• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

AT ANY JOB the best part of the day is going home, and our deli is no exception. The last hour of the night is invariably the most miserable, taken up by gruesome tasks like fishing fingernails out of the cash till and wiping down the slicer. At that hour you also get the worst customers of the evening, the drunks, the skeeves and the people who seem to seek out helpless deli workers and other innocent victims who have no choice but to hear about their cat’s digestive problems or a scene-by-scene rundown of the latest Pauly Shore movie. (Salim once said when we asked him why he didn’t keep the store open past one o’clock, “Trust me, you don’t want the kind of customers who come in after one.”) If you stay open even one minute later, you can be sure someone will start banging on the window and begging you to unlock the door, reopen the register and sell them a quart of milk. And if it’s a regular customer, you probably will.

After that you’re free, and not only are you liberated from the store and difficult customers, but at one o’clock in the morning you are physically free to do almost anything you want: drive on the sidewalk, window-shop naked, land an airplane on Atlantic Avenue. New York may be a twenty-four-hour city, but after midnight there is still a big difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and at first the stillness is disorienting, if not a little spooky.

However, the drive on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is nothing if not pleasurable. The police don’t even bother patrolling, and you can drive at speeds that on an elevated highway like the BQE truly feel like flying. Of course, at that time of night most of the drivers are exhausted late-shift workers trying to get home before their eyes involuntarily shut, and you often see the remnants of terrible, fiery accidents that close the highway for hours, but at least until you hit one of those driving the BQE at night is fun, and the ride over the Verrazano Bridge at one-thirty A.M. is like jetting silently into space, the perfect way to end the night.

One stifling August evening I stop by the store on my way home from the Review to check on Dwayne and Kevin (the college kid who’s still working at the store), have a sandwich for dinner and listen to a few of Dwayne’s stories. At eight o’clock the temperature still feels like noon. When a hot day ends and relief doesn’t come, you feel cheated, like you’re being toyed with, and in the bad old days of New York, you would turn on the ten o’clock news on a night like tonight, and the first six stories would be about murder or armed robbery, half of which would take place at Domingo’s Mini-Super in Washington Heights or the New Steve Deli on Avenue C. A grim-faced newscaster would hand off to an even grimmer-faced reporter standing outside a doorway barricaded in police tape, with candles burning on the sidewalk and family members bawling nearby. And then they would show The Video, the grainy, silent, eight-shots-per-minute film from the overhead security cam that would make everything look like it happened in slow motion inside an elevator. “Man, I could have dodged that baseball bat!” you would think. Sometimes since the store opened I’ve wondered how I’ll look in silent, grainy super-slo-mo on the ten o’clock news, and then I remember: Oh, yeah, we don’t have a security camera. It’s one of those decisions we’ve postponed as we waffle back and forth on the deli’s future.

Tonight, though, the city seems peaceful, almost like a small town. On my way home I can feel the barometer finally dropping and see the lightning on the horizon, and after drinking half a beer in front of the TV I fall asleep before midnight for the first time since we bought the store.

The phone rings an hour later, at one A.M. sharp. Lunging across Gab’s sleeping body, I end up half on the floor, pressing the receiver to my ear.

“Hello?” I sputter. “Hello? Hello?”

The caller ID number belongs to the store, but no one is at the other end of the line.

“Who is it?” says Gab.

“The store,