The phone rang two times, three. And then there was a click, and a voice that unmistakably belonged to Scott Summers said, “Corsair Pizza.”
“Hello, Scott,” said Hank.
There was a long moment of silence.
“Hank,” said Scott.
Hank waited.
“Are you going to order something?” Scott asked. “Because if not, I need to go deal with the dinner rush.”
.
Once upon a time, two disgraced superheroes opened a pizza parlor.
“I thought you were joking,” Alex said, after he got the call from Anchorage and flew up to find Scott frowning over a saucepan. “I thought you were dead.”
“I was,” said Scott. Alex wasn’t sure if he meant that he’d been joking, or that he’d been dead, or both; or what it said about their lives that that was even a question. “And then I thought about it, and, well--the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Doing something together that wasn’t--you know.” Fighting supervillains. Fighting each other. “Anyway. If we’re going to be laying low for a while, I thought it could be nice to try something new.” He sounded nervous, like it was a sales pitch. Like Alex hadn’t come running the second Scott had called.
Alex, who still flirted on and off with the idea of going back to grad school, the same way he flirted with the idea of giving Lorna a call or showing up to his 20th high school reunion in full Havok uniform; who could look back at his life and see nothing but one long rut with occasional spin-outs; thought about that for a minute. And then he told his brother, “Yeah. Sure. Let’s give it a try.”
.
They didn’t actually call it Summers Brothers Pizza, because some things are just an invitation to trouble.
Neither of them had ever been much of a cook, but they were both smart and methodical; and YouTube had come a long way in a relatively few years.
“95 percent of restaurants fail in the first year,” Scott told Alex across the rickety kitchen table, flour ground into the seams between metal and formica. The flour got into everything, tracked through halls on their shoes, dusted in pale handprints across Scott’s spiral notebooks filled with page after page of meticulous notes in a hand so cramped that even Scott had to lean close to read back over it.
Alex wondered idly whether that was new or something he was just now noticing; and what they’d do if Scott ever actually needed reading glasses; and whether Scott had already planned for that contingency among all the others. Probably.
“Five percent’s not bad,” said Alex. It wasn’t, really, compared to the odds they were used to.
Scott nodded. “Hell, it even leaves a decent margin for error.”
.
They could have afforded a nicer setup--built from scratch, even--but Scott had his eye on a vacant strip-mall storefront with a cracking checkered-linoleum floor and rent low enough that it wouldn’t raise eyebrows if it didn’t take off right away. Alex scoured garage sales and flea markets; Scott rented a router; and within a few weeks, the mismatched furniture had gone from tragic to--they hoped--eclectically charming.
That left staffing and supply lines, both of which problems were solved at once when Illyana Rasputin appeared in their living room in a flash of light, accompanied by a large crate of fresh tomatoes and a small duffel bag.
“Did you call her?” Alex asked Scott, as Illyana prowled around the apartment, poking at shelves and sniffing knick-knacks.
“I thought you had,” said Scott, but he didn’t seem concerned, and it turned out that ruling a hell dimension was fairly good training for managing the front end of a restaurant, so Alex figured it was probably okay.
.
They were running on borrowed time.
They never talked about it, but all of them knew that the corner they had carved out was very small and very fragile. Someday, something would break, or someone would get recognized, or the wrong person would walk through the door; and the whole thing would come tumbling down.
“How long do you want to keep this up?” Illyana had asked Scott, once, early on.
“As long as we can, I guess,” he had said; and it occurred to Alex as he sliced mushrooms that none of them knew how to build lives to last.
So, they’d all been braced for the worst; but then they’d made it through licensing and opening. They’d made it through the first week, and the first month, and the first winter; the first customers; the first reviews. Scott had hired someone to paint an old-fashioned wooden sign instead of the cheap printed one they’d gotten online; and Illyana had gotten an apartment so she wouldn’t need to keep crashing on their couch or teleporting back to god-only-knew where.
And then, as they were closing up, Scott had said, “Hank McCoy called today.”
“Oh,” said Illyana, and she and Alex both pretended he hadn’t seen the look on her face in the split second when she’d looked up from counting out the register.
“Shit,” said Alex, since his poker face wasn’t worth a damn anyway.
Illyana kept counting out ones. Scott kept wiping down the bar. No one said anything.
“What did he want?” Alex finally asked.
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “It was during dinner rush. He said he’d call back.”
.
Later that night, when they were all halfway to drunk and nobody had said anything in a while, Alex took a sip from his beer, and asked, “It was good. Wasn’t it?”
“It was good,” Illyana said solemnly. She was lying on her back on the floor, legs propped up on the couch beside Alex, drink balanced on her stomach. The way her hair splayed out on the floor reminded Alex of a halo from a Sunday school illustration.
“It was really good.” Scott was on the floor, too, slouched against a bookcase, empty bottle dangling from two fingers.
“Maybe Hank just wanted to say hi,” Alex said. “Let us know that he knows where we are, just in case we’re planning something nefarious.”
“Maybe he wanted to know if we deliver to Westchester.” Illyana’s accent thickened when she drank, and the way she said “Westchester” made it sound like somewhere distant and exciting and a little magical.
“Maybe he wanted to open a franchise,” Scott offered.
“Maybe he wanted the recipe for our secret sauce,” Illyana said.
“Do we have a secret sauce?” Alex asked.
“No,” said Scott, at the same time that Illyana said, “Yes.” Alex and Scott both turned to stare at her.
“What?” she said. “It’s secret.”
.
It ended as quietly as it began.
One day, nobody unlocked the door or turned the lights on. A few weeks later, a FOR RENT sign appeared in the window. Of the few regulars who noticed, fewer still took the time to wonder what had happened to the unremarkable pizza place with the sci-fi posters, or to the slightly frightening woman up front and the two men--brothers, someone had said, but nobody was sure--who rarely emerged from the back. There were the usual half-hearted rumors--that they’d had to pack up in a hurry to run from the mob; or because they were the mob, on the run with the law--which, in absence of interest, fizzled out almost as quickly as they started.
As for what its owners did next--who knows? Certainly, nothing that anyone would ever expect.