Six months later, after a lot of cleaning and scut work, leaving my drawings one by one on Jonathan’s station and never mentioning them, and dealing with a metric ton of shit from his other employees, I was Jonathan’s apprentice. When I thanked him, so excited I could hardly believe it, he shook his head, half impressed and half irritated by my tenacity. It would remain his general attitude toward me for the tenure of my apprenticeship.
What I didn’t tell him was that after a year and a half of working my ass off to get in, I didn’t plan on putting up with any shit from anyone ever again. I also didn’t tell him that I was only sixteen, or that I’d been skipping so much school I’d never graduate, nor did I intend to. When he found out later, he’d read me the obligatory riot act because that’s what Jonathan did. But then he’d clapped me on the shoulder and winked, and I’d known he got it. After all, he’d left school at fifteen to learn tattooing from a biker called Shannon who had a reputation for the most delicate line work in the area, and for punching anyone who didn’t like his tattoos.
So when I told M&M that the shop was my home, I wasn’t exaggerating. It was the only place I’d ever felt comfortable, accepted. The only place I’d ever woken up excited to go. It meant everything to me.
I’d taken the apartment upstairs when Raul had moved in with his wife six years ago, and I’d taken over the lease on the shop when they had their daughter three years ago. Raul still owned a share of it, since I hadn’t come close to having the cash outright, but I was slowly buying him out. I poured every penny the shop made back into it, and any money I made that didn’t go to groceries or rent went to paying off Raul.
One day the shop would be mine, officially. Now, with my best friend gone, that felt even more imperative. One day, no one would be able to take it away from me. No one would be able to tell me that tattooing was a waste of time, like my mother had. That I should get a normal job, like my father had. That I didn’t have a head for money, like my sister had. Or that I’d never succeed in this business long-term, like more assholes than I could count had told me, meaning that women tattooers were only good for a few things, and none of them were being the boss.
I held the promise of someday like a touchstone, focusing on it whenever I was stressed, whenever I was overwhelmed, whenever I needed to be reminded of what I was working toward.
One day, the place I loved the most, the place I felt most like myself, would be mine.
⌃ ⌃ ⌃
Hey, J
I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I might be sick of sandwiches. I know, I know, blasphemy, right? But after months of messing around with proportions to make sure everything’s in balance, I just want to eat something that isn’t delivered between two slices of bread. For real, last night I got Chinese takeout from this awful place on the corner, Golden Empress, which has been shut down by the health department twice, just to avoid eating dinner made up of the stuff I take home from the shop at the end of the day so it won’t go to waste.
But then while I was eating (really bad) sweet and sour pork, I got this idea for a new sandwich. It’ll be thinly sliced barbecued pork, a honey mustard cabbage slaw, and pickled red onion relish on rye. I’m going to try it over the weekend if I have some time. But see? Sandwiches have colonized my brain.
First year at Walnut Hill, we spent a month on eggs. Scrambled, boiled, fried, shirred, poached, deviled, over-easy, omelets, quiches, soufflés… At first it was great. Eggs are the perfect food. But after a week, I was sick of them. After two, I felt like puking at the smell of egg yolk. By the end of the unit, I couldn’t even see yellow without gagging.
Anyway, as soon as Melt is in the black I’ll start buying real groceries again. Oh yeah, I named the shop Melt…what do you think? I wanted something short since everyone nicknames places anyway, but I didn’t want to go totally abstract with it, you know, cuz it’s a damn sandwich and coffee joint. And I definitely didn’t want to call it Christopher’s Sandwich Emporium or some crap, right?
I’m sure you could’ve come up with the perfect name. You’ve always been better at the creative shit than me.
Ok, well, I hope you’re feeling better, man. Or…you know what I mean. I wish you’d let me come visit but I get it.
Love,
C
Chapter 2
“Go the fuck away,” I mumbled at the beam of sunlight boring into my eye socket, and buried my face deeper in my pillow. The minute I let out a sigh of comfort, though, my alarm clock went off. I reached over the side of the bed to smother it but I was too slow. The damn thing barked its robot-dog-creature bark and rolled under the bed. Convinced I could still snag it, I slithered to the side of the bed and reached as far as I could.
