The Assistant Read Free Page A

house too?”

    â€œKarp don’t know. Maybe.”
    â€œBig mouth. Imagine a man that they held him up four times in the last three years and he still don’t take in a telephone. What he says ain’t worth a cent. He promised me he wouldn’t put in a grocery around the corner, but what did he put?—a grocery. Why does he bring me buyers? Why didn’t he keep out the German around the corner?”
    She sighed. “He tries to help you now because he feels sorry for you.”
    â€œWho needs his sorrow?” Morris said. “Who needs him?”
    â€œSo why you didn’t have the sense to make out of your grocery a wine and liquor store when came out the licenses?”
    â€œWho had cash for stock?”
    â€œSo if you don’t have, don’t talk.”
    â€œA business for drunken bums.”
    â€œA business is a business. What Julius Karp takes in next door in a day we don’t take in in two weeks.”
    But Ida saw he was annoyed and changed the subject.
    â€œI told you to oil the floor.”
    â€œI forgot.”
    â€œI asked you special. By now would be dry.”
    â€œI will do later.”
    â€œLater the customers will walk in the oil and make everything dirty.”
    â€œWhat customers?” he shouted. “Who customers? Who comes in here?”
    â€œGo,” she said quietly. “Go upstairs and sleep. I will oil myself.”
    But he got out the oil can and mop and oiled the floor until the wood shone darkly. No one had come in.
    She had prepared his soup. “Helen left this morning without breakfast.”
    â€œShe wasn’t hungry.”
    â€œSomething worries her.”
    He said with sarcasm, “What worries her?” Meaning: the store, his health, that most of her meager wages went to keep up payments on the house; that she had wanted a college
education but had got instead a job she disliked. Her father’s daughter, no wonder she didn’t feel like eating.
    â€œIf she will only get married,” Ida murmured.
    â€œShe will get.”
    â€œSoon.” She was on the verge of tears.
    He grunted.
    â€œI don’t understand why she don’t see Nat Pearl anymore. All summer they went together like lovers.”
    â€œA showoff.”
    â€œHe’ll be someday a rich lawyer.”
    â€œI don’t like him.”
    â€œLouis Karp also likes her. I wish she will give him a chance.”
    â€œA stupe,” Morris said, “like the father.”
    â€œEverybody is a stupe but not Morris Bober.”
    He was staring out at the back yards.
    â€œEat already and go to sleep,” she said impatiently.
    He finished the soup and went upstairs. The going up was easier than coming down. In the bedroom, sighing, he drew down the black window shades. He was half asleep, so pleasant was the anticipation. Sleep was his one true refreshment; it excited him to go to sleep. Morris took off his apron, tie and trousers, and laid them on a chair. Sitting at the edge of the sagging wide bed, he unlaced his misshapen shoes and slid under the cold covers in shirt, long underwear and white socks. He nudged his eye into the pillow and waited to grow warm. He crawled toward sleep. But upstairs Tessie Fuso was running the vacuum cleaner, and though the grocer tried to blot the incident out of his mind, he remembered Nick’s visit to the German and on the verge of sleep felt bad.
    He recalled the bad times he had lived through, but now times were worse than in the past; now they were impossible. His store was always a marginal one, up today, down tomorrow—as the wind blew. Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered—sometimes it seemed to take forever—went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down. When he had first
bought the grocery it was all right for the neighborhood; it had got worse as the neighborhood had. Yet even a year ago, staying open seven