My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [35]
Meanwhile, this dysfunction is being broadcast to the world via bloated, error-ridden issues that the editors themselves are reluctant to read in their entirety. Even the Review‘s famously well-attended cocktail parties in George’s apartment have gone slack.
So George is absolutely right to worry: the situation at the Review feels ripe for a crisis. The issue is whether he worries enough.
LUCY
MY HANDS CAME BACK.
After a few weeks behind the register, my hands have returned to being the reasonably obedient appendages they used to be. Money no longer causes them to spaz out and seize up, and one reason is that I’ve accepted that I’m never going to be able to keep them clean, and when someone fishes deep inside their pocket for some cash, as if they were rearranging furniture inside their groin, then hands me a bill so damp it might as well have been underwater, I no longer flinch. Money is money.
Tonight while on duty I meet Chucho, our wheezy, purple-faced landlord.
“I live in this building thirty years,” he says. “Bought it with a lottery ticket back in”—he inhales deeply—“seventy-three.”
“For how much?”
“Forty thousand.”
“Forty thousand dollars? Wow! That’s a lot of money. For a lottery ticket, I mean.”
“Guess how much the building’s worth now.”
“I dunno. A million?” Chucho has already established himself as a landlord who plays hardball—we’re freezing right now partly because he refuses to spend money on heat—so I try to pick a low number. I don’t want him to think that I think the building is nice.
“Seven.”
“Seven million?”
“Yeah. Easy. No problem. Someone offered me that last week.”
“Wow. Seven million is a heck of a lot of money.” For a building falling sideways. I’m not sure I believe Chucho. I could see the location alone justifying one or two million, but with floors as soft as boiled lettuce? It’s a delusion. Even more disturbing, however, is the question, Is he shopping his building?
“You know, my wife got shot where you’re standing.”
“What?!”
“Blam!” he says, pointing a finger at my stomach. “Blam! Blam! I used to own this store.”
“Yes, I heard that.”
He nods and breathes in noisily, evidently lost in memory.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible.”
“Sorry for what? My wife? She lives in Virginia now.”
“Oh.”
“My brother got shot here too, except he was outside.” Another deep breath. “And he didn’t make it.”
Silence.
“So are you gonna gimme a lottery ticket or what?”
I give him a Lotto ticket for free and he goes upstairs.
The lottery machine, a clunky blue cash register–like contraption that as it spits out scraps of paper makes noise like a screwdriver inserted into an electric pencil sharpener, sits next to the actual cash register in the checkout area, forming a bulwark against the reaching arms of shoplifters. A few days after we bought the store I asked our liaison from the state lottery commission, a hennish Indian-American woman named Glenda, how to go about getting rid of it.
“Get rid of it?” fluttered Glenda. “No one ever gets rid of their lottery machine!”
“Why not?” I asked. For a moment I had a vision of the machine trailing me around to the end of my life, like an unkillable parasite. I would never be able to escape the horrible grinding noise, and there would always be an old woman in a nightgown and army boots standing next to me and shouting, “Three! Seven! Two! Four!”
But it turned out that what Glenda meant was that nobody who had a lottery machine in their store would even consider letting it go, because getting one in the first place could be such a struggle. In seeming recognition of the vast power that lottery machines possess, the state lottery commission allows only a certain number of stores in each neighborhood to have them. If you didn’t have one already, you could spend years waiting in frustration for your chance to become an approved vendor of state-sanctioned