My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  At the time, though, we don’t know this, and we won’t until Gab gets back to New York and reads it in one of her pregnancy books. Which is good because in Steamboat Springs we were able to enjoy ourselves for once without hiding it, like the grown-ups we used to be and someday will be again.

  ON THE FLIGHT home from Colorado I’m looking out the airplane window at the great checkerboard of farms across mid-America when suddenly I realize I’m seeing a different checkerboard—the one in our deli formed by all the dishwater-colored tiles spreading out before the cash register. It occurs to me then how much I’m looking forward to getting home. Our three-day trip has taken me and Gab away from the deli for longer than we’ve ever been, and during that time I’ve been thinking about it more or less constantly. I even made Gab call her mom twice a day to find out how much the shifts had made. Gab also misses the store, but she’s too busy thinking about babies to let it distract her. For me it’s the set of pleasures I most look forward to—for instance, the satisfaction of beholding well-stocked shelves after the deliveries have come. Or the anticipatory buzz of a busy weekend starting as soon as I wake up on a Friday morning. Best of all is when the store gets so overloaded with customers that extra people are needed behind the counter and everyone is communicating telepathically, a human assembly line with seamlessly interacting parts, and the customers are happy and the whole store hums with energy. During times like those it feels like you’re thinking not with your head and not even with your hands but with someone else’s hands—Gab’s, Kay’s or whoever’s—and you almost get the sensation of being one big organism behind the counter. It’s glorious and mindless and probably weird, but most of all it’s collective and communal.

  Unfortunately, our experiment in running a tobaccoless convenience store is not going well. It isn’t just the loss of revenue, devastating as that is, or the defection of customers who used to buy cigarettes and beer, groceries or the newspaper. It’s the message it sends, the tone it sets, the seemingly high-handed attitude it broadcasts. Even some nonsmokers are offended by the idea of a convenience store that doesn’t sell tobacco. And there’s no use explaining when you’ve had, as we have, customers actually throw things at us in anger or drop their groceries and walk out. Smokers and their ilk feel persecuted enough in this city—they’ve had so many changes imposed on them in the last few years. “And now I have to feel judged here too?” as one customer put it. “Screw you.”

  What makes this even more tragic is that over the summer the store had finally found its way, acquiring a form that suited the neighborhood. It had a kind of double or triple life, but so, after all, does the quintessential New Yorker, with a day job as a waiter and a night job as an actor, or an economic existence here and a family somewhere else. Our store had all these different and painfully particular customers, yet somehow we had found a way to reconcile all their various needs. And it was a beautiful thing. Someone once told me that small business is “is putting your faith in the world. Your risk your reputation, your family, your future, and essentially trust that you’ll be rewarded.” For a while in the summer of 2003, that’s how it felt.

  COSTA RICA

  ONE MORNING A FEW DAYS AFTER WE GET BACK FROM DENVER, Gab and I are sleeping in after a late shift when Edward comes down to the basement, which he rarely does when we’re home. Something he says to Gab in Korean causes her to bolt out of bed.

  I sit upright, wondering what the fuss is about. Did we oversleep? Did something happen at the store? If so, why did Edward summon Gab instead of Kay, as he normally would? Maybe Kay had a bad night again; lately she’s been anxious about the cigarette problem and unable to sleep, and then the next day she passes out while sitting at the table or counting money on the kitchen floor. She’s in a state of nervous exhaustion, and her mind isn’t working right—she’s been making very un-Kay-like mistakes with money and scheduling, forgetting things she of all people never forgets. The other day while cooking she almost lit herself on fire, and apparently this wasn’t the only kitchen accident she’s had recently, because her hands are covered with burns. Of course, the more strung out she gets, the more she smokes, and as a result she’s also chronically sick. So when I hear her in the living room coughing after Gab has run upstairs, I’m again pondering what we can do to make Kay take better care of herself.

