Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [28]
I figured the college kids would keep to themselves and act like the job was beneath them, rolling their eyes at the mothers asking where to find the toilet paper or the mousetraps or the wrapping paper, and it was true that most of them were like that. Cliquey. They’d sit at their own table in the breakroom, just as if we were all still in high school, and bring things like sushi from Whole Foods for dinner, with chopsticks and little packets of soy sauce, but Gabe was always polite. That was the second thing I noticed about him. The first thing was his food. Most of us had regular stuff, sandwiches or leftover casserole or lasagna, but Gabe had interesting things: a tin of oily sardines that he’d pop into his mouth one by one, a chunk of crusty bread, wedges of cheese so stinky that they made everyone wince and crack jokes about smelly feet, sticky dates in a plastic tub, a square of black-flecked brown goo that he told me was truffled pâté and that he ate on a heel of bread, with fig jam smeared on top. “My grandma’s French,” he said. “We always had weird stuff around the house. I’d bring friends home from school, and instead of having, you know, Oreos and milk or whatever, she’d give us herring.”
“Herring’s French?” I’d never had French food, except for the one time Frank and I had gone to a fondue restaurant, where for your main course you dipped bread and vegetables into bubbling melted cheese, and then dipped fruit into chocolate for dessert.
He’d shrugged. “Not especially, but my grandma loved herring. I do, too.” He’d smiled then, offering me a bite of chicken marinated, he told me, in lemon peel and crushed garlic, which tasted like no chicken I’d ever had before.
Sometimes Gabe sat with the college kids and sometimes he sat with us. He carried lollipops in his pockets and would give them to kids fussing in the shopping carts after asking the moms if it was okay. “That’s nice,” I said, the first time I saw him do it, and he shrugged, looking a little embarrassed with his hair flopping into his eyes. “I’ve got two little brothers,” he said. “I understand the value of candy.”
Gabe always had a book in his pocket and I usually had one tucked into my purse, and at break time we’d slip into the corners to read. After I’d been there for a week, he wandered over, casually, and asked me about my book—a Nora Roberts—and told me about what he was reading, the story of a Russian rapper in New York. “But really,” he said, sitting down in the molded plastic chair beside me, “it’s about what it means to be an American.”
“Huh.” I wondered what my book was “really” about—about love, I thought, but I could have been wrong. Maybe if I’d been to college the real story of the book would reveal itself to me, like one of those Magic Eye puzzles where if you stare at it long enough a hidden picture appears. I’d never liked school: all those things like the square of the hypotenuse and the principal exports of Uruguay would, I correctly suspected, have nothing to do with my life after graduation, my life as a wife and a mother. I did all right in my English classes, and I’d always liked to read, but just for the story’s sake, for the chance books gave me to visit another world, where everyone was beautiful, where the sex was always amazing, and where, when the telephone rang, it was sometimes a handsome stranger and not the heroine’s mortgage company inquiring as to when they could expect that month’s check.
“You can read it when I’m done,” he said, offering me the book. I shook my head, smiling. “I think I’ll stick with Nora.” But two days later I found the book in my locker, next to the snapshots of my family that I’d taped to the inside of the door. When I tried to thank him Gabe just shrugged. “You don’t have to read it,” he said. “No pressure.” He held up his hands like a gunfighter showing they were empty, then tucked into his lunch, which was a salad with rice and raw tuna and a dressing he’d made of soy sauce and sesame seeds. Poké salad, he’d told