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Syd sighs down at her fingernails, flecking at the chipped nail polish she now allows herself to wear. She’s only been working at Jewel-Osco for a couple of months but she knew deep down in her soul that working on Valentine’s Day was going to be shitty, shittier than Christmas, shittier even than New Year’s near closing. And it certainly has been – starting around mid-day, the store has been crowded with clueless men wandering around as if they had never been inside of a store before, confused expressions on their faces. The customer service counter sits across from the floral department, and she’s made sure to send a constant stream of sympathetic glances over to Fatima and Diana and Pilar as they handle complaints about over-priced teddy bears and confusion over the difference between carnations and roses.
She has also dealt with a constant string of inane questions…there’s a non-zero chance she might stab the next guy who asks if she knows what his wife’s favorite flower is, since she certainly is the same person who checked him out last February 14th so she has to remember, right? Right.
Last February 14th Syd was catering a sophisticated and intimate wedding reception at an art museum in the suburbs through Sheridan Road, so. It definitely hadn’t been her, and she definitely hasn’t been thinking passive thoughts all day about the flake on the crust of her Japanese-inspired beef Wellington, with three kinds of mushrooms inside, and the crunch of the crust of pistachios on her matcha yuzu mousse cakes served on the dessert table next to the extravagant wedding cake from Alliance Bakery.
She definitely doesn’t hate that she’s selling cigarettes and lottery tickets and iPass stickers at the customer service counter a whole year later, clinging to the union benefits while trying desperately not to hate herself (or her abysmal credit score) in the process.
Anything to escape working outside with cousin Monty as an aircraft marshaller. Anything.
“Hey,” she hears, shaking her from her reverie. She cannot stifle the sigh that escapes from her lips, too worn down to plaster on her most sincere customer service smile. Her best customer service grimace will have to do.
“Sorry,” she says preemptively, hearing the edge of her own voice, as she is distracted by the collision of two shopping carts which almost took down the dwindling display of Barefoot Bubbly champagne at the edge of the floral department. “I don’t know what kind of flowers you bought for your wife last year.”
“Oh,” he says, as one of the guys shoves his cart back into the cart that it collided with. “I don’t have a wife.”
“Cool,” Syd tells him, trying to decide if she needs to excuse herself to go break up whatever the show of egos is in the middle of the floral department before it turns into a real fight. “Don’t know what kind of wine your girlfriend likes, either,” she says, before finally letting her eyes flicker over to her customer’s.
She can’t help but gasp a little. Shockingly blue eyes meet hers, on a face that’s so handsome and also so familiar to her, that she almost has trouble believing it. Her astonishment clearly confuses him, but he quietly adds, “I don’t have a girlfriend, either.”
“You’re a chef,” Syd says.
He scoffs. “Used to be.”
“In New York. Empire, right?”
“How did you…?” he asks, and even she can read the intrigue on his face.
Syd shrugs. “I used to be a chef, too. Not big time like that, but…I had my own catering business for a minute. A hot minute.”
“And now you’re here,” he says, and his voice only sounds sympathetic.
“Mmm,” she agrees. “Selling Mega Millions tickets and handling package pickups and arguing about expired coupons and taking returns of moldy vegetables and weird meat.”
“Don’t feel bad,” he says. “I’m in town shutting down my dead brother’s beef shop so our uncle can sell it and turn it into an Applebee’s or a parking lot or whatever.”
“Yeah?” she asks. “That’s grim.”
“Yeah, fucking grim,” he says, before he stops meeting her eyes. “Couldn’t hack it, fixing it, I mean. He told me, ‘Carmy, you can’t start from fucked,’ and I guess he was right.”
“Carmen Berzatto, right?”
A red flush courses up his neck; he rubs his hand over the back of it. “Yeah. Sydney?” he asks, gesturing at the name tag pinned crookedly to her store-issued polo shirt.
“Yeah. That’s me. Singular name Sydney. Just like Whitney or Sade or whoever.”
“Excuse me,” an older man holding three bottles of champagne in his arms huffs. “Stop flirting; I need help with the wine! There’s a line forming ma’am. It’s Valentine’s Day.”
“Sir, I’ll be with you in just a moment,” Syd tells the man, before turning back to Carmy. “So, what will it be? Powerball? Rug Doctor Rental? Returning moldy bread?”
“Oh,” Carmy says, “just a pack of American Spirit Sky cigarettes. Two, maybe.”
“That I can do,” she says, turning around and grabbing his choice from the rack behind her. She rings him up and he pays with a debit card he pulled from a worn, thin wallet. He declines a bag he’d have to pay ten cents for and before Syd can stop herself, she scribbles a note at the bottom of his receipt, but she doesn't let herself press it into his hands. “You know, if you ever want to commiserate,” she tells him.
“Enough with the flirting!” the guy behind Carmy exclaims again.
“Sir, it is Valentine’s Day,” Carmy says.
The man huffs again. “Shouldn’t be, when someone is on the clock. And my wife…”
“Maybe you should have thought about wine before 7:13pm on Valentine’s night. Sir,” Syd says innocently.
Carmy rubs his hand across the back of his neck again. “How long does your shift go?” he asks.
She feels like she’s been waiting an entire lifetime to answer the question, or at least her entire day. “Seventeen more minutes,” she tells him.
“How about tonight?” Carmy asks, plucking his receipt out from between her fingers.
“It’s a…” she stops herself before saying date. “I would love that, very much.”
“See you in seventeen minutes, then,” he says.
“I can’t wait,” she says, as the guy behind Carmy plunks the three bottles of wine onto the customer service counter.
“Finally,” the man says. “Now, can you tell me which one of these is my wife’s favorite?”
Syd can only grin.