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Just then, as the cherub is leaving, Dwayne walks in.

“New inventory?” he says, weaving his way unsteadily through the stacks of boxes. He’s drunk. It’s his day off, and he’s been drinking all day. Nevertheless, as the delivery truck drives away, he starts helping me open the boxes.

Start small, I hear myself say. Like a little boy on Christmas morning, I need to control my emotions. There is too much drama, too much joy and too much sorrow at the same time. Pace yourself. Save the big stuff for last.

The first box is like a cruel joke: one whole case of organic Sesame Street soup. A Brooklyn special. For kids or adults? Not clear, and no, it does not make me warm and happy inside to see Big Bird right now. The only way I’d like to see Big Bird at this moment is if he’s in the soup.

Next, atop the biggest pile of boxes, is a parcel barely the size of Big Bird’s beak. I pry open the cardboard flaps and pull out … four bottles of hot sauce! From Oaxaca! Now, that’s more like it. I take out the bottles and search for a temporary place on the shelves, which ends up being next to the Glazed Donut Holes. The bottles look a bit incongruous and lonely there, so I tear immediately into another box, this one big enough to contain Big Bird’s head. What will it be? I can barely control my shaky hands as they rip apart the stiff cardboard.

More hot sauce! From Yucatán this time! Which is great, because as everyone who likes hot sauce knows, it’s not the heat, it’s the taste. You need variety. And now if the store fails, we have enough hot sauce to open a taqueria.

Don’t think about it. Open another box. Maybe if I get them all open tonight I can fill up the shelves with new inventory and have the store looking like it had a makeover. That’ll win over Gab and Kay, and they won’t even care how much it cost. Now, let’s see what we have in here …

More sauce! Not hot sauce this time (thank God) but, rather, some new barbecue sauce—a “legendary Texas-style hickory bourbon slow-cooked over smoky mesquite with real old-time flavor” that “goes great with beef, pork, chicken or fish.”

Wonderful. Except we don’t have any beef, pork, chicken or fish. Unless you want a roast beef sandwich.

“Is this turning into a sauce store?” says Dwayne, peering over my shoulder into the bottomless box of slow-cooked Texas flavor.

“Can it, Dwayne, okay? Just can it. Just because there’s no Beefaroni you don’t have to get snotty.”

Dwayne belches and grabs himself a Heineken.

Time for another box, and it better contain something of a nonliquid consistency. Fucking sauce store. I did not jeopardize my career and mortgage my future to open a sauce store. I rip open the package and pull out … cocktail rounds. I ordered cocktail rounds? Jesus. Pardon the sexism and ageism, but I really thought you had to have been a housewife in the fifties to actually buy cocktail rounds. Well, now we’re covered in case the Greenwich Yacht Club decides to host a luncheon in Brooklyn.

The phone rings.

“It’s Gab,” says Dwayne.

Shit.

“Hello?” I say, trying not to sound as depressed as I feel.

“Hi, it’s me. I’m doing the bills right now and wondering, did you make a large order of merchandise recently?”

No!

“I’m sorry? What did you say? There are a lot of people here in the store.”

“I said, Did you make a large order of merchandise recently? Because there’s an invoice here in the mail from—”

“Gab, I’m going to have to call you back. We’re getting a customer surge.” Dwayne looks at me and clucks, wagging his finger.

“—didn’t we agree that we’d spend nothing on new inventory except what we’ve already been getting? Didn’t we? And this is ridiculous. It’s almost fifteen hundred dollars. For what? What did you buy? It better be good. Good-bye.”

Click.

It’s only eight-thirty.

I still have four and a half hours until I can go home and fall asleep.

And when I wake up, it will only be Tuesday.

“This kind of a store is a death tomb,” one of the characters says in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, a novel set in a Brooklyn deli grocery during