Don’t call me old, old man.” She aimed a heavy-lidded smolder in his direction, then picked up one of his untouched cleaning rags. She draped it around his neck and used it to draw him closer, with mock sensuality.
Maybe Shabbat could last just a few moments longer.
♡ ✡ ♡
“Good morning, Yael!” It was Jacob Straw-Hat himself, standing in front of his wine wagon.
“You’re late,” said Yael, crossing to the back of the wagon where the wine was. “And where’s Sarah?” It was far too close to her lunch opening for her to feel safe standing out here messing around with vendors. If she thought of the okra and walnuts she still had yet to chop she felt so agitated she almost couldn’t breathe.
“Oh, I had to send her to Ir Ilan with a delivery,” said Jacob breezily, lining up bottles on the back of the wagon.
“What?” Yael crossed her arms and peered over his shoulder at the line of jugs. “I thought she was local distribution.”
“We had an issue we needed to resolve and she’s off taking care of it.” He counted silently with one pointed finger. “Three jugs of Two Trees dry red, right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Yael, “but what about the Aram and Swan?”
“Right here.” He tapped a jug.
“That’s dry.”
“Yes, but dry is actually better—”
“Jacob.” Yael glared directly into his eyes, taking advantage of her height for once. “I don’t really care what you think is better, or what Daniel thinks, or what wine snobs think is better, or what Aram thinks—”
“Aram’s dead, his son runs the—”
“That is so far away from the point it had to hire a messenger boy just to find out what the point looked like.” Yael knew her rising voice was attracting the attention of people on the street and she didn’t care. “What matters to me is, my customers like the red semisweet, it’s my top seller, and for some reason they seem to think it goes best with my food. I lose money every day I don’t have it to offer them. I work too hard to lose money. Do. You. Understand. That?”
“Absolutely, Yael. We all do, and I’m sorry.” Jacob held out both his hands, smiling shallowly like the impervious wall he was.
“Does Asher have it?”
“What?”
“Does Asher have the wine I want?”
“How should I know what Asher has?”
“Never mind. Where’s the rest of my order?” Yael perused the row. “Is that white sparkling? I stock pink sparkling.”
“It says pink sparkling on the invoice,” said Jacob. “Daniel must have—”
“Do either of you two know how to take responsibility for anything?”
When Yael went back inside, Aaron greeted her with a smirk. “I could hear you in here.”
“Oh.” Yael stuck out her tongue at him. “Oops. That man, though. He could stub his toe and blame the queen.”
“Why was he here?”
“He sent Sarah on some errand and now he’s making her deliveries for her.”
“In the wrong order, sounds like,” said Aaron. “It’s nearly lunchtime!”
♡ ✡ ♡
That night, Yael and Aaron sat on their bedroom’s balcony, watching the stars come out while she rubbed his aching feet. This wasn’t unusual but her silence must have been, because Aaron asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“Oh.” He chuckled, pointing to the west with one finger of a hand wrapped around a cookie. “Well, Asher’s is that way.”
“Mead,” Yael continued, “and Sarah.”
“I thought you said if they messed up one more time, never mind Sarah.”
“I know,” said Yael, digging her thumbs into tough, tired skin. “But today had nothing to do with her. I didn’t expect that.”
“All today shows is that you can’t count on them to let the one thing keeping your loyalty even be there for you.” He finished the cookie.
“Every time I make up my mind to do it one way or another, I start feeling even more strongly in the other direction.”
“I can see that.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Better, now you’re doing that.”
She smiled up at him. “It’s like I said. You’re on your feet too much. Wish Sarah’d taken that job I offered her.”
“She might still, if she didn’t like being sent all the way up to Ir Ilan.”
Yael sighed. “I hate having this hanging over my head. Who invented wine, anyway?”
“Most people find it relaxing.”
“Smartass.”
“C’mere.” Aaron patted one of his massive thighs. “I just want to hold you and stop thinking about the restaurant.”
