As in:
Benji had known Oscar for twenty six years and for most of that time their large shop at 13th and Mahogany had flourished. Their formula wasn’t any one thing, but an ever changing duet of timing, brio, and a tastefully erotic attraction for consumerism. They wanted to sell, but not to force. They wanted to advertise, but not dominate the conversation. They wanted to be hungry to please, but not to burp as the customers left with bags in hand. It was always their aim to look like an overgrown tobacco shop that just happened to have the latest in electronics on hand. Their best year was 2004 when a Car Toys opened down the block and closed its doors seven months later because Uno Momento’s loyal customers wouldn’t even go in the new store to check the prices on a bluetooth.
But now the economy had tanked and, simultaneously, Benji’s alimony payments to Monica had kicked in, forcing him to sell his house in a down market, and pass up the new muscle car he was used to buying every 18 months.
“I have a bit of a motorhead sweet tooth,” he’d admitted to his lawyer.
He’d always appreciated Oscar’s decent interval from the rigors of reality but now he increasingly felt his partner was being cavalier. Oscar’s reaction to the pooling red ink on their balance sheet was only to shrug and then to change eye-wear, from a slim, flat pair of glasses with violet frames to a gun-metal gray pince nez.
“It’s all good,” Oscar had begun to say in 2006.
“Yeah, how so?” Benji had always thought to himself. His daddy had come home from Korea missing most of a leg and an eye. It was a visible warning that life can just kick you in the ass without explanation or apology.
“It’s all good,” Oscar said, once again, as they closed early on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
And it was then that Benji just snapped, throwing a handsome metal kitchen stool right through the store’s plate glass window, as casually as if he were throwing a bucket of mop water into the alley.
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