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“You’ll see.”
They walked on, just another couple in the surging crowd, until they’d gone almost ten blocks. Bridget looked up at the green-and-white street sign. They were at 42nd Street.
Letting go of Jonas, she stepped off the curb. An oncoming taxi swerved into the next lane over, horn blaring.
He grabbed her and pulled her back. “Careful. Those guys drive like maniacs.”
“No kidding,” she said wryly. “So where are your friends? Nobody actually lives right around here, do they? This doesn’t look like a residential area.”
With a new skyscraper going up on one corner, an old building wrapped in scaffolding on the diagonal from that, a magnificent public building backed up by a big park of some kind across the street, and a retail establishment behind her, Bridget didn’t see anything that looked like it might contain apartments.
“They’ve been here for years,” he reassured her. “Okay, we have the light. Let’s go.”
A little more cautiously, she crossed the wide intersection, aware that Jonas, a head taller than she was, was keeping a wary eye out for taxis this time. She let him take the lead, too jostled to do anything but follow, looking into the faces of people who seldom looked back. When they were halfway down the next block, he stopped. “Look up. Meet my friends.”
Bridget laughed. Two magnificent stone lions gazed out over the stream of shoppers and office workers, resting nobly on pedestals that flanked wide, wide stairs.
“Ta-da. The New York Public Library lions,” he said. “All decked out for the holidays.”
Each lion wore an enormous green wreath made of metal around its neck, adorned with a red metal bow.
“Wow,” she said. “They’re wonderful. Introduce me.”
“Huh?”
“Do they have names?” she said patiently.
“Hmm.” Jonas rubbed his chin with a gloved hand. “I think they do. Oh, I remember. One is Patience and one is Fortitude. But I can’t remember which is which.”
Bridget took his arm and leaned into him, looking up at the lions. A few tiny flakes of white drifted down as she did, and she caught one in her palm. “It’s snowing a little.”
Jonas held out his hand and caught a few more. “Want to take the bus downtown?”
“Well, it doesn’t look like we’re in for a blizzard,” she laughed. “But okay.”
They got off downtown where Fifth Avenue ended, and walked through Washington Square, beneath the fine old triumphal arch and under bare trees that surprised her by their size and age. The lightly falling snow outlined the bends and twists of massive branches arching overhead.
“I didn’t know there were trees this big in New York,” she murmured.
“Yes, that surprised me too, when I was first here. Of course, this is one of the oldest parts of Manhattan. The streets down here have names instead of numbers.”
“Hmm.” The thought of him once being as new as she was to this city was somehow comforting. “Hey, I’m hungry.”
“Me too. What would you like to eat? Take your pick.”
They had exited the park and come out onto a narrow street that ran through small, old buildings with intriguing stores on the ground floors and a daunting variety of exotic restaurants.
Bridget didn’t really feel like eating Thai or Russian or Senegalese food. “Can I be unsophisticated and just have a burger?”
“Sure. If you don’t mind walking some more, we can go to one of my favorite places for that.”
“Okay. I’m not tired.”
As the snow continued to fall lightly but steadily, they went through Greenwich Village and Little Italy, into a neighborhood of big loft buildings that made the old streets seem even narrower.
“Are we there yet?” Bridget asked. “Oh gosh, I sound like Molly.”
“Almost. Gotta go two more blocks to the right.”
