• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1190 0

air-conditioning company, which, like all start-ups (particularly those in a country that the owner has just moved to), struggled at first and went through years of ups and downs. Until Edward became established, the Paks were forced to live in trailer parks and a brutal succession of blighted condominiums overlooking highways and cemeteries. Kay had no choice but to work in sweatshops and as a night cashier at stores, and meanwhile she still had to raise three kids and open her doors to an endless stream of visitors, including me and Gab. Despite her attempt to restore the “traditional” balance between a husband and wife, there was no switch from breadwinner to full-time housewife.

But of course there was a happy ending: the family stayed together. In that sense, things have worked out. And now, with the store getting on its feet, there is finally the potential to restore what had been lost.

On that day when I stand at the window watching Kay smoke in her tank top (never has the name for that particular shirt style suited its wearer more appropriately, by the way), it feels as if we are in some kind of golden moment, and it almost looks that way, too. For one thing, the sun is setting, and at six o’clock on a July day the light filtering through the industrial haze of New Jersey is nothing if not peachlike. (To my mind Brooklyn is always at its best during a long summer sunset, when it is still a city and still dense with neighborly interaction, but when the volume and pace are at a humane level and you don’t feel literally overshadowed by the sheer bulk of New York’s money and ambition.) For another, inside the store a few feet away from me, one of our new workers, an eagle-eyed college kid named Kevin, is meticulously unpacking a shipment of inventory in front of a startled frozen food deliveryman. After failing in our initial attempts to hire people other than Dwayne who don’t share TV time with us every night, in Kevin we’ve developed a competent, able-bodied employee who craves as many shifts as we can give him. Kevin has an especially useful talent: he makes a sport of sniffing out the deliverymen’s tricks and is essentially a one-man stop-loss squad, probably saving us hundreds of dollars a week. And with Emo making the morning shift into smooth sailing and Dwayne thwarting the narcs, it feels like we’re actually covering our bases for once, instead of constantly being caught out of position.

Meanwhile, a group of Mexican busboys stand in back, boisterously but not offensively getting smashed on cases of Corona Light sold to them at a special regulars’ discount. Residents of one of Chucho’s overcrowded rooming house–style apartments upstairs, they’ve been doing this now every Wednesday since the start of the summer. Other regulars—I’d say we currently know about a third of all people who come into the store by name—keep coming in and lingering by the checkout counter, some for a few hours. They bring their lizards and their dogs, their mothers in Nebraska (via cell phone, of course) and all their annoying habits, like the Russian limo driver who always starts shouting lottery numbers at me when I’m in the middle of talking or counting someone else’s change, or the woman in neon pink spandex who can never decide what sandwich to order and stands there at the counter slowing down the line. Some of the regulars have come back—Super Mario, Barry the half-blind cab driver, a soft-spoken Haitian waiter known as “the General” who stands in the snack section every night for two hours and doesn’t speak. I’m not sure why they’ve returned. At one point back in the spring I think we all realized how miserable we’d become, and it could be that since then we’ve made an effort to be friendlier. Surely success brightens one’s attitude.

Speaking for myself, the biggest change has been a kind of loosening of that legendary clenched-sphincter Puritan uptightness. Even with a store as small as ours you can control almost nothing—except maybe the environment. And I had tried. Imposing my will on the music or the coffee was a way