By all accounts, my father had no intention of putting Mr. Bertrand out of business. Our family’s success, and the stores that followed, did not hinge on his shop’s demise. No one, least of all my father’s oldest friend, ever insinuated this. The process of Bertrand’s closure was instead a gradual one: winter to winter to winter, a leak for which patches sufficed, until they didn’t. Mrs. Bertrand called her husband a victim of circumstance, of subtle shifts and vicissitudes (she was an English teacher) in the market for hardware impossible to predict and, worse still, to prevent. How much mone...
Perfect Competition
Matthew Jeffrey Vegari
Matthew Jeffrey Vegari is a writer and economics researcher. His fiction has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Yale Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. He was a 2020 recipient of the Dau Prize for emerging writers from PEN America.