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“After today I will no longer be working here, Mr. Torez.”

He completes writing a word with his pencil, then he looks up and says: “You tell the office, Coronel?”

“No.”

“So why tell me, man?” He regards his newspaper. “You know another word for hurricane?”

I return to Tran and my tea and I have a wish to tell the Vietnamese goodbye, but when I point to my chest then to the road, he smiles and nods his head as if I were telling to him a very old and humorous story.

And now it is evening at the convenience store and my legs are heavy, my eyes are beginning to water from fatigue, but I am filled with cheer as I work my very last shift. Rico, the young man working beside me, has always possessed the habit of chewing gum which on other evenings bothered me a great deal—that nasty sound it makes in the mouth—but tonight this is not the case; none of the usual irritants have their power over me, not the bright fluorescent lighting over all the shelves of overpriced boxed and canned food; not the university students who enter with their stupid smiles after drinking too much beer to purchase chocolate bars and cigarettes; not even when people hand to me a gasoline credit card and I have to use the cumbersome machine beneath the magazine display rack; and even those kaseef and dirty magazines of naked women on their covers, which I have always despised having to touch or sell, even they cannot upset me as they have so many times before. Because this I know of life’s difficult times: there is always a time for them to begin and a time for them to end, and the man who knows this knows he must thank God for each day he has suffered because that is always one day closer to the sun, the real sun.

But many nights after many long days in America, I have forgotten God and thought only of my troubles, of the manner of jobs I was forced to work here, jobs I would not have assigned a soldier under me back in my old life. Here I have worked in a tomato cannery, an auto wash, a furniture warehouse, a parking lot, two gasoline stations, and finally the highway department and this convenience store. Yes, I have earned enough to slow our spending, but each check cashed felt to me like one less bone and muscle in my back, those a man needs in order to stand straight.

My young colleague and I close the store promptly at one in the morning. We lock the evening’s receipts into the small safe in the rear office, and we post our inventory sheet for the day gentleman before removing our paychecks from the coin drawer of the register. We lock the doors and walk beneath the light over the gasoline pumps to our vehicles, and to the young man I only say, “Good night, Rico,” nothing more, and as I drive my Buick Regal down San Pablo Avenue beneath the streetlights so early in the morning, my body feels sewn into the car seat with tiredness, but I nod five times to the east and thank God, my mouth beginning to tremble, for the freedom He has granted me once again, for the return of the dignity I was beginning to believe I would never recover.