My Last Innocent Year(44)

Manny was behind the counter, sliding his knife carefully across a side of bright pink salmon. Some of the old timers liked to have my dad slice their lox instead; Manny did a good job, but Abe sliced the lox so thin you could read the newspaper through it. (And also, although they didn’t say it out loud, they never got used to seeing a Dominican slice lox.) People in a hurry preferred the presliced packages in the back, but those who had the time—those who knew better—waited for Abe.

“Hi, Izzy. Your dad’s in the back,” Manny said without looking up. He wasn’t being rude. Manny had been at Rosen’s as long as I could remember, working his way up from stock boy to lox slicer. He hadn’t gotten there without learning the first rule of lox slicing: never look up.

I found Abe in his office, wedged behind the desk that had once belonged to Ruby. “Hello, stranger,” he said, rising to give me a hug. My father was a small man, narrow like a dancer. His thick gray hair was combed neatly to the side, and he smelled strongly of aftershave. He’d gotten thinner since I’d last seen him, and I worried he wasn’t taking care of himself.

“Hi, Izzy.” My cousin’s voice startled me. Benji, Leon and Fanny’s son, was sitting on a stool in the corner, a stack of purchase orders on his lap. I hadn’t seen Benji for a while, not since he’d graduated from SUNY Binghamton with a degree in business or marketing or some other uninteresting thing.

“Isabel, you want anything?” Abe asked.

“Sure.” I wasn’t hungry, but there was no point refusing since I knew he’d bring it anyway.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Benji.

“Helping out,” he said, and something about his tone annoyed me, the implication that I wasn’t helping my dad or that he needed help at all.

“Oh, yeah? With what?”

“This and that. Getting organized mostly, putting systems in place.” He went on for a while about maximizing efficiency, streamlining productivity, getting systems to talk to each other—a bunch of business school lingo I had a hard time picturing in the context of Rosen’s Appetizing.

“Are you getting him to use that?” I pointed to the computer on Abe’s desk. Someone—maybe Benji—had convinced him to buy it a year or two ago and, as far as I knew, he’d never turned it on.

“Actually, yes,” he said. “I’m showing him that while it feels like more work now, it will be less work in the long run.”

“Good luck with that. Are you working at the counter? Abe says that’s the only way to learn the business.”

Benji pursed his lips. “I’m not learning the business, Izzy. I’m just helping out. But sometimes, yes. When it’s busy.”

“Has it been busy?” I asked.

Benji paused. “Now and again.”

Abe walked back in and handed me a bagel with whitefish salad, my favorite. I felt a pang of something as he and Benji chatted about a shipment that had been delayed, not jealousy, more like nostalgia for something that didn’t exist anymore, that maybe had never existed. I’d never really thought about what would happen to the store when Abe retired, or died. I guess I thought he’d sell the building at some point—that’s what most people like my dad did, since the real estate was almost always more valuable than the business itself. Abe said the only reason Rosen’s had survived all these years was because Ruby had had the sense to buy the building when he had the chance. But now I wondered if he had other plans, and if they involved Benji.

Abe glanced up front. “Benji, there’s a woman by the candy counter.”

“Okay, Uncle Abe.” Benji stood up, and I saw he was wearing an apron. “Izzy, my mother says you should come for Shabbos when you get back to the city. Celia will be there too, with the twins.”

“Sure,” I said, through a mouthful of whitefish. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but I’d love to come.”

“What do you mean you’re not sure when you’ll be back?” Abe asked when Benji was gone.

“Just that I was thinking of staying in New Hampshire this summer.” This was something Connelly and I had talked about briefly before I left. Roxanne was going to England for the summer, so he’d largely be on his own. The idea was both thrilling and terrifying—lazy afternoons holed up in his office or house, wide swaths of uninterrupted time to read and write. We could go for drives together, eat a meal, take a walk, things we’d never done. But I didn’t have a job or a place to live and I hadn’t discussed it with Kelsey, with whom I was planning to share an apartment and who would want to know why I was staying at Wilder and wouldn’t let me get away with vague excuses. I didn’t know why I’d mentioned it to Abe, and when I saw how panicked it made him, I instantly regretted it.

“In New Hampshire? Why? What would you do there? Where would you live? You can’t stay in the dorms.”

“Nothing’s settled. It might not happen. It probably won’t.” His face softened. “You didn’t tell me Benji was working here.”

“Fanny asked me. I guess he needs a job to attract a nice Orthodox girl. I don’t know what that degree was for.” He put on his glasses and squinted at something on his desk. “To tell you the truth, I never thought he was that smart, but he has some good ideas.”