She wrote the brothers at their forwarding address; the letters were returned: address unknown. The emails bounced back: invalid recipient. The mailroom in Century Village had never heard of them. Had they started their own Florida satellite despite the noncompetition clause? She Googled. She searched Yelp. She clicked on Gourmet.com and typed in submarine sandwich recipes. She checked public records and actually paid $49.99 for a search. The Pillsbury Doughboys had disappeared.
“Should we hire a private detective?” she asked Sam.
Sam laughed. He was sure they could use the remaining stock and their collective gustatory memory to analyze the sandwich layer by layer. They would deconstruct and reassemble the prototype, arranging and sifting through its segments like so many archaeological shards. Salami, olive oil, onions, cheese. How hard could it be?
The two of them took notes, made diagrams. Here was the formula: Its base, the soft roll from the local bakery cut down the middle. First came chopped green peppers; second, exactly three slices of tomato, followed by a thick filling of diced onions marinated in oil, salt, garlic, and red pepper flakes and some other mysterious ingredient: Mayonnaise? Worcestershire sauce? Vinegar? (Balsamic? Cider? Wine?) Mustard? (English? American? French?)
Like the Pierre and Marie Curie of home economics, they separated out and sampled each in turn. Using an algorithm Sam devised, they subsequently—and painstakingly—tried all possible combinations until they came up with the closest approximation to the original. Once they nailed the sauce, they placed four squares of unnaturally yellow American cheese, the texture of thin rubber, over the onions. Next, they covered the cheese with three circles of overlapping salami studded with green peppercorns—all garnished with a precise row of five fluted pickles.
Their Eureka moment didn’t last, however, because of the unexpected difficulty in finding just the right bricks and mortar for the Paul Bunyan. In the years—decades—since the brothers had started their business, even Passamaquoddy, Maine, had begun to embrace the organic. “Nutritious Diets” and “Healthy Eating” sections were colonizing more of the supermarkets’ square acreage. Variety stores and fast-food joints were inserting the word gourmet on their signs. It wasn’t easy sourcing the nitrate-laden ingredients with their artificial coloring and large proportions of fat to lean. The establishments that sold them were in the sketchier parts of town where the shelves were dusty and the shelf life long.
But finally, Annie and Sam managed to paste together a gastronomical Grecian Urn that they could reproduce. They held a tasting for loyal customers. “A miracle,” declared the local police chief. “Like Helen Keller discovering the word for water,” marveled the nursery school principal. “As good as ever,” wrote the food columnist in the Passamaquoddy Daily Telegram. Though a few curmudgeons voiced doubts, most letters to the editor were positive, striking a you-can’t-go-home-again-but-this-comes-close tone of approval.
They also needed a new name. For obvious reasons, The Three J’s wouldn’t work. They brainstormed. Maine Chance? Maine Squeeze? The Big Bite? BUNyan House? With the addition of a Pinot Grigio, they became sillier and sillier. “PtoMaine,” Sam suggested, writing it out. By the time they agreed on Annie’s Samwich, the second bottle was half-empty.
* * *
Now she texts Sam: Everything ok? Can you spare me to run some errands?
Under control, Sam texts back. Luv u. Miss u.
She stares at the text. Miss u scrolls across her eyeballs like breaking news on CNN. How can I tell Sam? she laments yet again.
* * *
In her front hall, she kicks the mail to the side, throws her coat on the floor, drops her pocketbook on the table. Her four-leaf-clover key chain breaks—no surprise—and the keys scatter and roll, one tilting precariously on the heating grate. She doesn’t bother to chase after them.
She flops onto the sofa, wrapping herself in the afghan her mother-in-law gave her when Sam’s parents moved to a gated community on the Gulf Coast. Its colors are tropical: oranges and yellows and chartreuses and pale orchid. Her mother-in-law, when she knitted it, must have already been dreaming of nicer, warmer places that offered oversized tricycles and pastel cocktails topped by parasols.
Annie doesn’t want a nicer, warmer place. She wants what she has now. This job. This husband. This house. This life.
She knows, of course, that people die young. She’s donated to bone marrow searches and Kickstarter campaigns for kids with leukemia and a young woman who wanted only to finish her college degree before her heart/lung transplant. She supports a fund for wounded soldiers and one for scholarships to memorialize lives cut short in their prime.
When she checks the mirror, she looks the same as always. She’s no Mimi from La Bohème, all skin and bones whittled away from a wasting disease. Okay, she’s tired after long hours at the shop. Who wouldn’t be? And the dry cough could well come from inhaling onions and Tabasco sauce all day, not to mention the unrelenting cold of February in Maine. Half the town is going around hacking into their lumber-jacketed and down-stuffed sleeves. Is this the bargaining stage of grief Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talks about? Hasn’t she always had a sense of doom? Get a grip, she tells herself. She’s feeling otherwise completely fine. At least she was before her doctor’s visit.
The doctor.
Her chest x-ray, CAT scan, and PET scan glowered from his monitor. Grasping a letter opener, Dr. Buckley pointed to the white areas on her lungs. He used words like multiple masses, pulmonary nodules, swollen chest glands, until she covered her ears. She turned away from the tip of his pointer, where the blob overlapped the outline of her lungs like a salami slice annexing a square of cheese. She remembered the pictures of diseased lungs they’d projected onto a screen at Smokers Anonymous. Scare tactics. Okay, she was scared. Is scared. Instead she concentrated on the letter opener, on its shiny silver side, its scrolled handle, the engraved words: To Ambrose Buckley in grateful appreciation … Because his fingers covered the rest of the inscription, she couldn’t tell who was grateful or in appreciation of what. A life he saved?
Her life couldn’t be saved; that much she had gleaned from what she had assumed was an ordinary appointment. Dr. Buckley had delivered her. He’d brought her into the world, into life. And now … Tears spilled down his baggy, grooved cheeks.
She’d protested the biopsy. She needed to think about it. Why go through surgery to confirm what already seemed so clear? she reasoned. After her exam, he’d sent her to radiology, where the techs said nothing and the young radiologist refused to meet her eye.
“There are specialists,” he said.
She pointed to the monitor and the report on his desk. “Isn’t that irrefutable evidence?”
“I’m not an expert. I would be remiss in not referring you. And at your young age—at any age—it is only sensible to seek a second opinion.”
“I can’t decide anything now. I need some time to process this.”
“Of course,” he conceded. “Though let me send on your PET scan to the son of a colleague, a thoracic surgeon in Portland, a rising star. Don’t wait too long. There are all kinds of new medical treatments that an old country doctor like me has never even heard of.”