"If you don't get down here right now, you're fired!" a booming voice calls up the steps outside our apartment. I roll my eyes as I shove my feet into my worn Converse and double-knot the laces.
"I'd like to see you try, old man!" I call back, throwing open the door to reveal my bald dad smirking up at me from the entryway, our dog Cooper at his feet, tail wagging. "Good luck finding someone else who'll work for free."
I jog down to meet him, and he taps his watch, raising a thick eyebrow. "Six oh one. You're late."
I pull my phone out of my back pocket and hold it up to him. "Six o'clock. Your watch is off."
“Fine, you can stay another day,” he says, his graying mustache ticking up at the corner as he slides past me to head upstairs and sleep after working the overnight shift.
“Don’t forget the drink delivery at noon,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Roger that.” I pat Cooper’s head on my way through the side door that leads directly into Cameron’s Corner Shop, my usual Saturday morning duties waiting for me.
As I make the coffee, I gaze out the window at Penn Avenue, at the new buildings, modern apartments, and hip restaurants that have moved in since I was a kid perched on my dad’s shoulders while he made the coffee. This street, and so much of Pittsburgh, has changed over the past eighteen years.
But not Cameron’s Corner Shop, with its scuffed floors, sagging shelves, and rusting sign. Our little slice of Pittsburgh has remained exactly the same, even if the customers have changed. Regulars come for the cheap coffee and scratch-offs. Students stumble in on Friday nights to get armfuls of snacks and mixers. Tourists pop their heads in to ask for directions and recommendations. And the bougie people from the overpriced apartments meander in as a last resort when they forget to buy their premium milk and ancient-grain bread, settling for 2 percent and cardboard white.
It isn’t much, but it’s my dad’s pride and joy, his childhood dream of opening a shop on the street where he grew up brought to life after a CVS took the place of the one he used to visit. Something simple and homegrown and constant, for our community, the people that have always been here and always will be here. And that dream became my whole family’s, in a way, his love for the place and the customers and the unusual hours infecting me and my mom.
Plus, it’s easy to be coerced when you get free chips and soda for working the register or stocking the shelves. Can’t say no to a bag of Cheetos and a Cherry Coke. At least not when you’re a kid, before sleeping in and dreams of your own start to seep in. But I try not to think about that now.
Coffee made, I fall into the dull but steady rhythm of the morning, perching behind the counter on a squeaking barstool my dad got off Craigslist with Cooper curled up at my feet, reading a new cartoon-cover romance novel in between greeting the blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces that pass through the front door. Gary the bus driver stops in for his powdered donuts, telling me about an accident on 576 that has traffic backed up all the way to the airport. The cool artist girl who moved in over Vince’s Pizza just down the street grabs a yellow pack of American Spirits, paying in crumpled dollar bills and quarters while I try and fail again to work up the courage to ask her about what she’s working on.