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Glenda said she’d start the process of disenfranchising us as lottery vendors in a week or so, but first she wanted us to think about it long and carefully.

“You’re new to the business,” she said. “I don’t want you to make an impulsive decision and lose all your money.”

Yes, I thought. That would be like playing the lottery.

So I study the lottery machine’s impact on the store, how much money it makes for us and what sort of people it attracts. Economically, it’s a no-brainer: for every dollar of tickets we sell, our take is a pathetic six cents, and that’s before you factor in the cost of paying someone to sit there and operate the machine. (Kay once spent an entire hour punching in numbers, and at the end she calculated that as store owners we had barely earned three dollars—the same profit we’d make on a six-pack of beer. And please don’t even ask whether we get a portion of winning lottery tickets; unless you sell the one and only jackpot winner, you get nothing.)

As for the customers, what can you say? The typical lottery customer is apparently someone who woke up and almost got run over by a bus outside their apartment building, then memorized the bus’s license plate number and realized that it had four digits in common with their mother’s birthday, which prompted them to visit their mother’s old neighborhood and play the lottery at the local store using a combination of (1) the number 9, representing the floor of the apartment building where she used to live, (2) the numbers 6 and 3, 63 being the year in which John F. Kennedy (of whom the mother was the world’s biggest fan) died, and (3) the number 2, because that was the TV station that featured her favorite show, Judge Judy, which she passed away while watching. This simple, heartfelt tribute—a sentimental and not at all profligate gesture—would be followed by sixteen more tickets involving every permutation of 9, 2 and 63 imaginable, after which the customer would eyeball one of the oranges sitting on the counter, make a comment about how “the fruit looks kinda old in here,” follow that with a shocked, disapproving scowl upon learning that the orange costs a whole thirty-five cents, and then, in spite of obvious hunger pangs, request another set of tickets involving every possible combination of the numbers 3 and 5. All this would happen, moreover, as the customer stood in the way of the door, blocking other people from entering, while having a speakerphone cell phone conversation for the benefit of the entire store with someone who kept saying “What? What?”

Some of the lottery customers are so difficult and demanding that I have nicknames for them: Mumbles, the Screamer, and Toilet Paper (after the material I was once handed that contained a list of scribbled numbers I was supposed to input). However, as much as I dislike seeing some of them, they are our customers. It’s the culture of the regulars, that group I encountered in the stockroom with Dwayne, an international brotherhood of mostly middle-aged men who in the evening often lend the store an atmosphere similar to that of an off-track betting parlor. Some of the regulars come in around seven, as the evening rush slows down, and don’t leave till after midnight. My first experiences with them have been like that night in the stockroom—ill at ease and mutually suspicious. They wonder if I’m going to kick them out and I wonder if they’re going to in some way complicate our arrival in the neighborhood. The younger ones occasionally do their thug routine—motherfucker this, bitch that, I’m gonna fuck that motherfucker up—leading me to half-wonder if some of them don’t get drunk in our deli and then go rob someone else’s. But I’ve gradually come to realize that, for the most part, the regulars aren’t the types to get drunk and knock off convenience stores; they’re the types to get drunk and go fishing underneath bridges. Even the younger ones are too old to get in trouble, and besides, if they got hurt in a fight they might have to spend a night at home,