He bought my father's store

My dad had the store on Argyle since 1979. He bought the building in 1984 for a hundred and nine thousand dollars and my mother told him for about six years straight that he'd lost his mind. When he died the assessor had it at six hundred and forty.

Run that out and it's five and a half percent compounded, which beats what most people are getting on the money they think they're being smart with. He wasn't being smart. The landlord was raising him every year and he got tired of it. I've used the number on clients anyway.

We lived over it. Second floor front, right on top of the kitchen vent, so I went to school smelling like the store and didn't know that until somebody told me in fourth grade.

He died in February of 2018. He had a stroke in the walk-in and Manny found him when he went in for a case of scallions, and the ambulance came up Argyle the wrong way because of how the buses sit there.

My mother wasn't going to run it, she's seventy-nine. My sister's in Cerritos and she wanted it listed the week of the funeral, which I told her was cold. We put it up in October and it sat there till spring.

Then Marek came through. Polish, Portage Park, had a place on Milwaukee for eleven years and a banquet hall out in Norridge that his brother-in-law ran into the ground.

He walked it twice and the second time he brought a guy with a moisture meter, and I figured that was the end of it, because nobody brings a moisture meter into a hundred-year-old building unless he's hunting for a reason to come down. That's not a knock on him. I'd have brought one.

He paid six-twelve for the building. Seventy-four for the business and the equipment, and we carried eighty of that at six percent over seven years, which I told my sister was generous of us. It wasn't especially. She doesn't read the documents.

He kept the tank. The tank by the door with the two big goldfish my dad used to top off out of a plastic pitcher, and Marek kept those fish going another two years after. The register's the same one too, a Sharp from 1994 that you have to order the tape for special.

Closing was the second week of March. There was about a week before it where I was down there most days separating what was my dad's from what was the store's. My dad kept his reading glasses in the register drawer and his pills behind the fire extinguisher.

The office is behind the kitchen, past the prep table. Eight by ten, no window, a calendar on the wall from the seafood guy that was two years out of date. I was in there on a Thursday afternoon with the inventory sheets spread on the desk and Marek came in behind me to ask about the grease trap contract. Which is a service agreement and not a policy, and I'll walk anybody through why that matters, because the day it backs up into the dining room is the day they find out.

He put his hand flat on my back, between the shoulder blades, and left it there, and I didn't move, and a while after that I was standing up doing my belt and looking down at a sheet that said forty-eight pounds shrimp, sixteen-twenty.

He didn't say anything about it. He said the ice machine was going to go and I should warn my mother, and he was right, it went the next January. My dad put that machine in in 2006.

I took the Kennedy to 290 to 88 and it was forty minutes because it was the middle of the afternoon. Grace asked how the closing went. I told her about the taxes, how the building went from nine thousand a year to nineteen across two reassessments, and she said that's criminal.

I wrote the policy on the place. I want to say up front that's less strange than it sounds. I do commercial lines out of a strip office off Ogden, and a restaurant on Argyle is a decent account for me. It's property and GL, and the liquor liability rides separate because a business owner's policy won't touch the dram shop exposure, and nobody believes that until somebody's cousin gets in a car. Anyway. He needed a broker and I'm a broker.

So there's a phone call every February. Twelve minutes, fifteen. We go through the receipts because the premium's rated on receipts, he tells me what beef is doing to him, and he asks about Maddie. My daughter. She's at Illinois in actuarial science, so by twenty-six she'll be making more than me and she'll have earned it.

Her rent is eight seventy-five plus her quarter of the gas bill. Four of them in a house I'd condemn.

My mother eats there every other Thursday. She takes the 81 over and sits at the eight-top by the window with Auntie Pham whether the place is slammed or empty. Salt and pepper pork chop. Every single time she tells me the wok isn't hot enough. That's the table my dad did the books at, and Marek doesn't seat anybody there before six.

I go along sometimes. I don't sit. I've got sixty pounds on me. I stand up by the register with my hands on the counter and tell my mother I've got somebody coming in at four.

Marek comes out of the kitchen. He shakes my hand and calls me Kenny, which nobody has called me since eighth grade. He carries my mother's tea over to her himself and she's polite to him in English.

Sundays my mother expects me at the church out in Westmont. I'm fifty-two years old and she still counts heads. She doesn't ask where I was when I'm not there. She calls Sunday afternoon and tells me who asked about me.

Fellowship hall downstairs has those folding chairs with the X legs. I'm not finding out about one of those in front of eighty people who knew my dad.

Herb Kaminski died in 2023. Herb did our books from 1986. I walked into the funeral and Marek was sitting in the second row and I never did find out how he knew Herb.

Mass at St. Peter's on Madison and then lunch at a place on Wabash with a cash bar going at eleven in the morning, which Herb would have enjoyed. I'd parked on four in the garage across the street, the one where the ramp's too tight for anything with a real wheelbase.

Marek walked out with me. He got in on the passenger side, saying something about Herb's daughter putting the house on the market. Fifteen minutes, around there. A cart went by on the deck with an orange light going and it came around twice.

Then he asked did I want to get a coffee. I said I had a two o'clock. The two o'clock was real, a renewal with a printing outfit in Lisle, forty-one employees. You sit down in front of a renewal if you can. That's how I've always run it and it's why I keep them.

That was 2023. Since then it's the February call, twice, and both times he told me beef was killing him.

The card comes the first week of December. Store's name across the front in red, Kim Wah, which is half my grandmother's name, and Marek never changed it and has no reason to. Inside it's printed Season's Greetings and then in pen it says Marek. That's the whole thing.

Grace brings the mail in and she opened it and said that's nice of him, he didn't have to do that. He didn't have to. It's a business card basically, he probably sends two hundred of them out to his vendors.

I took it out to the car. No reason in particular, I had it in my hand and I was headed out anyway, and I put it in the glovebox with the tire gauge.

There's six in there now.