“With all due respect,” Josh says, “Briar’s claim to fame is a photo series of Taylor Swift as handbags. Not getting paying customers through the door.”
His sister adjusts her posture. “Excuse me, I can get a hundred people to show up to anything.”
“The beer garden pop-up was packed,” Radhya adds.
“Being an influencer doesn’t qualify you to run a restaurant.”
“I grew up in a restaurant!” Briar shouts. She’s red in the face. “And I’m tired of you underestimating me. I’m an adult. I’m good at this stuff. And I’m not going to watch while you sell Dad’s legacy to the highest bidder.”
Glancing at a seething Briar and then Josh, Radhya clears her throat. “It’s just a pop-up to start. Give us till the end of the year to prove it’s a good concept. After that, if you still want to sell, we’ll…find a different location.”
Briar huffs but she hands him a plate. “Sit down so we can discuss how this is going to work.”
All his instincts urge him to flee. To let the self-righteous anger overwhelm every rational thought. To take a little bit of sick pleasure in having the last word.
He’s not sure why this time is different. Why he reaches for the plate.
Maybe it’s the way Briar is punctuating her thoughts with periods rather than question marks. Or that he can already taste three different traditional Jewish dishes that would work perfectly with Radhya’s Indian flavors. Or because Radhya clears her throat and says, “You’ll really regret it if you storm out of here without trying the wontons. They’re fucking amazing.”
This time he presses his boots into the floorboards. He silently names five things he can see, four things he can smell—which is easy because he’s standing in front of some of the best Sichuan food in the city. He can practically feel the handle of his favorite chef’s knife in his palm. His hands are definitely too sensitive to belong to a chef. Luckily he has all the time in the world to build them back up.
25
WHEN ARI RECEIVES AN EMAIL from Brad with the subject line NeverTired!!! she initially assumes it to be some kind of motivational tactic. Brad is prone to sending coke-fueled all-staff emails time-stamped at three a.m. featuring the “inspirational” story of how he quit his insurance sales job to “bootstrap” WinProv.
But it’s a client brief. Ari will fly to Austin for NeverTired’s strategic leadership retreat, featuring an “ideation and concepting session,” followed by an afternoon improv workshop.
“They have some really big things in the works,” Brad tells her over the phone. “They just hit number thirty on the App Store’s business chart.” He takes a huge, suspicious sniff. “They’re coming for Grubhub’s crown.”
Still, she’d rather get paid a handsome salary to teach NeverTired executives how to play improv games than spend hours on the actual NeverTired platform for poverty wages.
Radhya calls every week. She doesn’t trust Ari’s emoji-filled text messages to accurately convey her friend’s state of mind. It’s understandable. Maybe because they lived together, they communicate with an extra layer of nuance floating just above the actual dialogue. Rad notices the little things other people miss. It compels Ari to work extra hard at expressing nothing but bland okay-ness.
“Briar’s introducing me to a branding strategist,” Radhya says. “We’re meeting him today before my shift.”
“Cool.” Ari does her best to convey a supportive tone, which is really all she can do from five hundred miles away.
Briar has consistently commented on all of Ari’s generic selfies with the broken heart emoji. It’s unclear if this is intended to be a comfort or some passive-aggressive defense of her brother.
“She’s really been a huge help.” Suspicious pause. And then on cue: “Speaking of help, Josh came over to pick up his pasta machine.”
There’s a stubborn silence on each end of the line.
It’s not like Ari specifically requested that Rad never bring him up. It’s more of a process-of-elimination situation, like an allergy test. Movies: not reactive. Briar: mildly reactive. Pasta machines: highly reactive. But how does Radhya invariably find ways to steer every call down a conversational back alley toward Josh? （“Seriously, what happened?” “Have you spoken at all?” “Would it be okay if I—”） Ari, just as inevitably, either changes the subject or announces that she’s very sorry but she needs to hang up now.