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Dwayne then began beating the robber to a pulp, until luckily for both of them, a customer happened by and convinced Dwayne to let up. The robber, in addition to having a broken jaw, would later need fifty-two stitches to close up a single arc-shaped gash running from his temple to his chin. Thus the pool of blood.

(“They jumped me,” the robber would later tell police. “I was just out riding my bike, and this guy came out of the deli and knocked me down for no reason.” He and his friend, whom the police will pick up a few days later, will both turn out to have criminal records.)

Armed robbers on bicycles wielding BB guns. It would be a joke if not for that hideous puddle. For days afterward I keep thinking about the blood and wondering how so much of it poured out of somebody who managed not to die. Fifty-two stitches doesn’t seem like enough. It makes me wish that I had seen the robber, who has been handcuffed and is already on his way to the hospital when I arrive. I ask Dwayne to describe the incident, expecting the usual amount of exuberant detail, but that is the most surprising part of the evening: Dwayne seems shaken, as if he’s as unaccustomed to violence as, well, me. When I come into the store he acts as if nothing had happened by continuing the mopping, but then I notice that he’s forgotten to put cleaning detergent in the water, and I say, “Dwayne, why don’t you go home. I’ll finish up.” Initially, he refuses to even look at me, but I won’t take no for an answer—something I’ve never done before with him—and finally he stops resisting. Outside, after forcing him to accept a case of Heineken, I watch him shamble down the street toward the projects without the usual swagger, his head hung low for once.

THE NEXT DAY at the dinner table Gab says, “I’m calling the Korean newspaper and placing an ad for the store. Anybody have any objections?” No one does.

It takes less than a month. In what appears to be some sort of ethnic paradigm shift, at first all the potential buyers who visit the store are Bengali Indians—stout, mustachioed men who show up in pairs wearing pin-striped suits. But the first buyer to satisfy Gab’s price is a Korean-American family that came to America about ten years after the Paks and has slightly younger children, a pair of boys, who want to purchase the store so they can give it to their parents.

On our last day Kay goes to Consumer Affairs in Manhattan and pays off a thousand dollars in fines that she’d procrastinated on (deliberately, but still) for as long as possible. Gab, Kay and I go to Jetro and use our store-owner privileges to buy enough toilet paper to fill up the trunk of the car. Then, for the first time when there isn’t a blackout or a blizzard, we close early, and stand there around the cash register, the three of us, silently eating take-out Thai food. Customers bang on the door—“Let us in!” “We need lottery tickets!” “A cup of tea!” “Change for a twenty!” “Where’s Preach?” Awkwardly and unconvincingly, we pretend not to hear them.

I AIN’T NEVER LEAVING BROOKLYN

IT’S BEEN SIX YEARS SINCE WE SOLD THE DELI, AND DURING that time I’ve forgotten a lot of things about it, like the price of a Coors Light tallboy and everything I once knew about how to operate the lottery machine. Occasionally I see a former customer on the subway or at a restaurant, and I stare at them, trying to remember what the connection was. Did we go to college together? Did I work with her? No, that woman likes roast beef and American cheese on white bread with ketchup—cold. Sometimes these people stare back, as if they’re trying to remember too. But I’m afraid to say that most don’t even look twice. In an America that people say is becoming less neighborly and more self-segregated, a convenience store might be one of the last places where you spend significant time with people who aren’t “you,” so to speak. However, it’s by nature an ephemeral, shallow community, and only once did I ever make a friend at the store.