The Lemon by S. E. Boyd

Author:S. E. Boyd [Boyd, S. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

12.

VLADIMIR “LAD” BENSHVILI

QUEENS, NY

Wednesday, July 24, 2019, 4:11 p.m.

For weeks on end, these small American teenagers with soft, wet hands had come to Lobio to talk to Lad about the dead man.

They would begin by introducing the publication they were from, but these were not newspapers or magazines or even persuasive pamphlets. If the New York Post had come to see Lad, he would’ve been happy. Or the Daily News. Or even the socialist Times. But these had dumb names like Chewy or Swallow, or pornography names like UrbanDaddy. They existed only on computers, and Lad didn’t own a computer, so what, really, was the point?

His mother had a saying, which she used to repeat to his father frequently: “Tell it to the bog wolves.” In his youth, Lad interpreted this to mean that ultimately all big decisions must be run by the wolves who inhabited the local bogs, but as he grew older, he realized what she was really saying was that she didn’t believe him. That his story lacked value.

And that was how he felt about these elfin children asking him questions and holding their phones to his face. They never made eye contact. When he was a child, his father had stressed to him that you had to make eye contact for at least twelve seconds when you shook hands with or talked to an adult. His father told him only liars and Albanians had shifty eyes (and they were essentially one and the same). He used to count in his head as he interacted with elders, and as he got older, he realized that this eye contact, while not only being polite, also gave him power. In any social interaction, Lad would never be the first to look away. But these miniature toy humans with their damp dish-towel hands couldn’t even start a handshake by meeting his eyes.

As such, all of their stories lacked value for him. But still, he tried his best to answer their questions. When they asked him about why he only served bean dishes, he told them that it was because beans were very cheap. When they asked what made his dishes so unique, he said that they were not unique, and that his own restaurant recipe came from a very popular Georgian cookbook. When they asked what was the best part about owning a restaurant, he stared at them for a count of twelve and said, “Pass.” All of these answers seemed to delight these fairy-size, water-handed scribes. The more curt he was, the more they seemed to relish the interaction. And yet they refused to look him in his eyes.

To accommodate the crowds and his restaurant’s newfound popularity, Lad did . . . nothing. He didn’t hire more servers. Or cooks. He didn’t put more seating in the dining room even though, for three years, two of his booths in the back lacked tables. He didn’t even order more beans. This meant that by the time half the crowd got to the front, the restaurant would already be out of food.

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