Nearly three weeks after a Jeep Cherokee, driven by Jamal Donaldson, careened off of Route 9W and catapulted into his deli, Robert Kirk is just waiting for the insurance company to give him the green light to rebuild.

Kirk would like to completely raze and reconstruct the building, “but the insurance company wants to put some duct tape on it and put some pallets up front but we’d like to have a new roof and update it. We want $100,000 and they want to offer us $10,000, that’s the whole game there, I guess.”

Kirk said the Manesse family, who own the building, appear to want to rebuild.

“The engineer said the building is not in that bad a shape; the roof’s not as bad as it looks,” Kirk said.

Kirk said his parked pickup truck was hit by Donaldson and was completely destroyed.

“The [insurance] check was supposed to be cut yesterday but apparently nine to fivers at noon on Friday they get tired and go home and don’t really worry,” he said, adding sarcastically that, “Pushing buttons takes a lot out of a person.”

Inside the deli, Kirk pointed to a support lolly column that he had wanted to remove some time ago. In the crash it prevented a long steel beam from collapsing on him that probably would have killed him.

Despite the difficult turn of events, Kirk went ahead with his annual pre-Super Bowl BBQ in his parking lot last Saturday.

“We just rocked today, everything we made is gone. People came out of the woodwork from all over,” he said. “I can’t say enough about the people here. They come up and ask do I need anything, do you need a food truck?”

Kirk praised the town Police, Fire and Ambulance Corps for their support.

“I’m gonna put them in a group and call them ‘All of a Sudden’ because that’s when they were here; they were here instantly,” Kirk said.