♡ ✡ ♡
The next day, Yael still hadn’t made up her mind. For two days she told Chana to tell Sarah she didn’t need anything, barricading herself behind a pile of kitchen busywork. On the first day she made excuses for herself in her mind, that she was too busy right now, but on the second day she knew she was deliberately avoiding Sarah. After all, how could she cut her off after so much eager and helpful service above and beyond her actual job?
But she knew she had to do it. Aaron was getting older—she was, too, she couldn’t deny it—and it wasted so much of their precious time to deal with incompetence and inconvenience.
Sarah didn’t stop by on the third day, but they were slow. On the fourth day, business picked up, which was great, except now they were starting to use up the stores of wine held in reserve. Yael knew the restaurant would soon run out and this time it would be entirely her own fault.
Well, never let anyone say Chef Yael backed down from difficult things.
Aaron sat at one of the front tables counting the money from lunch, and he looked up when she kissed him on the forehead on her way out the door. “Where are you going?”
“Asher.”
She heard his satisfied grunt as she left.
Thoughts swarmed around her like gnats as she walked through the sunny city. What would she do if she got stuck for product in the middle of the day, now, without Sarah? It really was time to hire a second person to help Chana. Aaron should be resting more, should be greeting customers and pouring wine, and leave all the rushing around to the young ones.
“Peace, Yael!” called a man who was standing at the juice booth waiting for his drink.
He was a regular customer, and she waved back at him. She felt vaguely guilty, almost like she didn’t want him to know where she was going. Well, that was silly! Her customers would stop eating at Frangipani Table if their quality declined, so they would have no reason to expect any differently of her and Aaron’s purchasing decisions.
Besides, there would be benefits to this, beyond just Asher’s purported reliability. There would be mead. She longed to share another bottle of it with Aaron, this time on the bedroom balcony.
Asher’s business office was in the front of his home, a small but immaculately white building with the same red curved tile roof as most of the rest of Home City. Yael admired the bottle palms flanking the doorway, and she wondered idly if they were intended as a pun.
Probably, because his door knocker was shaped like a bunch of grapes. She smirked as she rapped it.
Fumbling noises on the other side heralded someone’s approach, and then the great door swung open. “Oh!”
Yael’s mouth dropped open in surprise, for standing on the other side, her great big hair bound up under a deep pink scarf, was Sarah!
“Who’s that, Sarah?” A pleasant tenor voice came from behind her, and in a few moments Asher himself appeared. He was a sprightly, handsome man in his midforties but with the air of eternal youth, curly, dark hair, and a romantic dusting of scruff.
“I—” Yael took a moment to gather herself. “Are you here now?”
Sarah issued an embarrassed smile, and Asher laughed warmly. “She’s here.”
“Things were bad over there,” Sarah said finally. “I mean, you knew. You could see. And then they sent me upstate, which was—they didn’t even give me money for lunch. If they’d only given me money for lunch I would have felt appreciated but—never mind, I’m being unladylike. I’m sorry. And then, I knew I was losing your business, and that hurt the worst of all, and I just—” She looked up at Asher, who was behind her. “He’s so organized!” This last exhalation was spoken in breathless joy.
“Well, ain’t that just the thing.” Yael grinned, splashing around in her own relief like a kid in the lake and not really knowing what else to say.
“Would you like to come in and see what we have?” Asher held his hand out toward his office. “I know you like Aram and Swan’s semisweet red, and I put some aside for you as soon as I hired Sarah.”
Yael followed his hand without a word.
“I was going to come see you, but I’m still moving my things,” Sarah explained meekly.
“Now, then,” said Asher once the door was closed. “What would you like to taste?”
Yael smiled firmly. “Let’s share a bottle of mead.”
Every Us
Cast: Kaveh/Farzin
whose love story is told in Climbing the Date Palm
For J.L. Douglas
♡ ✡ ♡
Farzin found himself awake.
