I stopped at the station on the way out of town and asked the boy in charge of the pumps to put half a tank of fuel in the jeep. The cashier at the gas station was an Indian man named Ajay, very friendly, and I remembered his name well because in some ways he reminded me of Apu, the convenience store owner from The Simpsons. He always had this gesture of giving you a blessing when you paid, a gesture that made me smile and more than once had made me feel better on a particularly difficult day. And that day I was very nervous; I thought maybe one of Ajay’s blessings would help calm me down—but when I went into the convenience store, it turned out there were two men at the register talking to him.
Frustrated, I walked around between the displays, took a bag of chips and another can of Red B
