My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [64]
However, in the middle of the night Gab apparently has a different idea from the rest of us. At four in the morning, without telling anyone, she sneaks out of bed and mummifies herself inside about eight layers of winter clothes, and then, hip-deep in wet, heavy snow, she thrashes and stumbles her way across two miles of snow-covered hills to the St. George ferry terminal. It’s not a totally out of character thing for her to do. Gab admits that she is the sort of person who “has to do, has to do whatever comes into my mind,” much like her never-say-die mother. Lately, however, she’s been trying to curb those tendencies, almost as if in the process of trying to match her mother’s tenacity and determination over the last few months she’s scared herself with how much like her she can be.
This morning, though, Gab is a shopkeeper possessed. After getting herself to the ferry terminal and crossing New York Harbor at sunrise, she finds that subway service has been canceled, which leaves her no option for getting to Brooklyn other than walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in a whiteout as fifty-mile-per-hour winds lash its exposed pedestrian walkway. For someone who has never been particularly adventurous in a physical way, it’s probably the most impulsive thing she’s ever done, but then again, how often do you have the Brooklyn Bridge all to yourself? Three hours later (five after she left the basement), she lights up the store’s funky tropical awning, and for the rest of the morning she is rewarded with the distinction of being the only store open anywhere in the neighborhood.
That one act seems to bring back a large number of customers, including, I would guess, many who’d been avoiding us simply because we’d rubbed them wrong. (Take your pick how: the siren in the night or the cold coffee? The price increases or the turned-off TV?) New York may be a hard and impersonal place, but people do actually want to like the people they give business to on a regular basis. Today, by showing commitment to the neighborhood, Gab goes a long way toward rebuilding that crucial relationship.
But there’s still a long way to go, and this is but one step. In a smaller place than New York they might give a business endless opportunities to get it right, because there’s less competition and something better might not come along. Here, a thousand other wannabes are ready to replace us.
JUST AS I’M thinking that Gab, who, unlike me or Kay, has never taken off even one minute from the store, is the one person in this family who’s indispensable, in March she gets a call from a friend at her old law firm, the one she quit because it was hollowing out her brain. The friend wants to know if Gab would be interested in a job at a big international bank selling off commercial jets in the bank’s midtown office. The friend’s husband, who works at the bank, is looking for someone with Gab’s qualifications and specifically asked about Gab.
When she tells me this I can’t help but laugh, because what could be more ridiculous than going from peddling Slim Jims and Nutrament to selling Boeings? And how could Gab possibly abandon us now, with the store in so much jeopardy? Not even Gab or her mother would try to work at a deli and a bank at once.
Quickly, I realize she’s not laughing with me: she’s going to apply for the job.
“But you said you’d never go back to corporate law,” I cry, suddenly panicked.
“I did?” replies Gab, who has the power to eliminate any traces of doubt in herself once she has settled on a course of action. “I don’t remember that.”
“You made me promise to incarcerate you in a mental hospital if you even considered it. Don’t you remember the long hours and meaningless work—the drudgery?”
Gab looks genuinely baffled. “Even if what you’re saying was true,” she says skeptically, “this job wouldn’t be like that.” She explains that it’s a contract position, which means