Our neighborhoods would otherwise be moonscapes of Burger Kings and Dunkin’ Donuts.

The greatest perversity of all? It’s the most community-minded souls who create the most lovable third places. Vera knows your regular order and discreetly slips you leftovers at the end of the week. Even now, she’s making sure she’s still baking vegan and gluten-free options for those who want them. When customers linger briefly and make conversation, she reassures them that her cafe is OK, in the same poignant and peculiar way that the bereaved often console those who are supposed to be consoling them.

“If someone wants to talk to and ask how you are,” she told me, “you don’t want to shut your customers down.”

And she feels tremendous obligation to those who work for her. While the message we’re getting from President Trump is that it’s every state for itself — the kind of message that gives unconscious license to be personally selfish (would Americans hoard if we had a president who urged unity?) — she feels the moral weight of mutual commitments.

“I feel responsible for my guys,” she said. “They’re my family. I can offer them steady days.”

Two of her three employees are now the sole breadwinners in their families. One, Jose, told me he and his parents now eat two meals per day. “We eat a lot of rice and beans,” he said. “When we get sick of it, we scramble an egg.” And he considers himself lucky. His family is more secure than others.

Provided, that is, that Du Jour stays in business. It’s the only open business on its block. Keeping it that way requires the kind of endurance that makes emotional and physical stamina almost indistinguishable. Vera gets up at dawn, bakes her pastries, closes, cleans up and shops at the local grocery store for the next day’s lunch-special ingredients, because she no longer has enough customers to order those items in bulk. Then she goes home to her rented apartment above the shuttered bar next door and spends two hours filling out forms for loans.

“You have to keep a bit of a robot brain,” she told me. “Otherwise you’re just going to fall apart.”

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

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