In Chicago, a widow soldiers on

Reporting from Chicago — Phoebe Naoum still gets up at 5 a.m., just as she did before her husband’s slaying. She still does a few exercises, then walks the dog, which she always did alone anyway because Bassam was off to work by 6.

Routine, she tells herself, is glue. It will hold her together for everything the day brings later, when all routine is gone.

By 10 a.m. on most days now, she’s at Munchies convenience store, walking over the same chipped floor tiles where, several weeks ago, her husband was shot in the back for reasons still unclear. His killer remains a mystery.

Vendors, employees, inspectors, potato chips, Listerine, bread, incense, frying pans and chewing tobacco populate her day — along with customers who want to hug her.

This is her first job outside the house in years.

“I don’t think there’s any way I could replace Bassam,” she said. “But he poured so much of his time and effort into these stores. It would just be too hurtful to see that disappear.”

What happened that Saturday night in October still seems crazy. Bassam, known as “Ollie” to his customers, had come home in the afternoon for an early dinner, as he often did now that he was older and liked a nap. Then he headed back to Munchies to train a new cashier.

Typical Bassam: always working, ever since he and Phoebe met 36 years ago at the University of Alabama. After their two kids were born, she quit her office job at the Art Institute to rear them. He worked long hours to pay their way through the University of Chicago Lab Schools.

“Cabrini-Green?” she said when he told her back in the 1990s that he was opening a business in Chicago’s most famous housing project. “Cabrini-Green? What?”

He told her it was an opportunity, and he was right. He prospered and came to love the people he served, just as they loved him for his tough, generous ways. Through him, she came to love them too.

She didn’t spend a lot of time at the two stores he operated — Ollie’s in Cabrini, Munchies nearby — but she sometimes brought Bassam a home-cooked meal, maybe one of the Middle Eastern dishes he savored growing up in Jordan that she (an Alabama native) had learned to cook.

He often phoned her during the day, but rarely late at night. She always knew he’d be home around 11.

When her phone rang at 10 p.m. on the night he died, she didn’t recognize the number, so she ignored it. But she had a feeling. She phoned Munchies. No answer. She called the unfamiliar number. A friend of her husband’s said, “Something terrible’s happened.”

And then she was at the hospital, and he was gone. In her head, she heard a voice saying: It’s over, this is the end for you. Those plans for the two of you to relax together, maybe move downtown or to Alabama, all over.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t expect it,” she said. “I did expect it. This was my worst, worst fear.”

Before long, though, she heard another voice: Keep moving. You’ve got to put food on the table. Do it for your kids.

Earlier this month, she reopened Munchies, then Ollie’s.

She comes to work every day without fear — “When the worst has been done, you don’t worry about it” — and without bitterness. With her children and her husband’s friends, she plans to make the stores more appealing to the gentrifying neighborhood.

The old customers bring her comfort.

“Can I hug you?”

A woman as stocky as Naoum is thin hurried down the aisle, past the canned hams and the cold drinks, her arms open wide.

“I am so sorry,” the customer said, hugging hard. “I am so sorry. You are so beautiful. Thank you for reopening the store.”

Downstairs, the ice cream freezer sat stuffed with frozen turkeys. Every year, Bassam “Ollie” Naoum gave away turkeys for Thanksgiving. This year, his wife will do it for him.

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