Perfect Competition Matthew Jeffrey Vegari (bio) 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 money Mr. Bertrand poured back into the business, trying to save it, is hard to say. I remember the desperation in his actions, a restlessness that ate at him not unlike, I imagine, the prolonged illness of a child whose prognosis is doomed from the start. Though he lost this fight—the “game” he called it—Mr. Bertrand made no allowances for the pity of others and would, with sorrow but genuine grace, speak fondly of the shop he had run for two decades. He remained the same man before as after, determinedly undeterred. I confirmed this as recently as last [End Page 123] week when I ran into him at the megastore where he now works as a floor manager. He looked physically well: hunching a bit, yet still quite tall, as if built to reach any stock room’s highest shelf. I tried to turn the corner with my cart, but he caught sight of me. I anticipated an embarrassment. As he approached to say hello, however, the reverence I had developed for him in childhood resurfaced naturally; there was always something about being in a shop in the presence of its owner. Given the history we both knew well, he could not have possibly owned the land and tall white lights and rows and rows of goods where we then stood, and yet it also seemed possible that he could. Trouble at Bertrand’s began my sophomore year of high school when I still held shifts at the shop. My employment followed a unique arrangement between Mr. Bertrand and my father, one established during a New Year’s of my early childhood as each man grumbled about the work ethic of his son. At the time, my elder brother, Tim, spent weekends working for my father, helping to check out customers, take inventory, and restock the stock room as necessary. Mr. Bertrand’s eldest, Charlie, a friend and classmate of my brother’s, did the same for his father across town. Over cheap champagne, the fathers traded stories, each trying to outdo the other with tales of their progeny’s incompetence, of spilled paint and overcharges and bad phone etiquette. During the retelling of a particularly embarrassing episode, in which he had knocked over an entire shelf of nails when an old flame entered the store, my brother left the room angry and, most likely, drunk. After the battering had gone on for nearly an hour (even I, half-asleep but hoping to gain favor, had begun to interject with stories I knew secondhand), and after Charlie had also left the room angry and, most certainly, drunk, the two business owners considered possible solutions: Could they fire their own sons? Would that make matters worse? What would their own fathers, may they rest in peace, have done? [End Page 124] It was then suggested—by my mother, I think, who tended to understand these things—that perhaps the problem wasn’t an inherent aversion to hard work, as my father and Mr. Bertrand alleged, but rather the simple problem of working for family. The two men decided to test this reasoning. In a plot that resembled the sitcoms we watched on Monday and Wednesday evenings, my father and Mr. Bertrand agreed to swap their sons for a month, paying them the same hourly wage, assigning them the same tasks. Each parent would then update his counterpart on his son’s performance. Four weekend shifts later, when neither shop owner could offer less than praise for...