I DIDN’T REMEMBER my parents. Ba died when I was six, almost ten years ago. My mother just left one day, dropping me off at pre-school and never coming back. In photos, she was pale and thin, unsmiling, her billowing dresses reminding me of plastic bags bullied by the wind.
My uncle said I could come live with him in Rockland. He and Ba were separated by eight years. Uncle was hunched and soft-spoken, little rivers of white shot through his hair, memory sieving away. He never married but had a son a few years older than me, who the two of us never talked about. In doing so, I was keeping up my end of the bargain, in exchange for him letting me stay. The first time I asked about Yin, how he was doing, if I could add anything to his commissary, Uncle’s eyes filled with an old despair. I didn’t ask again.
UNCLE OWNED a small drugstore on the border between Spring Valley and New City. He would tell me how Ba used to drive up on the weekends from Flushing to help with unpacking inventory.
After Ba died, Yin helped with the store, and now that Yin was gone too, Uncle was left with me. Every now and then, I caught him giving me a dispirited frown, like a gambler making do with a secondhand good-luck charm. The store, sandwiched between a massage parlor and a dentist’s office, was dingy and dim-lit, big enough for just one person behind the counter. Most afternoons, that person was me—Uncle had meetings in the city and didn’t come back until late.
The store was Uncle’s one measure of pride. He had finagled a system in which every inch of surface space was utilized. The only thing he lacked was a security system. He couldn’t afford a high-quality camera or an alarm, the kind that relayed directly to a dashboard manned at all hours. All he had was a baseball bat tucked
