My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [5]
Gab and I had no sex at all for the first three months. Too dangerous. In an Asian household no one wears shoes indoors, so you never hear anyone coming. And since the general rule in the Paks’ house was that an unworn shirt was your shirt, an uneaten chicken leg your chicken leg, people were always barging into the basement hoping to get into our bed.
From the day we moved in, we were dying to get out, which gave us the power to save thirty thousand dollars in less than a year. But then came Gab’s thirtieth birthday, and suddenly our misery didn’t matter anymore—in fact, the greater our misery, the better Gab felt. “Don’t worry,” she said to me. “We’ll still be able to move out.” She had a plan. At first, she and I would be the owners of whatever store we bought, and Kay would be the manager. During this period, we would keep the store’s profits and use them to replenish our bank account. Later on, within the six months or so it would take for the business to stabilize, we would transfer ownership to Kay and resume our old lives.
This plan was so foolhardy, so pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction, that it was almost as if it had come from me, not Gab.
GAB’S “PERFECT” STORE is in Brooklyn, a borough that, while beloved by many, stirs nothing in the heart of Kay, or that of anyone else in my wife’s family, for that matter. For the Paks, Brooklyn is nothing but a sprawling, dirty, dangerous place with no Korean restaurants or supermarkets and none of the prestige or business opportunities of Manhattan. Except to go the airport or endure a passage on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the borough has no place in their lives.
“The store is owned by North Koreans,” Gab reports gleefully. This is excellent news because training in the Kim Il Sung school of neo-Stalinist entrepreneurship tends to put one at a fairly severe competitive disadvantage, and we have hopes that the store will be undervalued.
Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the spectacle we were about to witness. While the store is in a trendy neighborhood surrounded by restaurants with one-word names and menus offering eleven-dollar desserts, the store itself—well, I’ve seen hunting cabins in the woods that were better stocked. The shelves are all but empty, and the place looks like it has been bombed, judging by the rubble swept into the corners and the tattered awning fluttering in the stiff November wind.
The owners, an older couple and their two silent daughters, are extremely friendly, but things only get weirder after we meet. “Country people,” Kay whispers to me as they lead us on a tour. They are like human beings from a different century, and they have funny accents and use words that Kay and Gab don’t understand. Both have numerous missing teeth and haircuts they’ve obviously given themselves.
The store embarrasses them, and they apologize for it, offering to feed us as compensation. “Come,” they say, leading us to the kitchen, where a mysterious crimson broth burbles and seethes inside a blackened pot. “No, thank you,” we all say. Next to the stove I see a box of broken-down fruit crates, tree branches and other bits of scrap wood. Gab goes off to use the bathroom and returns wearing an alarmed scowl, having peed in a makeshift closet with only duct-taped cardboard for walls. This place has secrets. I begin to feel like an intruder. And then we ask to be shown the basement.
The owners look at each other nervously. “Okay,” says the husband. “Follow me.”
It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really—just violently at odds with the city health code. The owners (or somebody; we don’t ask) turn out to live in the basement, where there are beds, dressers and clotheslines hung with wet laundry. Being basement dwellers ourselves, Gab and I withhold judgment, but Kay is appalled. It looks like the power has been cut off recently, judging by all the candles, and I assume that the kindling I saw by the stove is what