  Then, a few seconds later, a new level of urgency: I hear Gab pleading with her mother to “open your eyes, just say something,” so I run upstairs, where I find Kay on the floor, sitting but slumped over, as if she’s performing a yoga move that involved pressing her forehead to her knees. Gab is sitting next to her, plainly distressed, and Edward is pacing nearby, looking even more worried.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” says Gab. “My father says she took some cold medicine for her cough, and now she can’t wake up. Oma?” She shakes Kay’s shoulder, and nearly knocks her over.

  “I’m … fine,” Kay finally mutters, in English, which is a good sign because it shows she’s hearing us talk. She’s slurring, though, and her voice has none of its usual force.

  Gab rolls her over and puts a pillow under her head. Squinting at the dimness of an overcast morning, Kay looks to be in searing pain.

  “I think we should call an ambulance,” I say.

  Gab and Edward look at each other. No one in Gab’s family likes doctors or hospitals, and they always wait till the absolute last second to seek medical help.

  “No ambulance,” Kay gasps. “Too expensive.” Which is such a Kay thing to say that for a second I think, Okay, this isn’t such a big deal. Everyone’s going to be fine.

  I convince Edward to let me take her to a hospital five minutes away, though, and as Gab and I are driving her there, her condition starts to deteriorate.

  “I can’t tell if she’s breathing,” Gab says, holding her mother’s head in her lap in the backseat. “I don’t like this. Why is she losing color?” We race to the emergency room, and at the entrance to the ER I convince a nurse with a stretcher to help us get her out of the car.

  “What happened?” he asks us.

  I helplessly confess that I don’t know. The nurse then checks Kay’s vital signs and, apparently startled by what he sees, whisks her away from us, plunging her into the depths of the hospital, which Gab and I have always regarded with trepidation because newspaper reports say it is broke and many of its buildings seem to have been abandoned.

  Hours pass. We sit in the emergency room watching as a car accident victim hobbles in, followed by an old woman writhing in the agony of an apparent stroke. I think then about something that happened to Kay not long ago as she was coming home from the night shift. After leaving the store she drove down Atlantic Avenue to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, where the entrance ramp is little more than a stop sign and you have to merge with traffic going sixty miles per hour. Accidentally, Kay cut off a livery cab driver in a town car, and instead of honking at her once or flashing his headlights, he kept his hand on the horn for what seemed like forever, then chased her to the elevated portion of the Gowanus Expressway, where he cut in front of her and slammed on the brakes. Kay wouldn’t get out of her lane (of course), and as a result found herself trapped inside a maelstrom of honking, rushing traffic at the mercy of a psychopath, sure that she was going to die. Yet she couldn’t help noticing how peaceful it was up on the Gowanus, six stories over Brooklyn, looking down at rooftops of enormous nearby buildings like Jetro, while the Statue of Liberty and Wall Street winked at her on the horizon. She waited for the town car driver to come back and smash her window, but instead he stayed in his car, as if he too were paralyzed by the beauty of the setting. Then with a harrumph his car roared off, lurching in and out of his lane as he sped toward southern Brooklyn. Kay’s heart rate returned to normal, and she somehow managed to steer herself back to Staten Island. This had happened last summer, and since then she had been living in fear that she might see the livery cab driver again, either on
the road or at the store, but she didn’t tell us because she was afraid that we would criticize her or try to stop her from going home by herself.

  After hearing about the incident I felt shaken. What other secrets does my mother-in-law keep? I wondered. Particularly, what else about her own suffering has she not been telling us? Given that before we bought the store her health was not the greatest, it can be hard to judge the store’s overall impact—her body went from broken to more broken. “Before we make opening at store, I be okay. Now whole body not work,” she would claim. But “okay” to her meant those thunderous physical breakdowns, which were often the result of cleaning the house too hard (Kay’s method of cleaning leaves the house looking like it got jostled by an earthquake, pictures askew, appliances nonfunctional, mop handles snapped in half) or cooking marathons (five hundred handmade dumplings in thirty-six hours, say) or something more mysterious and implacable, like suddenly growing old after a life spent pushing yourself twice as hard as everyone else.

