THE LOWEST PRICE Diana Ip A dry hot summer brought an early fall, so even in new September the trees and grass in the nearby park began to show a yellow cast and the squirrels scrounged furiously. In the lines of rowhouses surrounding the park, parents brought home notebooks and pencils in preparation for the start of school, gardeners preserved the fruit left on their small trees, and children turned in earlier with autumn’s waning days. For Bernard Li, fall was usually a propitious time, when people preferred piping hot food with cooling temperatures. But this year, he met the change of season with an uneasiness that sallowed his skin and deepened the lines across his forehead. He slammed the door as he entered his take-out and trudged toward the back room where his wife, Mei Lin, sat wrapping wontons on a small clumsy stool of scrap wood, nearly squatting the stool was so low. She could tell by the way he entered that something was awry, so when he walked into the room, she was already staring straight at him. Bernard thrust his arms upward, his eyes following their trajectory to some point in the ceiling before finally settling on his wife. “It’s over,” he said. The next-door neighbor’s dog began to yelp. Mei Lin’s eyes and mouth widened into O’s. “Say it isn’t true!” The unmade wonton slipped from her hand. “I saw the words with my own eyes, ‘Four Seas Chinese Take-Out Coming Soon.’” Bernard yelled this though his wife sat less than two feet away. “When?” “Soon. I don’t know. Soon.” “What are we going to do?” “It’s over.” They barely said another word to each other that evening, glumly performing their tasks in the kitchen. Bernard eyed his customers suspiciously imagining each as a potential traitor who, in a week or two when the new take-out opened, might opt to go there instead. All summer long, they had been haunted by the empty store. For as long as they could remember, it had been a convenience store run by a Filipino family. One year ago, Joe and Melissa Santos did not want to believe that the new supermarket, several blocks north, could doom their business of fifteen years. First, Joe went to speak to the owner to strike a deal about who could sell what, but he found there was no owner to speak to, only a pursed-lip manager who said Joe would have to speak to a regional manager above him, a distribution manager above that, and Joe lost track of the others who were above the first two. The Santos’ lowered their prices to compete with the big store. When customers didn’t return, they attempted to fill their shelves with things the supermarket would not carry — short grain rice, adobo mix, miniature flashlights, ten varieties of
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