Sophie agreed that it had “a lot of character.”
With The Brod on the verge of a splashy opening, pulling the trigger on this auspiciously located property felt like the right way to say, “I love you, please relocate to New York and move in with me.”
Josh pictured waking up on Sunday mornings with Sophie. They’d complete The New York Times crossword together. He’d do most of it （in pen） with his neat block lettering, and she’d pull the occasional stubborn pun from thin air. Afterward, Josh would go down on her and—scratch that, she would insist on showering first and then he’d go down on her—and Sophie would return the favor but not in a sixty-nine configuration because it’s “distracting.” After that, he’d turn on NPR and make breakfast—baked eggs or avocado toast or lemon ricotta pancakes. Whatever she wanted.
He put in his best offer, using most of his inheritance, and they went downstairs to share what would be their first and only meal at The Smile.
* * *
—
SIX MONTHS LATER, THE SUNDAY crossword puzzle is blank and buried under a mound of folded newsprint. No sex in any configuration. No lemon ricotta pancakes or renovated kitchen. No Sophie. And yet, there’s fucking Sunday brunch hipster bullshit right outside his front window, like a targeted assault. Even five stories up he can hear them: otherwise sane people spending hours of their weekend huddled in the cold, waiting for their names to be shouted by a hostess. All for the privilege of waiting forty minutes for a hungover line cook to spoon under-seasoned hollandaise over a couple of badly poached eggs.
If there’s one thing Josh can’t stand, it’s an improperly poached egg.
If he’s allowed a second thing, it would be women who take new jobs in Dubai when their boyfriends are in the middle of career implosions.
The wail of the buzzer reverberates around the cavernous brick walls, shaking him out of his half-hearted Sophie reminiscence.
Finally. His fucking Ess-a-Bagel order. He punches the door button on the intercom and listens for the groan of the elevator, hauling the delivery guy up to the fifth floor.
When it lurches to a stop, Briar steps through the doors and hands him the Ess-a-Bagel bag without looking up from her giant phone. Great. Now he’s being ambushed in his fortress of solitude.
“New job?” he asks as she brushes past him. “The digital marketing agency didn’t work out for you?” He eyes her blue faux-fur coat. “Interesting uniform.”
“I stalked the building and intercepted the delivery guy. He got an excellent tip and didn’t even have to risk his life in your death-trap elevator.”
Josh hears a familiar click of heels against the wood floors he has yet to refinish. “Bring everything right through here!” his mother, Abby, calls out, as three men in moving company T-shirts wheel an assortment of restaurant equipment off the elevator and into what is supposed to be Josh’s living room. “Why aren’t you answering our texts?” Abby asks, before taking a last sip from a La Colombe coffee cup. His mother looks around the loft in a way that a stranger would find innocuous, but Josh recognizes the undercurrent of well-meaning judgment. “There’s another offer for Brodsky’s. The accountant wants to meet again. You need to be involved, Joshua.”
“What is all this?” he asks, as two of the movers haul the once-iconic （and constantly malfunctioning） neon Brodsky’s sign into the apartment. Josh is convinced his career troubles began the moment he removed it from the fa?ade.
“We cleaned out the cellar.” Abby removes a measuring tape from her Goyard tote and extends it across the width of what was intended to be Sophie’s office. “The building will show better without the clutter your father accumulated down there for forty years.” In addition to storing Brodsky’s deliveries, the cellar had become a glorified closet for all the junk Danny knew better than to bring back to the family’s overstuffed Upper West Side apartment.
“Absolutely not,” Josh protests.
Abby places a hand on her hip. “I’m not paying Manhattan Mini Storage a dime while three hundred square feet of space is sitting here unused. I thought you were renovating.”
“I’ve been busy.” For most of the summer, he’d successfully dodged his mother’s texts by claiming to be in the Hamptons.
Briar looks up from her phone. “With what?”
It’s a fair question. Since the failure of The Brod, Josh has been whittling down what was left of his savings. Ordering food, avoiding social obligations. Definitely not working.