My fingertips had just brushed its evil head when it robot-barked again and rolled out the other side toward the kitchen.
And I fell off the bed and landed on the floor in a tumble of blankets, hair, elbows, and swearing. I stared up at my ceiling, which I’d painted to look like a skeleton hand had broken through and was plunging into the apartment, unable to muster the energy to move.
Fuck the morning for having sunlight. Fuck the floor for being hard. Fuck Daniel for finding that damn alarm clock at a street sale last summer and knowing I’d think it was funny.
I rummaged around the blankets and found that my phone had fallen with me, so I dashed off a quick text to Daniel: Fuck you forever for this TERRIBLE alarm clock. May your every night be plagued with dreams of tart cherry jam and your descendants for twenty generations never find a moment of peace again. Love you. Jewish curses 4ever. Xoxo.
More immediately, fuck my own clumsiness. Last night I’d shattered my coffeepot on the floor, which meant that the closest thing I had to caffeine within fifty feet was my coffee ice cream. Which. Hmm, what were the caffeine levels in coffee ice cream…?
As promised, over the last week, I’d spent every morning before I opened the shop looking through the portfolios that tattooers had sent me, looking for someone who might be a good fit at Small Change. But no one was right. And for me to let some stranger into the sanctuary I’d created, they had to be right.
There were some good artists, but two of them were mostly interested in styles that Marcus and I already did, and the three who were artistically complementary weren’t a good fit, personality-wise.
The first, Carl, had been oblivious and inconsiderate. He’d interrupted often, told me he could help me with business strategies, and essentially acted like we’d be lucky to have him. When I told him it wasn’t going to work out, he’d demanded to know why, and when I said it just wasn’t a good vibe with the rest of the shop, he’d laughed and said he didn’t really want to work at the chick shop anyway. Clearly a gem.
The second artist we’d interviewed, Lawrence, had been a nightmare, which was doubly disappointing because he’d sounded great when I talked to him on the phone. He’d been excited about the work, had smart things to say about art, and seemed jazzed to meet everyone. But in person, he’d been pure typical tattoo bravado from the moment he’d walked in. Marcus had met him at the door, and Lawrence had narrowed his eyes and given him the kind of knuckle-cracking handshake that certain men subjected Marcus to when they were uncomfortable. He’d hit on Morgan within five seconds of sitting down to talk to us and when she’d shaken her head and said, “Stop,” he’d raised his hands in a who-me gesture and said, “What’d I do?” He’d been polite to me, but when I’d asked him why he was interested in working at Small Change, he didn’t have an answer and didn’t try to come up with one. He’d made the entire vibe feel gross, and we’d all agreed he was a no the second the door had shut behind him.
The third artist had spent the whole interview alternately staring into space and checking her phone fifteen times (Morgan counted). She’d seemed bored, rude, and entitled, and when I’d asked her how she got along with clients, she’d said, in a voice that suggested pride, “They usually don’t like me, but they like their tattoo
s.” Marcus and I had barely managed to contain our eye rolls at this. I understood better than most that in this macho business, sometimes it was beneficial to seem intimidating and hard-assed so people didn’t dismiss you as weak or take advantage of you. But with clients, you had to be the opposite. Often they were nervous, or their tattoo was meaningful, or they were in a lot of pain. Making a client dislike you was a surefire way to ensure they never came back to a shop, even if the work was good.
There were still two more artists I needed to call, but I had to spend this morning painting; I was way behind where I wanted to be, and the show at Malik’s gallery in January was getting too close for comfort. Hence why I had set my damn alarm for eight a.m. on a Saturday when I hadn’t finished in the shop until one. Hence why I had dropped my coffeepot while blundering around last night. Hence why I currently had no caffeine and was actually going to have to leave the house.
