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“Any place in particular?” I continue, trying to sound relaxed.

“Just drive,” Dwayne says coldly. His mood has changed since we got in the car. Usually I can’t get Dwayne to shut up, but now all of a sudden he won’t talk. He just sits there in the passenger seat and fidgets with his phone.

At first the landscape we pass through is familiar, and I pretend we’re on an ordinary supply run to pick up diapers or cigarettes. When you work with someone like Dwayne every day, it’s easier than you would think to pretend, and forget that he or she may be a violent sociopath—until you get in a situation where you feel utterly exposed and vulnerable.

Now the question What does Dwayne want from us? comes back to me. Because until recently I thought I was starting to get an idea what it was. Trite as it sounds, he wanted the store to be about more than just work. He wanted that connection with the neighborhood, that loyalty and sense of purpose—and from us he wanted the same thing.

“I want you to come to the Founders Day picnic,” he had said to me in the spring, then asked and asked again. Before that it was “Let’s go down to Baltimore and eat some rock crab this weekend” and “How about we go to Pennsylvania and hit one of them Dutch kitchens?” Maine for lobsters, Chinatown for the late-night all-you-can-eat buffet, even his annual Mother’s Day party.

Somehow I managed to turn them all down.

In part this was because as I saw it, Dwayne and I didn’t need to go on any extracurricular bonding expeditions. We were already doing the equivalent of a cross-country road trip every week. Dwayne’s efforts at bonding cross some sort of invisible line. He just wants the job to be about more than work, and all I can think of is, Hasn’t anyone told him that it’s a just shitty service job paying $10.50 an hour? He should be pushing for health insurance, not to have me come taste his barbecued chicken.

Gradually, as the rejections have piled up, his sociability has cooled. Dwayne has also been having a difficult summer within that sliver of his life that falls outside the deli. His rent recently went up, and he’s juggling more girlfriends than ever, it seems, while coping with the material demands of two teenage daughters who happen to be on summer vacation. At least the turmoil at the store is over, the possibility of it closing or being sold, which threatened to turn his life upside down as much as it did ours. But I wonder if Dwayne senses that his days at the store are numbered—after all, the neighborhood might throw a fit if Dwayne ever got fired, but what if it didn’t matter? The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be. Given how rapidly things change and people move in and out, it’s arguably not even a neighborhood anymore.

Maybe he’s plotting to get some of his blood and sweat back, I think as we drive deeper and deeper into Brooklyn. Earlier in the evening Dwayne’s friend Monty the low-level drug dealer had come in the store, and he and Dwayne had an argument out on the sidewalk—about what I’m not sure. Dwayne’s been hanging out with a more Monty-like crowd recently and quelling whatever tension he’s feeling with multiple six-packs of Heineken consumed over by the projects in the early morning hours after work. When we first got the store, Dwayne told me he avoided the projects. Could the old Dwayne be making a comeback, I wonder? Could he be drifting back toward his thuggish old self? And what does that have to do with this crazy joyride we’re on?

“Dwayne, how long is this trip going to take?” I shout at him. We’re now so far into Brooklyn I don’t know what neighborhood we’re in, or if we’re even in the borough anymore. We keep passing dark, windowless buildings, weed-filled lots and derelict storefront churches with patently inappropriate names like Bright Horizons and New Beginnings.

He still won’t answer, and internally I’m starting to freak out. What could possibly be out this way, and why won’t Dwayne tell me what it is? I wish I had called home and