My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [106]
Hours pass. We sit in the emergency room watching as a car accident victim hobbles in, followed by an old woman writhing in the agony of an apparent stroke. I think then about something that happened to Kay not long ago as she was coming home from the night shift. After leaving the store she drove down Atlantic Avenue to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where the entrance ramp is little more than a stop sign and you have to merge with traffic going sixty miles per hour. Accidentally, Kay cut off a livery cab driver in a town car, and instead of honking at her once or flashing his headlights, he kept his hand on the horn for what seemed like forever, then chased her to the elevated portion of the Gowanus Expressway, where he cut in front of her and slammed on the brakes. Kay wouldn’t get out of her lane (of course), and as a result found herself trapped inside a maelstrom of honking, rushing traffic at the mercy of a psychopath, sure that she was going to die. Yet she couldn’t help noticing how peaceful it was up on the Gowanus, six stories over Brooklyn, looking down at rooftops of enormous nearby buildings like Jetro, while the Statue of Liberty and Wall Street winked at her on the horizon. She waited for the town car driver to come back and smash her window, but instead he stayed in his car, as if he too were paralyzed by the beauty of the setting. Then with a harrumph his car roared off, lurching in and out of his lane as he sped toward southern Brooklyn. Kay’s heart rate returned to normal, and she somehow managed to steer herself back to Staten Island. This had happened last summer, and since then she had been living in fear that she might see the livery cab driver again, either on the road or at the store, but she didn’t tell us because she was afraid that we would criticize her or try to stop her from going home by herself.
After hearing about the incident I felt shaken. What other secrets does my mother-in-law keep? I wondered. Particularly, what else about her own suffering has she not been telling us? Given that before we bought the store her health was not the greatest, it can be hard to judge the store’s overall impact—her body went from broken to more broken. “Before we make opening at store, I be okay. Now whole body not work,” she would claim. But “okay” to her meant those thunderous physical breakdowns, which were often the result of cleaning the house too hard (Kay’s method of cleaning leaves the house looking like it got jostled by an earthquake, pictures askew, appliances nonfunctional, mop handles snapped in half) or cooking marathons (five hundred handmade dumplings in thirty-six hours, say) or something more mysterious and implacable, like suddenly growing old after a life spent pushing yourself twice as hard as everyone else.
And then, of course, the other possibility was that Kay was not being secretive at all, but that we chose not to see how much damage the store was inflicting.
“Are you relatives of Kay Pak?” a nurse finally comes over to ask us. It’s evening, and we’ve been at the hospital for the entire day and still don’t know what happened to Kay or what her condition is. Gab is a wreck. “You can come in now.”
In a busy hallway, a kindly male doctor who seems to be either Pakistani or Indian sits down with us. He says—jolt number one—that Kay had a heart attack and is lucky that we insisted on taking her to the hospital. “Heart attack?” Gab and I sputter, barely able to mouth the words. “But … she didn’t say her chest hurt … and she’s only fifty-five … she’s never had heart trouble before.” With seasoned patience, the doctor waits for us to adjust to the new reality before administering jolt number two, which is that as far as he can tell, this wasn’t her first heart attack—she’s had one or two before, possibly a few years back.
“Your mother is strong,” he says, smiling a little, as if without knowing Kay he can tell exactly what kind of person she is, “but the way she’s living,