If Sam Stavinoha were a religious man, you might say the decision to buy a small-town grocery was his come-to-Jesus moment. He cried a lot, as if mourning a loss, though he couldn’t name it. This was in 2019, when the 29-year-old software engineer had a cushy job working remotely out of a San Antonio suburb for a New York cloud computing firm. He made good money. Yet something felt amiss.
On a trip to Big Bend National Park, Stavinoha and his then-girlfriend stopped in Marathon, an unincorporated town of four hundred about forty miles north of the park, and stayed at the tourist-friendly Gage Hotel. Walking around town, they wandered into the gallery of the photographer James H. Evans (whose work has appeared in this magazine) and met Evans’s wife, Marci Roberts.
At the time, Roberts owned and operated Marathon’s only grocery, the French Co. Grocer. After thirteen years of running the shop, she was …