Stewart and Jean Read Online Free PDF

to eat, in order to talk to the hot girl.

Four
    Charles left the store at five, but Stewart was on the closing shift. Temple locked its doors at nine, then they managed to get out of there before half-past. Some of the guys were going for some beers a couple blocks away, and they invited Stewart. He declined. He did think about accepting, though.
    Now, in the dark, it was his turn to go to Bryant Park. He still worried about being out in a park after dark, as if he might be mugged and murdered, as if it were the Bryant Park of the seventies. This, despite the fact that there were still plenty of pedestrians and cars out. Stewart knew he was being dumb, but still thought he was doing well, considering the only big city he’d ever really spent time in was Dallas; and in Dallas, you really could get shot in the street. But Stewart had gone online and checked the stats, and knew that central Manhattan really was bizarrely safe.
    The reason he wandered into the park was that he needed to make a phone call to his mother, and he didn’t want to do it at home. Or where he lived, anyway—“home” seemed an odd word to apply to that apartment in Ridgewood, so far out in Queens that he still got lost trying to get to it, filled with strangers, the roommates whose Craigslist ad he’d answered while still in Arkansas. If he were to try to talk on the phone there, everyone who happened to be in the apartment would hear every word of it—he didn’t even have a door he could close, he slept on a couch in the living room.
    So his reason for ducking into the still-somewhat-scary park was to make a phone call; but he found himself dreading that conversation more than any of the most intimidating (and simultaneously alluring) scenes the city had to offer. He put the call off and strolled through the park, looking at the people, trying to eavesdrop.
    There were so many different kinds of people. Languages he’d never heard spoken, races he couldn’t identify. With a few overheard conversations, he wondered why they were privately role-playing with each other, till he realized a millisecond later that, no, they really were rich, or in the fashion industry, or whatever. He heard one woman talking and he wondered with alarm what might be wrong with her, till he realized she was simply speaking Chinese or something.
    There was a fountain. He sat on its edge. Even in a crowd, there was something mystical and removed about a fountain at night.
    It wasn’t like he couldn’t appreciate what his mother must be going through. She’d never gotten over Kevin’s death six years ago. And she’d never stopped being freaked out by Stewart’s suicide attempt two years after that, even though he’d explained to her multiple times that he’d never really, truly meant to go through with it. The proof was that he’d never tried a second time, right?
    He took the phone out of his pocket and held it in his hand. Rubbing it, looking at it. He imagined it popping out of his hand like a soap bar he’d squeezed and landing in the fountain, thus granting him a reprieve. It didn’t pop out of his hand, though. Finally he pulled up his list of contacts, pressed “Home,” and held the phone to his ear as the ringing tones started.
    After the third ring, he began to hope maybe no one would pick up. He had just enough time to start feeling guilty for the hope before his mother answered.
    She was worried about him, but for some reason her worry first expressed itself in questions about the weather. She was very worried New York was having a heat wave. He assured her several times that, though it was hot, it was still five degrees or so cooler than it had been in Arkansas.
    “Yes,” she said, “but someone was telling me that it’s even worse up there, because there’s more concrete and it bounces the sun rays right back up into your face.”
    She wanted to know if that job he’d found was working out okay. He told her it was. “Well, that really was