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at the table near the dishbin. “Get up,” he says. “You owe me a soup packet.” She looks up from her arms, her face covered with tattoos. “I’ll cut you,” Philc says, sorting through her bags—a black garbage bag and a Barbie lunchbox.
    “Theo.”
    A line of customers is forming in the front of the store. But I’m watching Philc and when he realizes I’m watching him and that Valerie is watching him he jumps up and spreads his arms in the middle of the floor.
    “Ta-da!” he says. He does a dance step where he walks a perfect square. Then he tries to walk behind the counter but I stop him with the broom.
    “You can’t come back here. You don’t work here.”
    “What are you doing?” he asks me, his face turning red, throwing his hand slightly forward and spreading his fingers, like he’s letting go of something and that I should be wary.
    “What are you doing?” Valerie asks.
    “He doesn’t belong behind the counter,” I say to Valerie and her black eye and back to Philc, who is looking at the floor now and rummaging in his jacket pocket for the handle to something.
    I poke Philc in the sternum with the broom.
    “You think you could take me, bro?” Philc asks, turning his head ninety degrees into his shoulder, crunching his ear against his collarbone, then walking away from me, slapping a fist into his palm. He walks straight back to the emergency exit muttering, “You think you could take me?” Philc kicks open the emergency exit. It opens to a small yard filled with garbage and recycling.
    “C’mon,” Philc says, standing next to the bathroom door, biting at his lips.
    “Get out of here,” I say.
    “You’re not part of this,” he tells me. He raises his boot and lowers it as hard as he can onto the foot of the girl with the tattooed face and she wakes with a loud scream and falls to the floor holding her foot. Philc pulls a rock out, whips it past my shoulder, and a bottle of syrup breaks. He runs up and puts a foot into the glass display case.
    “You don’t belong here,” I say.
    “You don’t belong here,” he answers me back as the front door closes behind him. The girl in the back has curled into a ball and is making small, high-pitched noises. Glass and syrup are everywhere. It’s just glass and syrup but I don’t know what to do about it.
    I look over at Valerie and she’s crying so hard she’s choking. She looks like a mermaid, her pink hair, all those tears.
    We’ve closed up. Pat is coming to look at the damage. Pat knows, with all of his talk of revolution, this is junkie central. The cost of doing business. I’m cleaning up the glass and mopping the syrup. There’s glass in the bagels so I throw all of the bagels away. Valerie straightens the countertop, dumps out the coffee that’s getting old and starting to burn, fastens the cap on the purple onions sliced from this morning. Picks up the pastries and throws them away.
    “That’s where you get that black eye,” Valerie says. “You like to fight. You like to pick fights. You like to pick fights with people’s boyfriends.” She’s still puffy-faced and red.
    “No,” I say. “That’s not how I got this.”
    “Fuck you, Theo,” she says. “Fuck you and your problems.”
    I’m wearing women’s underwear and leather pants at the 16th Street BART station, worried that someone will see me when Ambellina gets off the train. We walk back three blocks to my apartment, past the liquor stores and the transient hotels. Men with blankets on their shoulders huddle between doorways next to the Quick Mart. “You should have gotten me a cab,” she says. There’s been a fire in the red building on Van Ness. It’s a single-room occupancy, and spray-painted on the brick is
Death to landlords
. “I’m in marriage counseling. You didn’t know that.” Ambellina pulls out a cigarette. She never smoked before. She shakes her head. I almost tell her that I was married once. How I got thrown out of the abortion