“God, get it together, Holtzman,” I muttered.
I dragged myself up off the floor and pulled on the black jeans and bleach-spattered hoodie I’d dropped there last night. I didn’t have time for the catching up that would be involved in running into people I knew (a real danger when you’d lived and worked in the same place for years), so rather than go to Chapterhouse, my favorite coffee shop, I walked down 4th to Bainbridge where a new coffee and sandwich shop had opened over the summer. It was close to the shop and I made it my job to know the other local business owners. You never knew when you could help each other out.
But though I’d noted when it first opened, it had been so brand-new and chaotic that I hadn’t gone in. Then Daniel had left and I’d thrown myself into things at the shop and gotten so busy I’d forgotten about it.
Now, though, the promise of coffee and a bagel in a place where I didn’t know every barista and customer sounded like heaven.
I was already on to thinking about my painting when I walked into Melt. The sign outside was ugly. Bad font and too modern for the vibe of the place, which looked like a twist on a classic deli inside: black and white checkerboard tile, black vinyl chairs and white café tables, and stools lining a chest-high counter that ran to the left of the cash register. The hulking espresso machine was shiny and high-tech, and the display case housed bagels and other pastries. There was a blackboard that listed the different sandwiches, but the writing was crabbed, and since it was too early for sandwiches anyway, I didn’t bother trying to read it.
I ordered a bagel and a large coffee with a quad shot from the geeky, bespectacled kid behind the counter who seemed shockingly awake for this time of morning. He raised an eyebrow at my order then grinned at me. He had a contagious smile—lazy and borderline silly.
“I don’t need a bag.” I accepted my bagel and folded a dollar into his tip jar. I turned away to doctor my coffee, taking a big, excited bite of the everything bagel, the world’s greatest combination of flavors—garlic, then onion, then salt, then cream cheese—exploding on my tongue.
As the white cream unfurled into the dark coffee, my mind was back on the painting I was about to work on. I saw the way I’d razor the edge of my medium dry brush so I could stipple white into the black paint I’d lain down for the hair. As I took another bite of bagel and stirred my coffee at the same time, I almost knocked the cup over, and I made a grab for it with both hands.
In a cosmic joke repetition of this morning’s alarm clock mishap, as I reached out to save my coffee I dropped my bagel on the café floor.
“No!” I cursed a blue streak at myself, at my coffee, and gravity, and crouched down trying to decide if the patient could be saved. But no, its seeds were scattering the floor like the saddest glitter, and blobs of cream cheese had splatted around it.
Mid-swears, bells tinkled and I found myself squinting up at an indistinct figure in the doorway, carrying a cardboard box on his shoulder and backlit by the sun.
“Uh, everything okay here?” the guy said.
I said nothing, too busy mentally calculating whether I was willing to drop more cash on another bagel and immediately deciding it was necessary not only to my sanity but to my ability to even get up off the floor.
“What’d you do?” The guy asked, this time looking toward the kid.
“Nothing!” he said. “She—er…”
“Ugh, it’s not his fault.” I dragged myself up. “I dropped my damn…” I gestured unnecessarily at the dead bagel, grabbed a bunch of napkins, and started wiping at the cream cheese on the floor, giving the bagel a regretful pat before I dropped it in the trash. Then I carefully put a to-go lid on my coffee so it couldn’t suffer the same fate.
By this time, the guy had put down the box and gone behind the counter. Without the sun blinding me I recognized him. I’d seen him around the neighborhood a few times and noticed him setting things up when Melt had first opened.
He was tall, with the thick build of someone naturally powerful, rather than the kind of sculpted muscles of someone who worked out in a gym. About my age, I thought: early- to mid-thirties. His thick red hair was cut close on the sides and long on top, combed back from a square hairline. He had a strong jaw and a smirky mouth, and his stubble was nearly blond. It was his eyes that I couldn’t look away from though. They were almost the same color as his hair—a warm goldish-orange—and shot through with flecks of blue.
