The Deal by Adam Gittlin

find. There was nothing like going back to the freezer a couple hours later to get them. We were so excited. We’d just tear the cup off in one continuous swirl and there they were. We’d take them outside and race to eat them before they melted.”
    “Wow. Sounds great.”
    She looked at me with an expression that acknowledged the validity of my returned sarcasm. She had asked for it.
    “No, really, especially the part about the toothpicks. It must have been crazy fun trying to hold those big, oblong popsicles on those wimpy little sticks. Let me guess—when you two were feeling really slick, you went for some iced tea. Maybe cranberry juice. And you even threw in a bit of vodka for good measure. Which, unfortunately, made them take a little longer to freeze.”
    Perry threw her napkin at me.
    “You know what I’m saying, Jonah!”
    “Yeah, I do,” I conceded.
    We sat for a moment in silence. I leaned forward over the table on my elbows.
    “What’s going on with you today, Perry?”
    “What? Why do you say that?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because you haven’t made one mention of the deal we just had dropped in our laps. Potentially one of the biggest deals of our careers. Or maybe it’s all this talk about popsicles and plastic spoons?”
    She didn’t respond. I leaned back again in my chair.
    “I know you, Perry. You get excited by the challenge of a new deal no matter what size it is. You usually won’t shut the fuck up about it for the first three days. Your strategizing, your constant brainstorming and thinking out loud—we usually have to throw you out of our offices. In walks the deal we’ve all talked about so many times and you don’t say one thing about it. Not one thing.”
    Her eyes fell to her lap for a split second before she consciously raised them back up.
    “I think he’s doing it again.”
    She was referring to her gynecologist husband, Brian. A year and a half earlier, when she was pregnant with their kid, she found out the dirty bastard had been cheating on her. Not only is he a scumbag, but he’s not the smartest guy either. She had a sense it was going on, but he really got busted when Perry’s best friend walked into Peter Luger’s only to find the moron all over one of his patients at a corner table, the two of them dripping adultery onto their shared porterhouse steaks. During his “coming clean” to Perry, he admitted going to the legendary New York Steakhouse because it was in Brooklyn, out of the way of their mainstream lives. I’m sorry, did someone forget to mention to this guy that if you put Peter Luger’s in Dallas, it would still be the most popular restaurant in New York City?
    “Who?” I said innocently.
    She rolled her eyes.
    “Per, what makes you say that?”
    “I don’t know. I just have this feeling. And it absolutely pisses me off.”
    “That you feel paranoid all the time?”
    “No. Well, yeah, but I was thinking more along the lines of the fact that I ever allowed him to stay.”
    This was the only truly weak thing Perry could ever recall doing. Keeping Brian around. And it tormented her, knowing that she had to give up so much of her pride in order to at least give her child the chance of growing up with a father. She hated him for putting her in that position. She loathed him for playing the father-figure card as he groveled. Almost as much as she hated the fact her father-in law, as she learned post-marriage, was a childhood friend of a certain figurehead of a family in the waste management business.
    For a while it had seemed things had gotten back pretty close to normal. I was a bit surprised by all of this.
    “Well, there must be something that would make you think so?”
    “It’s just the way he acts. It’s—I don’t know.”
    “Perry, do you have any concrete evidence about this?”
    She thought for a second. Perhaps even looking for something she could reference as a stretch.
    “Uh-uh. No.”
    “Then I really think you need