“Um. You seem to be very engrossed there,” a familiar voice broke in tentatively.
Of course. I should have known better than to expect that he would vanish from my life that easily. I kept my eyes on my plate and took another generous bite of fish, making sure to scoop up the fried onions and a bit of the fat that had soaked up enough of the turmeric, ginger, and garlic sauce. “I’m calling on the strength of my ancestors.”
“Is it working?” There was a smile in his voice. It hurt.
“Considering that you’re still here, not the way I want it to.”
Hasan exhaled.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“I’ve apologized to . . . well, my family, you could call them. They warned me I was living dangerously, and they were right.”
I nodded. “Good. And, to be fair, I guess I wasn’t reading enough into all your extracurricular, altruistic activities.”
Hasan offered me a weak smile. “I guess you were too busy enjoying the fact that I bought three trays of your meatballs and chased it down with two shakes, huh?”
The words almost slipped from my lips, the words that his puppy-hopeful expression and subtly clasped hands made me want to say: No, I enjoyed seeing you. I enjoyed being with you. You eating my food without making faces or tugging bone shards out of your mouth was a bonus.
I sighed and pushed the plate back, swiveling to face him properly.
“Okay, listen. I’ll be upfront because I believe in transparency and honesty. I don’t want you to grovel. I don’t want you to bend at the knees and promise me you’re shipping off to madrasa or something to learn the errors of your ways. I just . . .”
My voice trailed off for a moment.
“I just wish you had found some way to let me know besides, you know, waiting for some weird macho guy literally wearing a fedora to trample all over my dad’s hopes and dreams.”
“Yep, he’s literally crying a river right now,” my aunt piped up. I’d almost forgotten she was there, and I glowered at her as she studiously slid a cup of coffee in front of an equally uninvolved customer, who I suspected was one of her gossipy masjid friends.
“Totally heartbroken upstairs in my apartment. It’s amazing my brother can even be so engrossed in the cricket match right now when he has a tissue stuffed up each nostril and pressed against his eyes like he watched the ending of Devdas on repeat.”
Hasan let out a suspiciously stifled sound, but when I whirled back to face him, he was fidgeting with his collar.
“I just want us to be cool,” he said quietly. “I mean, I don’t want this to be awkward, but . . .”
We both glanced at my aunt. She sighed, shook her head, and gestured to her friend. They both stood, perhaps with a little too much whispering and head craning between them, and headed out to the terrace.
Thank God.
Almost as soon as she left, though, I wanted her back there. The shop suddenly felt larger, and so did Hasan’s presence next to me.
“Okay, listen.” Hasan looked me straight in the eye. “I want to be honest now. I like you. I really like you.”
I like you.
I really like you.
There was a boy, a cute, Muslim, superhero boy standing in front of me and telling me that he really, really liked me. And he wasn’t done.
“You didn’t find it weird when I was always hungry. You spilled your guts about your family and made me feel like I was part of it. You always smiled at me. I really like the way you smile.” And then he smiled. “I definitely like the way you cook.”
Okay. Things were getting out of hand.
“Um . . . uh . . .” I swallowed hard. “I appreciate your honesty. But . . .”
“We’re going to pay for the truck.” I didn’t have to ask who we were. “We’re going to stay out of your family’s affairs. I promise, I promise, I promise we will.”
“But you . . . want to stay in mine.” I regretted the phrasing as soon as it escaped my lips, particularly when it made that smile so much wider.
“If that’s the way you want to put it.”
And then, bold as a Bollywood hero, he reached out, grasping my hand. Just the fingertips, nothing brash enough to tempt the Haram Police into bursting into the shop and gasping in horror over the extreme skin-to-skin contact. But I could feel myself flare up and flush.
This was happening.
He was here, and he was holding my hand and smiling at me and telling me he liked me.
But I just couldn’t make my mouth form the words back. King of Kuisine was gone, but I could still feel that presence behind me of the warm stove and the crowded cooler with its soda cans and syrupy juices. I could remember learning how to count off the coins in the drawer and the first time Baba cut open one of my burgers and said, chest puffed out with pride, “This is well done.”
For all the nights I had kicked at the wheels and tugged down the shutters to study for the SAT in peace (and shamefully stuck a few bills in the tip jar to even the balance), I loved King of Kuisine in my own way. And, even if it wasn’t Hasan’s fault, even if it wasn’t what he meant to happen, that life—those nights—weren’t coming back. Not quickly, at least, and they would never be the same.
“Hasan, listen,” I said. “This is not something I ever thought I would say. You changed my life. And there are ways in which I would never take that change back, whether it was making up alter egos for the street pigeons or that time I tried to make firni.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about your attempt at making firni.”
“You’re right. We weren’t. But I’m super nervous, and I want you to know that I do like you.”
“There’s a but there.”
“There is. But I don’t know how to deal with you right now. We can joke about it, but King of Kuisine was a big part of our family. Even if your people—whoever they are—replace it, that’s going to be changed for us now. We’re going to have to adapt, start back up, gather up our regulars, and maybe change locations so that we aren’t as easy a target.”
