The family that operates a convenience store together, stays together

I decided that I needed an energy drink to pick me up, so I walked over to the convenience store that is in our neighbourhood. It had recently been taken over by a new family that were all quite short, and of some hard-to-define nationality. Middle eastern? Eastern European? Could be either. Or neither. Anyhow, every time I walk into the store, there’s this short little woman with a strange accent behind the counter, standing at attention. She’s always polite, but I wouldn’t say exactly friendly.

So I was doubly surprised to walk in and, not only see someone other than her standing there, but to see that it was the guy that is usually behind the counter at the Esso station/convenience store 30 kilometres outside of town. Like the little woman, he’s always polite, but not particularly friendly, even though he sees me all the time when I stop for gas or a drink during my daily commute. I realized that he might be related to the little woman who is usually there. I said Hi to him as our eyes met, and I walked to the back of the store. As I was deciding which energy drink to buy, I started thinking I should say something to him like, “Hey, I usually see you at the Esso out on the highway,” or something like that, just to acknowledge that I knew who he was, as a gesture of friendliness.

I picked out a ‘reduced carb’ energy drink, and walked up to the front counter to pay for it. All of a sudden, three people, apparently all his family, but no one I had ever seen before, came bursting through the front door, and quickly filed behind the front counter. One of them, a pre-teen girl, was crying uncontrollably. A woman, presumably her mother, was yelling at her in foreign language. I think she was also directing some of her yelling at a young boy, presumably her son, who didn’t react in the slightest way. Then the Esso guy started yelling at everyone, and I was just standing there, waiting to pay for my drink. Saying Hi no longer seemed like a good idea.

They continued shouting for a bit, with the girl bawling her eyes out, and the boy completely expressionless. Pretty soon, the Esso guy decided to pay me some attention. He rang in the drink, the cash register calculated the tax and displayed the total, then he said the total out loud: “$3.38.” By now, the girl was sobbing noisily on a stool at one end of the space behind the counter, while the others stood on the other side of the Esso guy, with the mother continuing to berate everyone, including the Esso guy, who was probably her husband. I gave him $3.50, which I extracted in a painstakingly slow and awkward way from my pocket, fumbling with the coins to avoid including a large piece of pocket lint, and handed the money to him.

As he dug through the change in the cash register to get me my twelve cents, and as the yelling continued, I thought, ‘aw, what the hell’ and I said to him, “Don’t I normally see you at the Esso station out on the highway?” All of a sudden, everything went dead quiet as they all stared at me in silence. His hand stopped moving in the change drawer, as he seemed to forget how much change he was getting me. I looked at him, and then I looked at the rest of them, kind of surreptitiously. The young girl sniffed. “Never mind,” I said, “keep the change.”

As I walked out of the store, the woman started shouting again, this time much louder, the girl started wailing pathetically, and the Esso guy started shouting, too. The boy remained silent the entire time. I stood out in the parking lot, sipping my cold drink, and smelling the fresh air with wide open nostrils.