After a moment of disorientation, he realized that he had stirred not, as usual, from the gray light of dawn and the recitations of various songbirds in the vineyard, but from the irregular thrashing of the perfect specimen of masculinity beside him in the bed.
“Hey.” Farzin shook him gently. “Perfect specimen of masculinity.”
“Huh? Huh?” Kaveh woke gasping like a man saved from drowning. “Fa-Farzin? Oh thank goodness.” He rolled over and enveloped Farzin as if he were auditioning for world’s tightest blanket.
Farzin grinned from ear to ear, selfishly happy to be seized with such ardor even though he could tell something was wrong. “You okay, Prince Charming?”
“No more extra-peppery chicken right before bed,” Kaveh groaned.
Farzin rubbed his back gently. “You tell that cook he’s not allowed to hurt my companion anymore.” As usual, Kaveh was the dubious culinary artist in question.
“I’ll get right on that,” Kaveh mumbled. “I am… I am just so glad to see you. The real you.”
Farzin’s brow wrinkled. “I didn’t know I’d made any clockwork duplicates.”
Kaveh chuckled. Good, I made him laugh was Farzin’s gut reflex, as it had been since he was a boy and Kaveh was his sad-eyed classmate.
“I bet you could,” Kaveh replied. “Just like that little dragon you made last week. But that’s not what I mean. I had this dream… it was so real.”
“It was obviously so not,” said Farzin comfortingly. “What happened?”
Kaveh shook his head. “Everything was—well, first of all, you and I were just friends, like before… but I still loved you, like I do now. I was so sad that we weren’t together. I was devastated. It was like… hunger, and emptiness, and, I don’t know, missing a hand…”
Farzin kept holding his prince and methodically massaged his back. He was used to these periodic bouts of negative energy, and he always tried to transform himself into three hundred pounds of comfort and love. “That sounds distinctly unpleasant,” he said lightly. “I don’t recommend it.” The goa
l was to get Kaveh laughing.
“That’s not all,” Kaveh added. “It was like none of it had ever happened, and I was married to Azar.”
Farzin drew in his breath sharply. Now he understood Kaveh’s panic, and he tried not to think of the way Azar had forbidden the two of them from meeting their baby nephew on account of some insulting notion of love for men being contagious. That was enough to wipe the smile off even his face, and he needed to be strong for Kaveh right now.
“She’s still pretty,” Farzin commented. “Unless you’ve stopped being attracted to women and just like men now.”
“No, that’s not it at all. I’m still the way I always was,” said Kaveh. “I just—she’d put me in a box and never let me out. She thinks my love for you is some kind of sickness in real life—imagine how much worse that was in the dream world where she was supposed to be my ultimate companion.”
That did sound absolutely terrifying, Farzin had to admit, so he pulled out all the stops and went full-on clown. “Oh, but you were right the first time!” he said in a haughty tone with uncharacteristic feminine inflection. “I am Azar, your proud princess.”
Kaveh chuckled. “Oh boy. Wow, you have that down!”
“Of course I know how to talk to you,” Farzin continued, energized by that sacred sound. “We are man and wife, just as it should be in my incredibly tiny mind.”
“It’s more of a tiny heart,” Kaveh countered. “She’s smart enough.”
Not smart enough to marry you, Farzin didn’t say out loud. “I am very smart because I cut wonderful people out of my life because I don’t understand them.”
“How do I get Farzin back?”
Farzin pulled the blankets up over his head and shifted around. “He’s hiding. You’ll have to find him!”
Kaveh sniff-laughed and put his hand down on some random part of the great lump into which Farzin had transformed himself.
“Congratulations, you have won the left buttock of a Farzin.” With each of Kaveh’s chuckles, Farzin felt like he was shooting a perfect score at some field sport.
“How do I get a matched set?”
“There are no matched sets. We have only left buttocks in stock today. Right buttocks tomorrow. Will you take two lefts?”
Tales from Perach (Mangoverse Book 5) Page 4