Visitation Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

people in the neighborhood who know his name. Hey. Hey thanks. Coffee light. Coffee. The regular. The Post. The usual . How do you order “the usual” from someone and not know his name?
    The F train stopped on the elevated bridge just before Smith and Ninth. Fadi was stuck for twenty minutes in an un-air-conditioned subway car watching the sun’s slow climb over the Red Hook Houses. The temperature had barely dropped all night, simmering in the low nineties. The radio says it’ll crack a hundred today, menacing the power grid and threatening the neighborhood with a brownout that’ll kill Fadi’s dairy and ice.
    Van Brunt is waking up slowly. The Puerto Rican place is still shuttered. But the Greek across from Fadi on Visitation is battling with his roll gate, hammering it with a crowbar. The string of Christmas lights that spans Van Brunt between the streetlight in front of Fadi’s store and the one in front of the Puerto Ricans’ sags in the heavy air. The colored bulbs hang lazy and limp, the lights hibernating until winter.
    The papers are waiting outside his bodega. Both tabloids have front-page photos on cooling off. The News has snapped an elderly woman in the Bronx pouring a twelve-ounce bottle of water on her head. The Post shows a teenager jumping into the bay right off one of the piers in Red Hook.
    The kid is in midflight, arms above his head, right leg extended straight, the left bent back behind. Below his feet is the inky bay. A ferry is passing beneath his legs. His arms cradle the crown and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Three of his friends are hanging from the railing, waiting to jump, heads upturned, admiring the flying boy. It looks like a perfect leap, high and clear of the railing, far beyond the pylons, into the heart of the water.
    Fadi wipes his brow, unlocks the padlock, and lets the iron gate roll back revealing the cigarette ads that cover the shop’s windows and keep daylight from bleaching his stock. He shoulders the bundled newspapers and pushes his way into the bodega.
    This bodega was the idea of Fadi’s father, Hafiz. While his brothers opened bakeries and restaurants on the Lebanese strip of Atlantic Avenue, Hafiz wanted something besides counters lined with sambousek, awamat, and baklawa. He believed that what Americans want is a drink that’s orange because of the dye not the fruit. They want ham and turkey breasts pressed into neat cylindrical versions of hams and turkeys.
    Hafiz’s Red Hook bodega is only a twenty-five-minute walk from Atlantic Avenue, but Fadi figures his father might as well have set up shop in Staten Island for how often his uncles visit.
    Even Hafiz has given up on the neighborhood. He now spends his retirement on a camp chair, watching Atlantic Avenue roll by. He’ll be awake soon, drawn into one of his brothers’ shops by strong Lebanese coffee and a favorite honey and pistachio pastry while Fadi’s out here with knock-off Maxwell House and powdered Donettes.
    But Fadi still believes things are going to turn around out here, especially with the first cruise ships set to dock at the terminal at the end of Visitation in two months. Last night he gave his black-and-white linoleum an extra once-over with some premium cleaner from the shelves. His bodega shines a little brighter than the others in the neighborhood. His Puerto Rican competitors across Van Brunt have pared things down—generic beer, cigarettes, soda, chips, and only the Post . Fadi’s got a range of beers, from sickly sweet forties of malt liquor to microbrews with ironic names. He’s even got a kosher brand called He’Brew. He caters to everyone. But it’s getting harder to keep up with the trends. The hipsters now brown-bag Colt 45 down by the pier while old-timers from the projects cart cases of Pilsner Urquell to their barbecues.
    He stacks the newspapers in their racks and brews two pots of coffee. He turns on talk radio, props the front door open with a cinder block, then peeks