Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar Read Free Book Online

Willis, nodding to a green crescent of water visible through some trees where couples in rowboats were paddling.
    “Fish?” Joe smirked. “I thought you boys from the country liked big game.”

    JOEY SAT on a bench at the edge of a curving walk, just before it dropped and wound under a short bridge. Every time a man who looked like Steve walked by, she felt the fury inside her. A crumb. A cad. A heel. There was no word strong enough for him.
    She had met Steve at the woolen mill in Passaic that had hired her as a spool girl after she ran away from home. She fell in love with him—he was older, a supervisor at the mill, but what did that matter? He was a gentleman. He even bought her a ring. Then, one morning, another girl whispered that Steve was married. He’d preyed on other spool girls before, she told Joey, seducing them with false promises of marriage before throwing them over for someone new.
    Joey had felt so sick at the news that she left the mill in the middle of a shift, never to return. She scampered, sobbing, to her boardinghouse, where she persuaded a young man she cared nothing for to take her to a bar. After three glasses of beer, she returned to her room and opened a bottle of iodine that some other boarder had left in a closet. Priests said that people who took their own lives went straight to hell. But hell, whatever it was, couldn’t be as bad as the past few months of her life.
    The liquid stained her lips blue and burned the back of her throat. Before the dizziness set in and she heard the bottle crash against the floor, she thought, Was my father the only good man in the world?

    The sky over Central Park was darkening, and the wind shook the trees. Joey felt a twinge in her stomach, and gulped down the bile at the back of her throat. She hadn’t eaten since the night before, but she would make herself wait. There was no money for food. The wind was blowing so hard now that she could not keep the match burning. She left her sack on the bench and walked into the underpass of a short footbridge. There, shielded from the wind, she struck another a match and, with a trembling hand, raised it to her lips.

    THE SAILORS rounded a sharp curve beside the lake. A flotilla of ducks glided over the rumpled surface, trailed by a lone swan.
    “Any scoop on where Uncle Sam’s gonna ship you?” Joe asked.
    “Heard an officer talking about one of those new net tenders,” said Willis.
    “You mean the ones with the horns? Those things give me the heebie-jeebies.”
    “Look like walruses.”
    “Beats me how Roosevelt thinks we’d ever bag a German sub with one of them.”
    “Trapping subs? Officer told me we’d just be primping buoys.”
    Ahead, where the walk sloped down, a girl in a beige coat was leaning against the abutment of a low bridge. Willis elbowed Joe in the arm and nodded. The girl’s face was pale. She was so skinny it was hard to make out her age. The sailors slowed down.
    “What’s she doin’?” Joe whispered, leaning in.
    “Think she’s trying to light a cigarette.” Willis put his hands in his pockets and strode toward her.
    “Ma’am, can I help you with that?”
    The girl jumped at the sound of his voice, took him in with a flash of fluttering eyelashes, then turned away, toward the darkness of the tunnel. She pulled her coat around her.

    “It’s just that, you see, ma’am, the fire stays better if you cover the match with your hand. Something you learn real quick on a ship.”
    Looking over her shoulder, and seeming to take his measure, the girl sputtered, “Why should I care? I don’t even smoke.”
    “You are holding a cigarette, ma’am.”
    Silence.
    “Okay, so you don’t smoke. What about eat? You do that?”
    She turned around, backing into the abutment, and narrowed her eyes into a scowl. “Don’t be a goof.”
    “It’s just, you look hungry, ma’am, like a starved kitten I once found,” Willis said. “I’d like to buy you dinner is all.”
    She turned