Hai returns to HomeMarket the next morning for his interview and is told by Sony to wait behind the building. There he meets the nose-ringed worker everyone calls Russia, whose crude chatter mostly washes over Hai while Hai worries about getting back to Grazina before her medication wears off. When BJ finally appears, she briefly checks Hai's eyes for signs of drug use, then leads him inside for a rapid tour of the cramped store.

BJ introduces the kitchen, the counter staff, and the rotisserie station, but the tour quickly becomes a performance about what HomeMarket means. She insists the restaurant sells the feeling of Thanksgiving without the misery of family gatherings and presents the food, especially her corn bread recipe, as emotional care for worn-down customers. Her monologue, mixed with boasting about the store's sales ranking and her own leadership, reveals both her grandiosity and the strange seriousness with which the staff's work is framed, even as Wayne and Maureen undercut her claims with dry commentary.

In the office, BJ skips any formal interview and hires Hai immediately, giving him a uniform, paperwork, and a starting wage of $7.15 an hour. Sony reinforces BJ's quasi-military view of the workplace, and when Hai is introduced to the staff as the newest team member, he is unexpectedly overcome. Eating a piece of Wayne's chicken and receiving even this awkward welcome makes Hai feel, for the first time in a long while, that he has a legitimate place in the world, one where his past does not matter and usefulness alone defines him.

The rest of the day, Sony trains Hai through HomeMarket's routines: a customer-service VHS, bathroom cleaning, toilet-paper loading, and clocking in with his employee code. Hai notices that Sony only clocks him in after hours of unpaid work, but BJ then calls him into the office for a different reason: she wants his opinion on a heavy-metal track she recorded as an entrance song for her amateur wrestling career. BJ explains that HomeMarket is only temporary for her because she believes she is destined for something bigger, reinforcing the chapter's focus on work as both survival and fantasy.

After his shift, Hai walks home thinking about his exhausted mother and a childhood memory of sharing Pizza Hut with his mother and grandmother, who turned the pizza box spacer into a tiny altar table for the dead. Back at 16 Hubbard Street, Grazina is thrilled that he has a job and loves the corn bread he brings her. She then shows him the basement, where her late husband Jonas's hoarded junk hides a large library; amid stories of Jonas's hoarding, his cruelty toward their daughter Lina, and Grazina's fierce defense of Lina's reading, Hai discovers a cache of classic books. He chooses The Brothers Karamazov, remembering that he once meant to read it with Noah, and over the following week he reads late into the night beside Grazina, finding in the decaying book and the ruined house a fragile form of mercy and a return to the self he wanted to become.