Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar Read Free Book Online Page A

her head away and raised her chin. “You don’t even know my name.”
    “I was about to ask.”
    “You want a cigarette? Is that why you’re talking to me?”
    Willis took a few steps back and glanced over his shoulder at his friend, who had taken a seat on a bench a few paces up the path. “I’ll leave you be, ma’am. Good evening.”
    “It’s Paula, if you must know.”
    “Pardon?” Willis had already turned to leave, but pivoted now.
    “My name. But they call me Joey because my middle name’s Josephine, and the kids in school used to say I was a tomboy.”
    “My name’s Willis, or Bill’s okay, too. And if you don’t mind my saying, ma’am, you look like no boy I’ve ever met.”
    She felt heat rush to her face. Before she could think the better of it, she pinched the sides of her jacket and did a small curtsy.
    “Gosh, I sure am hungry,” Willis said, putting on his best smile.
    Joey pointed her elbow at the bench. “Who’s your friend?”
    “Who, that fella? Oh, that’s just Joe, just met him down at the pier.”

    Joe lifted his cap and hollered. “Glad to meet you ma’am.”
    “Joe was about to hit the silk,” Willis said, winking at his shipmate.
    “He’s right, ma’am,” Joe said. “Got someplace I need to be.”
    Joey raised a delicate-looking hand and gave an emphatic wave. “Farewell,” she said, smiling. Then, without warning, she wound a small scarf around her neck, brushed past Willis and strode down the walk, plucking her sack from the bench. “I don’t eat much,” she called without looking back.
    Catching up with her, Willis said, “I know just the place.”

    AT A diner off Fifth Avenue, the waitress brought two plates of chicken with cream gravy and two glasses of beer.
    Joey heaped forkfuls into her mouth, barely looking up from her plate.
    “You make a habit of lollygagging in parks alone?” Willis asked.
    She swallowed a mouthful of chicken and let her glance fall on the spoon beside her plate. “It’s not what you think,” she said. “I’m a good girl.”
    “How about I talk for a spell,” Willis said. “You eat.”
    He told her doozies about being the only boy in a houseful of girls. He told her about reading every Zane Grey book he could get his hands on—had she ever heard of him? “He’s the best scribbler in the U.S. of A.,” he said. He talked about how his Texas hometown during the Great Depression wasn’t so unlike the Old West. He said his grandfather, a genial old man who loved regaling his grandchildren with cowboy stories, had been working on a construction site when for reasons no one ever figured out someone cut him down with a shotgun.
    “That’s awful,” Joey said, with a look Willis took for genuine sadness.
    “He was a good man. A real good man. I miss him.”

    When Willis looked up, he saw that Joey was in tears.
    “What is it, darlin’?” Willis said. He wondered if the beer had gone to her head.
    “My poppa,” she said, and the tears ran harder now. Willis reached for the napkin dispenser. “He died just a while ago,” she said, pressing the napkin to her cheeks.
    “Was he old?”
    “No. Young. The doctor said it was lead that killed him. He mixed rubber at the tire plant. The gases, they say, were something awful.”
    “If he raised you up, Joey,” Willis said, “he must have been a good man.”
    “A saint,” she said. Then came another round of tears and more of the story. She had been the youngest of six in their small home in Passaic. Her older sisters tormented her. And when her father, her only protector, died, no one understood how she felt. Instead, her mother seemed to live to make her life miserable. She demanded Joey quit school and follow her older sisters into a life of chastity at a nunnery. When Joey refused, her mother raged, calling her “boy crazy” and destined for the agonies of hell. Joey ran away from home, found a mill job, and fell in love—only to discover that the man already had