Free The Turnaround by George Pelecanos

prepared to order, center-cut bacon, link sausages, scrapple, and grits and half smokes for the true locals. He held his coffee charge at fifty cents a cup, with free refills if consumed in house, and this became his signature. Served the coffee in cups with the custom P on the side, just like the one on the sign. Human contact, the personal touch. This was what kept him in business. Try to get that at Starbucks, or the Lunch Stop, or from any of the Keenezee- owned establishments. The Asians knew how to run an efficient operation, and they were workhorses, but they couldn’t make meaningful eye contact with their customers to save their lives. Alex knew most of his customers’ names and their tastes. With many of them, he had their orders written on the guest check pad before the words came out of their mouths.
    It was the chains and their patrons that were killing him. The young people were like robots; they only walked into eating establishments whose names they recognized from the suburbs and town centers where they’d grown up. Panera. Potbelly. Chipotle. And those weren’t nearly as wretched as the McDonald’s and Taco Bells of the world, which Alex could not even bring himself to discuss. They served dogshit. No wonder America was fat. Et cetera.
    So the clientele of Pappas and Sons was on the middle-aged side, which was not a desirable scenario for a forward-looking business. Alex had done all right up to this point and had managed to provide a decent and comfortable living for his family, but the future was not promising. The rent, though it had kept pace with inflation, had remained reasonable until now, due to the kindness of Mr. Leonard Steinberg, who had given Alex’s father his original lease and liked him, as they were both veterans of the war. But Mr. Steinberg had passed away, and the new landlord, a loud young man with dull eyes in a property management office of young men just like him, had served notice that the rent would increase significantly in the coming year. Alex wasn’t going to raise the prices on his product, which would drive away customers. He would not cut the pay of his help. They had kept up their end of the bargain, and so would he. That rent increase was going to come right out of his profits.
    Thank God for the death insurance money, passed through his mother, distributed equally to him and his brother, Matt. Alex had not touched a penny of it, and it had grown to a sizable amount. Also, he had some commercial property on the east side of Montgomery County. He was never going to starve.
    His father had suffered a heart attack in July of 1975, a month before Alex was to enter his second year at Montgomery Junior College, known then in the county as Harvard on the Pike. Alex’s plan had been to ease into school, perhaps transfer to the University of Maryland once he got his grades up, but he had floundered at MJC, doing well only in English. His social life had deteriorated, and he found refuge in music, watching films, and reading paperback novels, things he could do on his own.
    He had started with the usual stoner lit, Heinlein, Tolkien, Hermann Hesse, and the like, and moved on to mystery and pulp. He became infatuated with the Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald, though even at the age of nineteen he recognized them as the ultimate male fantasy, writ large. No job, no family ties, life on a houseboat, the freedom to kill your enemies, the convenient death of lovers, allowing you to move on to the next Playboy quality piece of ass . . . But the writing was clean and addictive. He began to think, Maybe this is something I can do someday. See my name on the spine of a book. A good profession, one to practice in solitude.
    After “the incident” he had stayed in close proximity to his family. His parents had been good to him. They did not react with histrionics to the event or, in his presence at least, obsess about his injuries. It was something that had happened to him, not