High school summers I worked for my family's mobile lunch truck business, side by side this old guy named Patrick Nialls. There were fourteen trucks at Kurbside Kitchen's peak, one of them driven by my father, another, through Philly, by his younger brother Gary. I did shop maintenance mostly, rotating perishable stock in the walk-ins, sweeping out and down the warehouse, collapsing cardboard boxes, scrubbing bathrooms and unclogging toilets—the damage done to which I learned not to take personally. The position did not pay a living wage, which was why it was so often vacant. My grandfather Skip owned Kurbside and more/less administered from the office, except the mornings when employees didn't show up and he was forced to fill in. This happened frequently, but he never complained, and so tacitly made it unacceptable for the rest of us too.

Kurbside was not a pre-meditated business, but a last-minute escape plan. Pop's unprofitable Skipper's restaurant went down quick in the early ‘80s, almost immediately after I was born, leaving my own father with shotgun shrapnel in his leg and my aunt Debbie's gun-toting first husband arrested, and later deported to Iran. Pop blamed the location. Skipper's was set way off and below a busy road in a depressed shopping center, and only cars moving north could access the entrance. The shopping center's catch-all sign came too soon before the entrance. It lumped the shops together, and discredited them as one. My immediate family moved up this road soon after, and for the first few years, whenever we passed the old site of Skipper's, my mother was likely to tell the restaurant's stories. My father rarely brought up Skipper's, nor did he tell me about the shooting. I learned about that from my aunt Debbie when I was much older––about her jilted Iranian husband who pronounced "motorcycle" motor-SEE-CLAY; about the gun he pointed at my grandfather's head; about the last-second heroics of a man named Kevin who wrestled the gun from the man's hands mid-shot. The buckshot got my father in the shin; Kevin married my dad's sister Karen.