The Storefront

The key the landlord gave David Ah Lum was the wrong shape for the lock, and they stood together in front of the empty storefront on South Virginia Street on a bright cold morning in the fall of 2007 while the man tried it four different ways, and David, who was thirty-nine years old and had spent twenty of those years cooking inside buildings other people owned, waited on the sidewalk and looked at the glass and thought that this was probably the most honest introduction the place could have given him. Nothing here was going to work on the first try.

The lock finally turned. The landlord shouldered the door and it swung into a long narrow room that smelled of dust and old grease and the particular closed sweetness of a space that had been shut a while, and light came in behind them across a floor of cracked linoleum, and David stepped inside and stood where the last owner’s counter had been and let the size of what he was doing settle onto him in the quiet.

It was cheap. That was the first fact and the reason he was standing there at all. This whole stretch of Virginia Street south of the tracks had been cheap for twenty-five years, ever since they built the freeway out west and pulled the highway traffic off it, and the street had gone from a road you drove through to a road you drove past, a mile of secondhand stores and antique malls and old motor courts with their neon half dead, the kind of address a young man with no money could actually afford to make a mistake on. Nobody called it anything in particular. It was just South Virginia, the other Virginia Street, the one the tourists never saw, and its cheapness was the whole reason a line cook could stand in one of its dead storefronts and imagine hanging his own name over the door.

But it was moving. You could feel it if you had spent your life reading rooms, which David had. A young couple had opened a little soup place a few doors up that summer, bright and hopeful and full at lunch, and there was a bar down the block that had not been there two years ago, and here and there among the antique shops a window had been cleaned and something new put behind it. The street was not turning fast. But it was turning, the way a tide turns, first in one shallow place and then another, and David had come to believe, in the private way you believe the thing you are about to bet everything on, that he had caught it at the exact moment when the rent was still a mistake you could afford and the street was already, quietly, deciding to live again.

Everyone he respected thought he was crazy. The town was strange this year, everybody said so. The building boom that had thrown up cranes over downtown was making a sound under it now like ice going soft, sold signs sitting too long, a nervousness in how people talked about their houses, and only a fool opened a restaurant into the front edge of a bad feeling. His friends in the casino kitchens, the ones he had come up with off the dish line, told him to keep the job, keep the benefits, wait for the town to settle. They were not wrong. He knew exactly how not wrong they were.

He walked the length of the empty room to where the kitchen would have to go. He had started at eighteen washing dishes in a coffee shop off a casino floor, during a car week when they threw him onto the line in an emergency and he found out, with his hands, that he could do the thing, that the cooking came to him the way nothing at school ever had. He had cooked ever since, twenty years of somebody else’s menu under somebody else’s lights on somebody else’s floor, good years and hard years, the industry that fed this whole town and had fed his family for three generations. His grandmother Helen had worked the war years feeding soldiers downtown. And back of her, back at the beginning of everything, there had been the first Ah Lum, Wei, who came to this valley in eighteen sixty-eight to lay the railroad track that made the town, and stayed, and opened a laundry on Commercial Row because it was the one storefront a Chinese man was allowed to keep, a mile north of where David stood now, in a Chinatown the town had later burned to the ground and paved over.

That was the arithmetic David kept coming back to, standing in the dust. A mile. In a hundred and forty years his family had moved one mile south down the same street, from the track Wei laid to the room David was about to sign for, and in all that hundred and forty years no Ah Lum had ever once hung his own name over his own door on Virginia Street and cooked what he wanted to cook. They had washed the town’s laundry and kept its temple and served its soldiers and fed its gamblers, always inside the building, always the hands and never the name. And here was a dead cheap storefront on the forgotten end of the street, at the one moment it could be had, and David had the money he had saved and the recipes he had carried in his head for twenty years and a nerve he had not known he owned until this fall.

“You want it or you want to think,” the landlord said from the doorway. He was not unkind about it. He had shown the room to other people. “I got a guy calling this afternoon.”

David did not answer right away. He stood in the middle of the long room and looked back down its length at the door standing open to the bright cold street, at the light lying across the cracked floor, at the sign bracket over the glass where somebody’s name had hung and come down and where his own could go, and he thought about all the ones behind him who had cooked and cleaned and served inside walls that were never theirs, and about his grandmother, and about Wei stepping off nothing into this valley with a life to build and no permission to build it, and he understood that the leap in front of him was not really a business decision at all and never had been, that it was only the oldest thing his family did, which was to stay in a place that had not asked them to stay and make something of their own in it anyway.

“I want it,” David said.

He walked back up the room toward the landlord and the paperwork and the open door, past where the counter would go and the tables would go, already seeing it full, already hearing it, and he stepped out through the doorway of the empty storefront into the turning street and the hard clean light of the town on the front edge of whatever it was becoming next.

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