“Just because you and Rachel pricked your thumbs and mixed your blood when you were kids.” He held up his hand. “Give me a knife,” he laughed. “Seriously,” he continued, “you’re all I need.”
Though she understands how a family of two, biologically limited, might cling together to the exclusion of all others, statements like these make her feel both claustrophobic and contrite. She needs Sam. Of course she needs him. After seventeen years of marriage, he’s as much a part of her life as the streets of Passamaquoddy and the scuffed floors of the sandwich shop. Still, Sam seems to lean on her more than she does on him.
“In every marriage, the balance is off,” reports Rachel, graduate of a master’s-degree program in social work, specialist in adolescent angst, eating disorders, and post-divorce therapy. “One partner always loves the other more.”
Annie is sure this isn’t true, though she doesn’t argue with Rachel. She knows she and Sam love each other equally. But on the playing field of dependency, the seesaw tips.
“I can’t imagine not having you by my side,” Sam tells her at the shop, in bed, at the grocery store, over a glass of wine, under a shared umbrella, inside the movie theater, outside their front door. “I don’t get those couples who lead separate lives. How would I ever cope without you?”
“You don’t have to. I’m not going anywhere” is always her answer.
Was her answer. Her smug, satisfied answer. Is she being punished for this certainty? After all, Rachel’s husband surprised the hell out of her, running off with that ditzy dental hygienist with the (ironic, oxymoronic) bad breath. Who can predict?
Given their superglue togetherness, Annie was convinced she and Sam would walk into the sunset, hip replacement to hip replacement; they’d occupy matching rocking chairs on their assisted-living porch, then go gently into that good night, if not exactly with Romeo-and-Juliet timing, at least within a few months of each other.
Not that she doesn’t know life is unfair. All those people she went to school with popping out kids as easily as blowing their nose. All those people with intact families, healthy-hearted fathers, loving siblings, and a mother who doesn’t embarrass them. All those people who didn’t have to hold a dead daughter against their breast, a perfect, perfect baby with a lace of pale-blue veins fluttering over her eyelids, a sweep of lashes that a Disney princess would covet, a flawless valentine of a mouth, a comic fuzz of hair like a baby chick’s.
The nurse had to pry her out of Annie’s arms. Finger by finger, wrist, elbow, shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” the nurse kept saying.
“It is not okay,” Annie screamed.
“What shall we call her?” she asked Sam, the baby book with their checked-off favorites still tucked into her overnight bag.
“Better not to,” he whispered, his words a sob against her ear.
Later, in her narrow hospital bed, as her uterus contracted and bled, he held her all night, his arms the same unrelenting vise with which she had clutched beautiful, anonymous, perfect Baby Girl Stevens-Strauss.
And even later, her husband, who had thrown up before breakfast all during her (his!) first trimester, who’d matched her cramp for cramp at each miscarriage, whose every sore throat signaled pneumonia and for whom the slightest nick meant gangrene, ended up in the hospital. “A depressive episode. Exhaustion,” was the official term. “Falling apart. Emotionally fragile,” the first-year resident translated. “Talk about feeling your pain.”
“It’s his pain too,” Annie said.
Hasn’t she paid her dues? Hasn’t Sam?
Now she checks her watch. She knows she should go to the shop. It’s almost lunchtime. Customers will be queuing up, a majority of the hungry masses consisting of locals who grab the same place in line every day exactly at noon. “Please open on Sundays,” they beg.
“Nothing wrong with peanut butter and jelly,” Sam jokes.
“Or a lobster roll,” she adds.
She should be next to Sam now, building the sandwiches, samwiches, wrapping the finished ones in the custom-designed waxed paper, chatting with the customers while simultaneously moving them forward—a talent she’s honed to an art. She should be ringing up sales, slicing tomatoes, checking in with the suppliers. But Megan’s there, Rachel’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie’s godchild, who, younger than her classmates, is taking off the year between high school and college. Megan has volunteered to intern at Annie’s Samwich Shop. She hopes to go into the restaurant business, she explained.
“This is hardly a restaurant,” Sam pointed out.
It didn’t matter. Megan wanted hands-on experience to help her decide between a liberal arts college and a culinary institute.
“Okay, but a paid internship,” Annie insisted. “And I, like your mother, strongly suggest liberal arts.”
“Crack that whip,” Rachel implored. “What better way to send her running toward English and art history.”
Though Annie agreed to be tough—it was a tough business, after all—she herself had floundered in figuring out a career. What a stroke of fortune when she and Sam decided to buy the shop from the three brothers who had owned it from the time her own father was a child. Three fat, cookie-cutter men of indeterminate age, Julius, John, and Jerome, so pale they seemed dusted with flour, wearing spotless white aprons and white caps. The Pillsbury Doughboys, everyone called them. So much a part of the marble counter and the mullioned windows that everyone assumed they’d die with their immaculate white clogs on, keeled over the last Paul Bunyan of the day with the same lack of fuss with which they spread mayonnaise and sliced rolls. Not a single Passamaquoddian believed the Doughboys would ever desert Maine, let alone sell such a thriving enterprise.
To Annie’s amazement, as soon as she and Sam became proprietors, she found herself doing something she loved. The accounts. The buying. The assembling. The spiffing up of walls with flea-market renditions of laden tables and kitchen interiors.
Not that it was easy. The day after the sale, the brothers discarded their aprons, donned Hawaiian shirts, and fled to Florida. Without leaving them the recipe for the Paul Bunyan. Had their lawyer, Bob Bernstein, who’d studied for his Bar Mitzvah with Sam, forgotten to put this crucial requirement in the purchase agreement? Of course not, their affronted attorney exclaimed; they needed to check page seven, paragraph three, subhead a. The parties had signed and disappeared without honoring a critical clause of the agreement. Not his fault. Paul Bunyans were his mother’s milk. He was addicted. Would he ever have left out the most important line in the whole contract?
Though it took a half hour on the phone, written and verbal apologies, and a bottle of single malt to mitigate the insult to both legal and epicurean know-how, the fact remained that they didn’t have the recipe for the most famous sandwich within a hundred-mile radius. Hell, the most famous sandwich in Maine. Natives who moved from the state and found themselves suffering from gastronomic nostalgia would order Paul Bunyans packed in dry ice and FedExed to places as far away as San Francisco. On visits back home, their hosts would wrap up a few dozen for return flights, causing fellow passengers to either relish the tear-watering smell or ask to change their seats. Without the recipe, Annie and Sam knew their business would bomb.