Tweet Cute(17)

Fair enough. I could delay my return home with practice and impromptu field trips with Pepper all I wanted, but that did nothing to get me out of a Supreme Dad Lecture of the highest order. The kind where he doesn’t even wait for me to get upstairs to the apartment we live in above the deli, but raises a thumb and jerks it to the booth in the back, which my mom dubbed the “Time-Out Booth” when we were kids. These days it’s more like the break booth, where we’ll scarf sandwiches mid-shift or do our homework during lulls, but every so often it seems to revert back to its original purpose to suit my parents’ needs.

The truly demoralizing thing about it reverting to the Time-Out Booth is that I haven’t done anything worthy of it in ages. And now that I have, it isn’t over anything edgy, like when our upstairs neighbor Benny hotwired a motorcycle, or when Annie, one of our regulars, got caught with a joint in Roosevelt Park. It was because of a stupid tweet.

“You know we’re not that kind of business.” My dad has so rarely had to discipline me that it’s almost funny, how he’s straightening his back at the worn-out cushions of the booth as though his clothes don’t fit quite right. “I don’t even like that we’re on Twitter and Facebook at all.”

“How else are people going to know about us?” I ask, for about the umpteenth time.

“The same way they always have, for the past sixty years. This is a community, not some … internet clickbait.”

I don’t understand how my dad can look so deceptively young and hip for a dad—all bearded and skinny with a baseball cap that confuses customers into thinking he’s our much older brother—and still be such a bonehead about social media. Honestly, our food is so good it should be in ridiculous Hub Seed roundups and viral food videos. I have watched literal tears form in people’s eyes when they’ve bitten into our sandwiches. The way the cheese in our grilled cheeses peels apart with each bite is near ungodly in nature. With just a few well-lit Instagrams, a few well-executed tweets …

They could be out of the hole they’re in right now, that’s for damn sure.

But I can’t say that to him outright. My parents think Ethan and I don’t know we’re not doing so hot right now, only dealing with the finances in the back office when we’re out of sight—and I’m sure that has every bit as much to do with my dad’s pride as it does with protecting us from it. Trying to push my agenda here will only make things worse.

“And besides,” my dad says, “that tweet was crossing a line.”

“I didn’t think freaking Marigold was gonna retweet it.”

“Even if she hadn’t, it was over the line. I don’t want to be provoking other businesses, especially not—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “And now it’s gone ‘viral,’” he says, using actual air quotes, “so we can’t even delete it. Especially since they responded.”

“They what?”

I lunge for my phone, my dad already warning me against the impulse to send something back. But why the hell shouldn’t we? A silly Mean Girls quote in response to them literally stealing from our business?

“This is the Twitter equivalent of spitting in Grandma Belly’s face. You’re gonna just take this lying down?”

He presses his face into his hand. “Everything doesn’t have to be so dramatic.”

In all honesty, I’m a little bit stunned. I may be way more of a hothead than he is, but nobody is a fiercer defender of Grandma Belly than my dad. I open my mouth to remind him as much, but he beats me to the punch.

“No more tweeting. The account is off-limits.”

“But Dad—”

“But nothing.” He gets up abruptly and claps a hand on my shoulder. “You’re gonna be running this place someday, Jack. I have to know you’re gonna be able to do that with its best interests in mind.”

My face burns. His back is turned to me, so he misses the wince I don’t manage to swallow down in time—the one that has only gotten more pronounced over the years as his implications that I’m the twin who will stay behind and take charge of the deli have slowly but certainly become less implied and spoken more like facts.

“Anyway, you’re on register in the evenings for the rest of the week.”

“Seriously?”

It’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. It’s the fact that my dad can flip from telling me he expects me to run this place and then treating it like a punishment in the next heartbeat that really gets me. To me, it’s yet another spoken confirmation of an unspoken thing—that Ethan’s the twin destined for greatness, and I’m the one who will stick around and deal with whatever he leaves in his wake.

“Consider yourself lucky. The next time an eighties pop icon retweets you, I’ll make it a month.”

“They ripped us off,” I argue. I know it’s not helping or hurting my case, but I don’t even care about that anymore. The punishment’s been doled out. The anger is still there.

My dad lets out a sigh, then rattles the shoulder he has his hand on and squeezes. He’s making one of those fatherhood is testing me faces he makes when one of us says something he’s not sure how to answer, like asking about the Easter Bunny, or why the college undergrads smell weird when they come in the deli after 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. (Pot, to be clear. It was 800 percent pot.) “I know, kid. But we’ve still got something they don’t.”