• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1289 0

other to say what we’re both thinking. Is it time? After failing to close the store when Kay got out of the hospital, Gab and her mother have been uncharacteristically indecisive. Given that the store was open, we decided we might as well not tie our hands behind our backs and brought back the cigarettes. Sales then quickly returned to a somewhat normal level, first for wintertime and now by the standards of the spring. The problem is that when you’re not fighting for survival, it’s easy to stop making decisions and fall into the trap of thinking you don’t have to. Ambivalence is a luxury; thinking you can have it both ways is virtually synonymous with being spoiled. That’s why the do-or-die condition that new immigrants find themselves in is a good one for shopkeepers, because it forces you to be a ruthless decision maker, like Kay and Gab are. Or used to be.

Given the need for clarity and decisiveness, we’re again seeing the danger of a family-owned business. On some days Kay will feel depressed and want to close the store, but then she’ll get embarrassed for not being stronger and resolve to tough it out. She vacillates, Gab vacillates, and I vacillate, and as a result nothing happens. What it means is that closing down will take as much will and effort as opening did.

AT THE END of the spring, five months after we bring back tobacco, we get caught in another sting. This time it’s a Dutch Master cigar sold to a minor while Emo is running the store, and we face the maximum penalties just in time for what should be the busiest part of the year, summer. We should take this as our cue to surrender, but there’s no way we’re going out on someone else’s terms—especially not the city’s. Shopkeeping may be a passive trade, but shopkeepers are hardheaded masochists and always try to do things their own way.

Unfortunately, our best hope depends on us persuading the city to give us leniency, which means swallowing our pride and losing some of the adversarial fervor. There’s a stipulation in the city’s administrative code that says that a tobacco vendor can be absolved of an employee’s mistake if he or she can convince a magistrate that the vendor did everything possible to prevent such errors. It’s a long shot, but occasionally plaintiffs do find sympathy, and so after scheduling a hearing, Gab and I march in to John Street in lower Manhattan, where the Adjudication Division of Consumer Affairs occupies a Kafkaesque warren of dim, windowless courtrooms on the eleventh floor of a black marble building.

It is the DMV from hell. Twenty or so grown men—schlubs in their puffy vests and hooded sweatshirts—rock in their chairs neurotically, mumbling to themselves in Urdu, Spanish or Korean while waiting to be summoned to a doughnut-sized hole in a Plexiglas window. We sit like a herd of frightened animals in the center of the room, bunched tightly, surrounded on all sides but one by that humiliating Plexiglas wall. A potbellied security guard with a walkie-talkie the size of a nightstick circles us like a starved cat, looking for new reasons to punish us. “NO TALKING!” he screams when someone’s cell phone goes off, and “NO EATING!” when someone takes half a bagel out of his pocket. Meanwhile, the clerks behind the Plexiglas gorge themselves on enormous foil-wrapped breakfasts obtained from delis down on Wall Street.

I try to maintain an upright pose in my chair, but the seat is made of the same kind of hard slippery plastic as bus-station chairs. After a few hours I give up and slouch like a pouty teenager. Soon half the day is gone, and it takes constant effort not to slide into sleep. As lunchtime ends I approach the doughnut hole in the Plexiglas and ask, “We were supposed to be seen at nine A.M. Why is this taking so long?”

“Some of our judges are very busy,” says a voice behind the glass. “Now go back and sit down.”

We wait another hour, until finally an unsmiling man with a Haitian-sounding name (Patrice or something like that) and the smell of someone who just emerged from a steamy locker room and daubed himself with talcum