More of Chapter Five.

After a cold walk to the subway station with what seemed like hundreds of people jostling for a seat, Joe entered a car and found a place to sit next to an old, tired looking woman. She looked like she had had a hard day. Joe knew the feeling. Work was hectic and he was still miserable about his breakup. Each day would hopefully be a little easier, but that was hard to measure.

He saw happy couples around him holding hands and talking to each other quietly and he missed that closeness that he once thought he had.

When the train made it’s fifth stop, Joe got up and strode out with false bravado. He turned left and climbed the stairs up to the world again. In the dark subway tunnels of the city, Joe thought of his life and those around him as being put on pause.

It was a safe place to think and plan unless tragedy struck. So far he had been lucky. He silently thanked Bernhard Goetz for his actions, long ago. He was a reminder to everyone of the possibilities of the unknown and unforeseen.

Joe reached the corner just as the light turned in his favor and he carefully walked across the wide street. Ice could form quickly on a cold day in autumn like this one. A fall was a real possibility if you weren’t careful.

Joe arrived in front of his building which looked much like most of the other buildings on the short block. He saw the empty park across the street. In the spring it was full and alive this time of day. But that sun was now busy else ware and the park stood nearly empty.

He climbed up the stars covered in nearly two hundred years of paint and slipped his key into the deadbolt on the door with the six nailed on it over flaky, green, paint. “Home is where the heart is,” he thought, as he entered.

He walked across the tiny living room to his desk, picked up the National Geographic magazine and crossed the room to grab his favorite chair sitting at the tiny dinning room and placed it in the last of what little sunshine remained. Now he only needed one dining room chair.

It was cold outside and getting colder. Joe often sat in this wooden chair on a cushion whose cover was made by his late mother.

It had sat at one end of the dining room table before Suzan left. He now used it in the spot where sunlight hit his back after a long day at work. The warmth eased the pain in his back and perhaps in his heart. It was Suzan’s chair, after all. The wall of the building sheltered him from the cold, fall, wind. That sunny spot moved daily as the sun moved across the sky, a reminder of mortality and the passing of time.

Joe found the section on East Africa and started reading it again. Really reading it this time. He looked down at the park two stories down below him and out and across the narrow, damp street between reading paragraphs and looking at the photos in the magazine.

Joe could see bundled up mothers out walking along the edge of the river with their baby carriages and one young fellow trying to get his kite airborne in the rapidly shifting wind. Water taxis and boats filled with unknown cargo and people passed by. He wondered if he would ever have a family. He thought the odds were stacked against him.

He sometimes thought, secretly, that the odds of his success at anything were somehow blocked by forces, unknown and unseen.

The subway entrance to the “guts of the city” where Joe caught the train to work sat at one corner of the park. Large trees loomed over the rivers edge and shielded the entrance of the subway from the summer sun. The trees, mostly bare now, let him see the roof of the subway entrance. In the spring it was hidden by masses of bright green leaves. The roof was made of concrete of concrete covered in moss.

Joe wondered how an artist might achieve that affect in a painting as he looked at it. He loved to walk through the neighborhood and go to the Bronx museum nearby. He loved to walk through it when it was raining or snowing and study the paintings of the old masters when he had the time. Suzan went with him sometimes, though he wasn’t sure she loved it like he did. She was a realist and he was a dreamer. Suzan told him that often, and not always in a good way.

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Well, a little more for you to contemplate.
I’m thinking of putting the frist chapter of another of my novels up here for you to read.

I’m not sure about that yet, but I don’t want you to get bored with just this one story.