My first impression was that his face was arresting, interesting the way sometimes in a gallery there’s one painting that pulls you in and won’t let you walk past. Each line eases into the next, each color shades into the one beside it in just the way your eye desires. Once you start to see the details you can’t look away.
But the more I looked, the more interesting converted to handsome as hell.
He sliced a bagel in one clean stroke and spread it with cream cheese, looking at me with mild amusement. “Dramatic start to the day,” he commented, eyes sliding to the spot where I’d been crouched when he came in.
“Not even my first encounter with a floor this morning, unfortunately.” I leaned an elbow on the counter, drawn toward him.
“One of those, huh?” He spoke with the ease of a food service professional accustomed to such exchanges, and the utter empathy of someone who actually meant it.
He wrapped the bagel in white paper with a few quick folds and twists, and put it in a bag. Then he added three more bagels and a plastic tub of cream cheese. When he held the bag out to me over the counter it was accompanied by an easy smile that crinkled laugh lines at the corners of those extraordinary eyes and displayed charmingly sharp incisors that overhung his bottom lip a little, like a kid wearing dress-up fangs. He had dimples underneath his stubble and I couldn’t believe that I’d ever walked past this shop when it first opened with little more than an, “Oh, he’s kinda cute,” to spare for him. No, this guy was smoking hot.
“Just in case the vagaries of your day find you needing another one,” he said.
And then he winked at me. Not the friendly wink of a barista. A filthy, promise-laden wink that shifted his grin from charming to sexy as hell. I was kind of impressed he’d managed to pull it off and I just looked at him for a minute, a smile threatening.
I fumbled in my pocket for my wallet, cradling the warm bag to me like a football, but he waved me off. Instead, he held out a hand across the counter and I shook it. His was warm and a little rough, and the contact made me want to squeeze and not let go. We stared at each other for a moment before I mentally shook myself. But he still held on to my hand.
“I’m Ginger,” I said, gesturing toward myself with the bag I was clutching.
“That’s usually my line.” He pointed sheepishly to his red hair with the hand that wasn’t holding mine. “I’m Christopher Lucen.”
The door tinkled and a group of loud-talking South Philly ladies spilled in.
Finally, he let go of my hand. Reluctantly, as if he might have held it indefinitely without an interruption.
“Hey, thanks,” I said, holding up the bag in a salu
te and picking up my coffee. The ordinariness of the cup was disappointing after the feel of his hand against mine. His smile was far more engaging than it should be and I was suddenly a little regretful that I had to get out of there.
He nodded, his eyes crinkling warmly as he said, “Good luck staying on your feet.”
✕ ✕ ✕
“His line work’s not clean enough,” I insisted, pushing the iPad screen toward Marcus. “Come on, look at that.”
Marcus sighed, hope gone. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. That’s the last one, huh.”
We’d just spoken to the final artist who had sent me a portfolio, and to our surprise and relief, he was a nice guy who seemed like he might actually fit in here. But there was just no way I would book in clients when there was a chance they’d walk out with shoddy line work. It was a basic skill and this guy shouldn’t have been able to make it at his previous shop for two years without it.
“We could always post an ad, I guess.” But it was the last thing I wanted to do. I’d be deluged with emails and it was inevitable that the overly aggressive ones would stop by the shop. Looking at someone’s crap portfolio while they were hovering at your shoulder was never fun. And the ones desperate enough to come around when I explicitly asked for an online portfolio were always crap.
I considered Morgan and Marcus’s suggestion of calling Paul, and as if Marcus could read my mind, he said, “We’ll find someone. I’ll keep thinking, okay?”
Lindsey waved as her daughter Tara walked in. A single mom and ex-bartender, Lindsey was an ideal shop manager: terrifyingly organized, bossy when necessary, cool under stress, and happy to leave the job behind when she left the shop. She got along great with Morgan, Marcus, and me, and we all considered Tara a bonus. We’d stopped referring to her as the shop cat when she’d said if she was the cat then she was going to hiss at customers who displeased her, but I still thought of her that way.