“I don’t want you to think of yourself as a target,” Hasan protested, grasping my hand a little tighter. “I just want you to think of yourself as Munira.”
“That’s what you want, but I don’t think that’s what your world will be satisfied with. And I’m not sure if you’re ready to stand against them.”
His grasp loosened from my fingers. And then he pulled himself up and squared his jaw, and I could see—in that moment, even without the incredible costume and the emblem across his chest—where the hero was in him.
“I think it’s more of them not being ready to stand against me,” the Comet said, and his voice reverberated through the shop and its walls and my skin and my bones.
I exhaled and nodded once. “Okay. Wow. I can believe you. But I just can’t tell you what you want to hear right now. I’m sorry.”
I almost hated myself, watching him as the light ebbed out of his eyes, as he tried to smile and nodded once. But I knew that I would hate myself more if I stepped over my resolve—over what my family meant to me, over all we had to rebuild and scrape back into normalcy—if I seized back his hand and promised him my heart when it just wasn’t there yet.
It took me a moment to realize he was headed for the door.
“Wait!” I called, and he paused.
“No offense, Munira, but if this is the moment where you ask if we can still be friends . . .”
I winced. “It kind of is. But I really mean it. Not awkward tense friends, not friends who can’t forgive each other for everything that’s happened. But friends who build past it.”
For a long moment, I held my breath and watched Hasan as his face shifted. And then, though I couldn’t see out the window, the sky cleared as he broke into a smile.
“Define what the end game is, and you’ll have a deal.”
“All of it, except . . .” I gestured to both of our ha
nds—currently not grasping each other—and felt my cheeks flare. “That can wait for later. Much later.”
And though I wasn’t sure if I could hold to that promise myself, an hour later—laughing as Hasan gulped down a glass of water and fanned his mouth, an open container of spicy ramen on the counter—I could live with a little less steamy Bollywood and a little more open, honest time.
That’s the thing about fairy-tale, neatly tied happy endings. They don’t exist, even for heirs apparent to huge family food dynasties (or, well, one very singed truck currently in repairs) and bright, beaming, currently sweaty-faced boys who fall from the stars.
But the ones you have to share, with everyone you love around you and good food spread over the counters and the city you love spread out before the open window with all its glimmering magic and promise?
Those I could live with.
And plan to.
Bloom
BY PHOEBE NORTH
Every morning at Pop’s Deli is the same. That’s what I like about it.
The sky cracks gray and hazy no matter what kind of day comes after. The air is cold even in the dead of summer. It’s autumn now, but I don’t care. The leaves, brick red and brown and gold, all look like a dull cloud of sepia before the sun comes up. I throw on my jeans, a white T-shirt, my apron, and my shoes. I decide I’m not going to go to school today. Pop won’t care. When the office calls, he’ll tell them I’m sick, like he always does, and I won’t even have to ask.
When I go downstairs, Pop has just lifted the metal door that covers the storefront. It rattles on its way up and sends light all through everything, the deli case and the floor I mopped till it shone last night before closing. I go to get the chopped liver and the whitefish from the walk-in fridge, shielding my hands with a second skin of latex, then scoop them into the containers. I slice up onions and lettuce and tomatoes. I set out orange-pink lox on a platter and lay down a sheet of saran wrap over it. Pop and I work beside one another, not talking, not needing to. This work is all that’s necessary.
Eventually, our rhythm is broken by the jangling bell on the door. It’s Chava, the butcher’s girl. She gives a wink to me, greets me quickly—“Hey, sweetness”—like she always does, and I’m silent, like I always am. Then she sets about arguing with Pop about what he’s going to take for the day. Roast beef or turkey? Sweet white round slices of chicken breast? Soon they’re bickering about Chava’s tattoos again. It’s the usual topic of conversation.
I watch them, listening. I don’t talk to Chava, not yet. It’s not that I don’t want to, but I don’t really know how to draw myself out of myself, to pretend I’m an ordinary person. When you’ve lived through what I’ve lived through, it marks you just as permanently as any tattoo.
She’s interesting, though, with her pushed-up sleeves and crooked mouth. Like someone who has seen things, felt things, and tucked them inside her back pocket for safekeeping. There are tattoos you show, and ones you keep hidden. I think we both understand that.
“How could you do that to yourself?” Pop says, gesturing up and down at the whole package that is Chava. A dangling bullish nose ring and colorful sleeves that snake out beneath her work shirt. Letters in Hebrew and vivid splashes of color. Dragons. Fish. “A Jewish girl should not be tattooed.”
“A nice Jewish girl?” Chava teases. Pop waves his hand at her dismissively, but she presses on. “Whoever said I was nice?”
“When I was in the army, they wanted me to get tattoos. They said everyone in our division had to get tattoos.” Pop was in Vietnam. He hardly ever talks about it, I’ve learned, except the same handful of stories, over and over again. Like this one. I don’t look up from my work. “Fighting bees. You think I did it?”
“I don’t know,” Chava answers. “You tell me.”
“No. I told them, get out of here! They tattooed my family in the camps. My father would roll in his grave. Besides, what would the rabbi say?”