  And then, of course, the other possibility was that Kay was not being secretive at all, but that we chose not to see how much damage the store was inflicting.

  “Are you relatives of Kay Pak?” a nurse finally comes over to ask us. It’s evening, and we’ve been at the hospital for the entire day and still don’t know what happened to Kay or what her condition is. Gab is a wreck. “You can come in now.”

  In a busy hallway, a kindly male doctor who seems to be either Pakistani or Indian sits down with us. He says—jolt number one—that Kay had a heart attack and is lucky that we insisted on taking her to the hospital. “Heart attack?” Gab and I sputter, barely able to mouth the words. “But … she didn’t say her chest hurt … and she’s only fifty-five … she’s never had heart trouble before.” With seasoned patience, the doctor waits for us to adjust to the new reality before administering jolt number two, which is that as far as he can tell, this wasn’t her first heart attack—she’s had one or two before, possibly a few years back.

  “Your mother is strong,” he says, smiling a little, as if without knowing Kay he can tell exactly what kind of person she is, “but the way she’s living, no one can survive for long.” He says the tests they’ve taken so far indicate flashing red lights across the board, from dangerously high blood pressure to emergency sugar levels. “She needs to eat better,” he continues, and she needs to start exercising and stop smoking.

  “What about work?” Gab says.

  “What kind of work does your mother do?” the doctor asks. Gab tells him about the deli.

  “She needs to stop immediately,” the doctor says. “That kind of stress is the worst thing for someone with her risk factors. I suggest six months of continuous rest, and then she can go back to work gradually, but in a different kind of job.”

  Gab and I nod solemnly, stunned by the news and frightened of what it all means, but relieved that we’ve found out in time.

  Jolt number three has yet to be delivered, though, and it comes when we ask the doctor if we can talk to Kay and tell her how lucky she is.

  “She’s in a coma,” the doctor says. “We had to put her there so she can recuperate, and I think probably she will come out of it soon, but I can’t be sure.”

  A coma? I think. Of course: the one way to get my mother-in-law to settle down and stop doing things. I’m sure if she were awake she’d be ripping the tubes out of her arms and trying to get out of bed, demanding that Gab fetch her a Parliament, which she’d try to get away with smoking in the hospital bathroom. And then she’d run to the store, yelling at us for abandoning it on a Saturday, of all days. (Emo and Dwayne have actually been holding down the fort just fine since this morning.)

  “Well, can we see her?” Gab asks. “Just for a second?”

  After making us promise not to disturb her, the doctor assents and takes us to the most dismal of all possible hospital rooms, an underlit windowless space with stains on the wall and disused machinery stacked in the corners. As much as I like the doctor, I have the urge to yank Kay out of here and put her in some swanky Manhattan hospital, whatever the cost. But then the nurse pulls back a curtain, revealing Kay’s spent-looking body, and I realize that with all the machines she’s hooked up to a move would be impossible. She’s been stripped, gurneyed and intubated, and her life force is so deeply buried in the coma that all her facial muscles have gone slack, to the point where she’s become unrecognizable. It’s not her! I feel like saying. She’s somewhere else in the hospital, somewhere the situation is less dire. We should find her and see if she’s okay!

  But then I see draped over a vinyl chair what I know to be Kay’s signature article of clothing: that sleeveless orange shirt that shows off her arms and touts a place she’s never been to, and I have to leave the room so as not to disturb her while my emotions get the best of me.

