Assigned Genre: Drama
Location: Deli
Object: Cork
Friday’s Child
A family secret reveals hidden strength from an unlikely source.
As her father tore the foil from the bottle’s neck, sent its cork sailing across the store, and filled the families’ glasses with its bubbly golden liquid, everyone cheered, and Madeleine realized how alone she was.
She missed her mother more than anything. Someone had said once that Dad was the looker, and Mom was the personality. She should be here now, making this right. Mom was open with her emotions and didn’t worry about appearances the way Dad and Elena did.
She had died on a Friday. Maddie remembered because Dad hadn’t wanted to close the shop. Fridays were their busiest day. It was the day people went out for lunch, and when everyone stocked up on the meats, cheeses and whatever else they might indulge in over the weekend. As much as he wanted to honor his wife, his responsibility to the town was what would carry him forward now. It was her sister Elena who suggested they close the shop early. Dad had looked at Elena that day as though she held the key to all of their survival.
Now, many Fridays later, Elena and Anthony had announced their engagement.
Anthony’s father was the store’s primary supplier. Anthony had started making deliveries there when he was sixteen. He and Elena began dating immediately.
It felt to Elena’s father as if their union would seal the store’s success. They were a perfect couple, both with dark, Italian features. They would no doubt have beautiful babies.
While the two families mingled, Maddie wandered over to the corner oak table, crouched under it, and tucked the cork into the pocket of her apron. She thought of her dog Buster, who had chewed off and swallowed half the cork from a wine bottle and almost died at the vet’s office. She and her mother had held hands in the waiting room.
A shifting of feet made her turn. Anthony had wondered away from the party and now stood behind her.
“Are you saving that for something?” His voice always sounded mocking to her.
“What? No. I just…someone could choke. The dog…” Maddie was flustered.
Anthony wasn’t interested. “Never mind that. Listen, we’re cool, right?
Maddie thought “cool” was the last word she would ever use to describe how they were. But she didn’t know what else to say. She gave the barest nod she could muster, and moved past him carefully.
She would not let her mind wander back to that horrible day, and instead, breathed in the store and all of its amazing aromas – cured meats, cheese, marinara, pesto. These were the smells of her childhood, and her mother.
She loved the store. And though she wasn’t as polished yet with customers as Elena, Maddie took enormous pride in her work as sandwich maker.
She loved their construction, all the wonderful layers. The shock of yellow mustard as it glided across fresh sourdough. The geometry of sliced salami, arranged so each slice overlapped slightly with the previous one. The swift, precise cut that divided a sandwich into perfect halves. Each two-minute masterpiece was a small gift to the lunchtime masses. And the masses came, day after day. It was a powerful feeling. Madeleine rarely felt in control of her life. She had mild dyslexia, and struggled with virtually every subject in school. But when she was making a sandwich, or even releasing a perfect ice cream scoop sized portion of her mother’s homemade potato salad onto a sandwich plate, everything fell into place.
Madeleine didn’t know she was pregnant. She hadn’t been feeling especially well, and had been vomiting some, but at the special school Madeleine attended, no one had bothered to explain some of life’s more complicated details.
She would learn soon enough.
A camera was flashing. Elena motioned Madeleine over to where she stood with their father. She instinctively brushed her hair back with her hand, thinking a family photo was happening.
“Maddie, we’ve just remembered the Dellbrook party. Would you mind finishing up their order? They want to pick it up in about 30 minutes.”
Back in the kitchen, Maddie tossed the cork from her apron pocket into a large glass jar on the shelf labeled “Corks for Charlotte.” One day, they’d make a birdhouse together.
She wondered if Elena would continue working at the shop once she and Anthony were married. Secretly, she hoped she would not. She loved her older sister. Elena had literally taught her everything there was to know about running the store. But the truth was, she wanted to scream and tell her what Anthony was. And she wanted to tell her Dad that she wasn’t as helpless as he thought, and that she was so much stronger than Elena. He just didn’t know it. Instead, she channeled her frustration into four perfectly crafted meatball subs, and wrapped them tight in thick white butcher paper, tied with a string.
As things turned out, Madeleine’s baby arrived on a Friday, stillborn.
But that was a lifetime ago.
Madeleine remembered how her father, and even Elena, had been more understanding than she expected. They seemed less shocked by her pregnancy than she was. Then again, their expectations of her had always been low.
Anthony never touched Maddie again, and she kept his secret. Not for him, but for the family. There had been enough grief to go around.
Still, when Anthony’s truck skidded off the road during a violent hailstorm a few years later, and she held her sister’s hand all through the funeral service, she secretly felt relieved.
And in the many years following, as she expanded the family business with hotel catering projects, and Elena quietly drank herself to death, Maddie took quiet satisfaction in showing her father that it was his youngest daughter, who took so much after her mother, that was the strongest after all.
On the day Maddie’s father died, she had her daughter Charlotte close the store early. But it was not a Friday.