“He’d say, ‘Haven’t seen you in years, Arthur,’ ” I pipe up, hardly raising my eyes from the bagels I’m setting out in their basket.
My grandfather grumbles. I guess you could call him a Passover Jew, but not even that. He hasn’t set foot in the synagogue since my parents’ funeral, five years ago.
“Enough,” Pop says sternly. “Chava, you’re a beautiful girl. I just don’t know why you’d do that to yourself.”
“Why don’t you ask me?” she asks him, with challenging eyes. My grandfather doesn’t say anything. Chava’s smile is wily. “Thought so. Do you want the roast beef, or not?”
Pop looks at me. I shrug.
“Sure,” I say, speaking to Pop and not Chava. “Sold well last week.”
He asks me, because he knows I understand. I understand, because I work. It’s what we do in my family. It’s how life moves forward. Soon the sun will come up in earnest, and Pop’s Deli will be busy, and the rhythm will wash the world away.
It’s days like these I never want to give up.
* * *
It’s lunch hour, and time passes in a flash if you let it. I’m busy slicing sandwiches and toasting bagels and pouring customers steaming paper cups of coffee, asking them if they need room for milk. At first, I don’t see the boy who shrugs under a trench coat, his dark hair tousled into his eyes. And then I do see him, but it doesn’t matter. I’m too busy to pay him any attention. Until he makes me.
“ ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ ” he’s saying, bending over to gaze down into the deli case. His breath is fogging the glass. I’m watching it suddenly. Watching him. “ ‘He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart—’ ”
“ ‘Liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes,’ ” I say, and I’m sure I sound a little stunned. I’m not used to boys coming into the deli to quote some of my favorite modernist literature. Even I can’t resist that. A boy like him, who, from the first moment, seems to love the things that I love. With his hands in his pockets, he stands up, grinning at me. His teeth are kind of crooked, like his parents could never afford braces.
Or at least that’s what I’m imagining. My family could never afford braces either.
“You know Ulysses,” he says.
“Yeah, of course,” I tell him, my head still spinning. Reading is the only thing I care about besides the deli. “I love James Joyce.”
“That’s rare,” he tells me. “You must still be in high school.”
When people look at me, I blush. I hate it, hate how it makes me look like my feelings are open to everyone else. I’d rather be a cipher, tough, hard, unreadable, just like Pop. But I’m blushing furiously right now, right into the white collar of my T-shirt.
“I’m a senior,” I say to him. I glance over to where Pop is busy with Mrs. Feldman, arguing over the cost of lox. “Hey, are you going to buy something?”
“I thought I might try the liver,” he says, tapping the glass. Smudging it. I’ll have to clean it later, but suddenly I don’t mind. I’m grinning instead. Grinning and blushing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy under fifty order the liver before.
“We don’t make it fried with crustcrumbs.”
He’s looking at me, a smile in the corners of his mouth.
“How would you recommend it?”
“Oh, I hate liver,” I say, and then laugh. He’s laughing too. It’s remarkable, how we’re laughing together. I’m not much of a laugher. “But if you have to do it, I’d go classic. You can never go wrong with a bagel.”
“Sure,” he’s saying, watching me. Watching me blush. “Sesame. Toasted. Black coffee, too.”
“Sure thing,” I say.
* * *
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t think about the boy after that. The one who quoted Ulysses. The one who ate chopped liver and wore a wrinkled trench coat like it was some kind of statement. Or maybe he isn’t a boy; maybe he’s a man, but a youngish one. College, I think,
thinking about it too much, a freshman, no more than a sophomore. Something about his hands. I think about it at school the next day, when I decide to go in for no particular reason, and I think about it over dinner while me and Pop eat and watch the news. I think about it when my brother calls and nags me about college. I think college for the first time. And for the first time it sounds vaguely palatable. Do boys read James Joyce in college, or do they read him all on their own, like I did?
“You need to get your applications together,” my brother tells me. “High school doesn’t last forever.”
“I’m working on it,” I say, and for the first time in my life, Ethan goes quiet. He always thinks he knows what’s best for me—doesn’t understand that I’ve always known how to take care of myself. I follow signs when I see them, tea leaves in a particular pattern, birds crossing my path on a certain day. It’s not religion, not exactly, but my own strange sort of faith.
I know already that that morning, that conversation, that boy—it means something. It’s a disruption from my usual life, which usually I would hate. But I don’t mind it. Don’t mind him. I’m dreaming, which feels big and dangerous. At the same time, I don’t expect to ever see him again. He may have gotten me to pick up Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for the four-thousandth time, but he’s a symbol. I think that’s all he’ll ever be.
Until he appears two weeks later, just before we close for the day—when the only people who are there are me and Pop and the old men who always linger over their newspapers until nearly three thirty, closing time. I’m mopping when the door jingles open and in walks the boy, the smell of autumn all around him.
“ ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ ” he says, grinning at me. It’s a nervous grin.
“You’re back!” I say, wondering if I can ignore the way my face heats so that we can both pretend it isn’t happening.
“I came back a few times,” he says. “But you were never here.”
“You must have quite the taste for liver.” I look down at the floor, mopping furiously.
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