conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Alberta, Canadian, Chihuahua with the genre: Romance?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The Assistant'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story titled The Assistant about Alberta, Canadian, Chihuahua with the genre: Romance.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Assistant (novel): Morris Bober, the 60-year-old proprietor of an old-fashioned grocery store, faces destitution as his customers abandon him in favor of more modernized shops.\nThe situation is aggravated late one night when he\'s held up at gunpoint in his deserted store by a pair of masked thugs.\nThe gunman beats him, leaving Bober with a debilitating head injury.\nJust at this time, Frank Alpine makes his appearance: a 25-year-old vagrant from the West Coast, raised in an orphanage after his father abandoned him.\nLeaving an abusive foster home to live as a drifter, he makes his way East in hopes of finding opportunities to turn his life around.\n(Later he berates himself for having had many opportunities but inevitably doing something to botch them) Frank begins to haunt Morris\' store and offers to work without pay as his assistant, claiming that this will give him experience he can use in a future job search.\nThe grocer, weakened by the assault and trying to recuperate without benefit of medical care, accepts and arranges for him to have room and board with the upstairs tenants, a young Italian-American couple, and provides him some pocket money.\nOnly at this point is it revealed to the reader that Frank was the accomplice to the gunman in the holdup.\nFrank works industriously to improve the store\'s upkeep, and his attentive service wins customers.\nThe resulting increased income is being supplemented by Frank\'s surreptitiously returning, in discreet amounts, his share of the holdup take.\nSimultaneously, however, he begins pilfering from the till.\nHe justifies this to himself by claiming it as recompense for his contribution to the store\'s improved situation, and keeps an account of his petty theft with the intention of eventually returning it all.\nMorris and his wife Ida, the latter particularly uncomfortable with the gentile\'s presence, attribute the improvement to the customers\' "preferring one of their own," and Morris insists on offering Frank more money.\nDuring lulls in the work day the men\'s conversations touch upon philosophical and personal matters, and Frank privately struggles with his own ethical quandary.\nWhile Morris is notably tolerant of others, Ida is worried by the young Italyener\'s proximity to the couple\'s 23-year-old daughter, Helen, single and living at home.\nHelen is courted by the sons of the only other two Jews in the neighborhood, both young men with good financial prospects, but her dreams of a better life include true love.\nShe also aspires to higher education, but has set aside her own plans in order to take a job as a secretary, as her wages are needed to supplement the family\'s meager income from the store.\nHelen and Frank begin to notice each other, and a romance develops between them.\nThey share an interest in storys and discuss their dreams for the future.\nTheir clandestine meetings grow in physical intimacy, yet at Helen\'s request stop short of intercourse.\nJust when she realizes she loves Frank and is committed to their relationship, Morris catches his assistant in the act of stealing.\nHe dismisses Frank on the spot, despite the latter\'s confession and revelation that he "was paying it back".\n(His confession to Morris of his role in the holdup will follow) When Frank arrives late to a rendezvous in the park initiated by Helen, he finds her being raped and rescues her.\nHelen is overcome by relief and clings to Frank, declaring her love for him.\nIn his fear that he\'s bound to lose her when she learns of his thieving and dismissal, Frank forces himself upon her, despite her repeated protest.\nDisgusted with herself for ever having trusted him despite her initial misgivings, Helen curses Frank and refuses to see him again.\nFrank obsessively berates himself with remorse and contemplates ways to make things up to her.\nHe apologizes to Helen profusely at every opportunity, smothering her with his need for redemption.\nMeanwhile, the prospects for the store have remained bleak due to several turns of events, and Morris considers desperate measures.\nWhen he is hospitalized after inhaling gas from a radiator he failed to light (claiming afterwards that this was not deliberate), Frank comes back to run the store over Ida\'s protests.\nFrank resolves to be a good person, stop stealing and somehow win back Helen\'s love.\nHe takes on a second job at a diner.\nBut, when Morris decides to leave his sick bed, he throws Frank out for good, or so he thinks.\nMorris grows anxious about his life—his wife is miserable, his daughter on her way to spinsterhood and his poor business no more than a prison.\nMorris turns down an arsonist\'s offer to burn his home and store for the insurance money, but then builds a fire himself.\nAs the flames catch on his apron, Morris is saved by Frank.\nAfter being saved, Morris sends Frank away again.\nThen, through tragedy, things begin to look up for the Bobers.\nA competing grocer on the block falls on hard times, and Bober\'s store benefits.\nThen, one night, Ward Minogue breaks into the liquor store owned by Bober\'s rival, Karp.\nMinogue smashes liquor bottles, then he lights a cigarette.\nA tossed match starts a fire that burns the store and the apartment upstairs to the ground.\nMinogue dies attempting to escape the fire.\nMorris is ashamed that he wished for his rival\'s comeuppance.\nEven so, Karp, knowing that he will lose his business while it is being rebuilt, offers to buy out the Bobers.\nFor a few brief days, they are happy.\nIt is the last day of March and thick snow is falling.\nMorris, in a burst of energy, goes out to shovel the sidewalk, despite Ida\'s many objections.\nStill weak from the gas incident, he dies three days later of double pneumonia.\nMorris is remembered at his simple service as an honest man and a good Jew.\nBut Frank and Helen are alienated.\nFrank returns to run the store while Helen and Ida mourn privately.\nMoney from a second job allows Frank to pay rent to Ida but ruins his health.\nFrank then settles on a plan to clear his debt with Helen.\nHe will give over all his earnings so that Helen can go to college.\nAfter several painful and awkward confrontations, Helen reinterprets the night that Frank sexually assaulted her, concluding that she would have given herself to Frank that night had not Ward Minogue attacked her.\nShe softens towards Frank, forgiving him for raping her.\nAs the story closes, Frank is working in the store.\nHe studies Judaism.\nHe gets a circumcision.\nAnd, after Passover, becomes a Jew.