  THREE DAYS LATER Kay wakes up, and after the doctors have checked her out and she’s eaten, the family stages a kind of intervention while she’s still stuck in bed, informing her that for the sake of her health, we have to sell the store. Lying there somewhat stunned, my mother-in-law has an expression on her face that I’ve never seen on her before: she looks helpless and resigned. She doesn’t rip the tubes out of her arms and walk away. She doesn’t pshaw everyone and say, “Please. I make my own decisions.” She just sits there and listens without resisting. Finally, I can’t help thinking. Ganging up on her doesn’t feel good, but with a woman as strong as Kay, what choice do you have? And since we are helping her, whether she sees it that way or not, it is important to be strong ourselves. After we explain why she’s here in the hospital (she herself can’t remember anything from the day she came in), I think she does understand how close to killing herself she has been. That look of acquiescence would seem to indicate a recognition that it’s time to let go, though later it occurs to me that, knowing Kay, it could just as easily be shame at not being stronger, shame at not being able to work and dread of the physical pain that idleness will cause.

  Nonetheless, she agrees to come home and rest, and for a few days we take turns watching her to make sure she doesn’t slip outside for a cigarette or try to clean the house. It feels ridiculous to be babysitting a grown-up that way, especially someone as independent and vital as Kay. I don’t like it and I hope I never have to do it again. What something like that does to your own dignity makes you question whether it’s worth the cost. However, partly as a result of her confinement, Kay’s strength, if not her health, returns quickly, and soon she is begging to be let outside. It starts with a few errands—picking up her own medicine at the pharmacy, for instance—and soon she is ready to visit the store. As her jailer on that day when she first goes back, I make her swear that after dropping off some money she will come home immediately. “Oh, I promise,” says Kay, crossing her heart dramatically. The next time I see her it’s nine hours later, at the end of the night shift. The following day she slips out once more, and after that it is right back to the old schedule, and so much for our plans to close the store.

  D.I.Y.

  EVERYONE WAS AFRAID THAT THE PARIS REVIEW WOULD FOLD without George, but once the collective concern for the magazine became clear, folding was no longer the issue. The issue was who would run the place. The board wanted to bring in someone from outside right away and already had several candidates in mind, as we learned from the newspapers. At first it looked as if the longtime editors wouldn’t even get one issue to prove we were up to the job. However, with some clever convincing from the staff, the board members realized they had to at least give us a try if they expected anyone to stick around and help them keep the magazine going. The search was thus suspended while the board “reassessed.” No one thought they were seriously thinking about letting us run the place, but maybe, we thought, if we do a good enough job, they’ll have no choice.

  Thus there’s been a change in atmosphere: with something like a year to prove ourselves, we’ve dropped the slacker routine. No more wandering into the offic
e late or missing deadlines. No more extended absences for the sake of skiing or finishing a novel. Painfully, about half the staff has voluntarily departed or been let go, resulting in hugely increased productivity from the remaining editors. All in all, it’s considerably less “fun” now than George would have liked, but it’s also a lot more efficient. Years of accumulated errors are being purged, and one of the results is that we’ve put out some of the strongest issues in a long time.

  Yet we still don’t have a circulation manager, a contracts specialist, or an IT professional. The office is still located in the Manhattan medialand equivalent of Nunavut, and we still let twenty-three-year-old nobodies edit Nobel laureates. There may be less pool playing and fewer business trips to the Playboy Mansion, but the office still feels like that of a college newspaper rather than arguably the most famous literary magazine in the world.

  This is dangerous. As long as the Review clings to its amateur past, another fiasco is inevitable. And this time it’s going to matter.

  WE ALL HAVE new roles at the Review since George’s death, and one of the responsibilities that has somehow ended up in my lap is overseeing the anthology series that the ten-thousand-dollar mistake came out of. Truly, it’s the sort of thing that could only happen at the Review. Not only does the ten-thousand-dollar mistake strongly argue against giving me this particular job, but overseeing the anthology means coordinating an important nationwide reading series, and as someone who once had a calendar from the wrong year hanging over his desk for eight months and couldn’t figure out why he kept missing appointments (“What do you mean my doctor’s appointment was two days ago?”), I should be banned categorically from any sort of job that involves booking people’s plane tickets or anything as logistically complicated as staging a public event.