Cheap Diamonds

Chapter 1 Cheekbones and Airplanes There just simply wasn't any such place as 830 Broadway. It went down to 860 and dead-ended at Union Square Park, and that was all she wrote. I checked my appointment book to see if I had misread it, but no-in the nine o'clock space it said, Ron Bonetti, 830 Broadway. I stared at the numbers on the building again, then looked around the corner to see if they might for some reason continue down that way. Nope-860 was all there was. Great. On top of running out of Broadway, I was practically crippled from walking twenty-two blocks in new patent-leather gillies that had rubbed blisters on both of my heels, my right eyelash was off-kilter, and I was sweating in my mulberry Bobbie Brooks crew-necked sweater and box-pleated miniskirt. I never thought New York would be this hot in September, as far up north as it was. All I remembered from the news was big snowstorms, but then in Sweet Valley there never was a whole lot about New York on the news unless somebody got shot in a restaurant or thrown onto the subway tracks and run over, which seemed to happen a lot. Cabs cost a fortune and subways were faster than buses but I can tell you right now, I was leery of going down into them. I have a little problem with being underground anyhow, and most of the stations were not very well lit and had an odor like mothballs and dirty bathroom. Plus, I was shocked when I saw that homeless people lived down there, and I didn't like myself for the way I reacted to them. Part of me was disgusted that human beings could smell that bad and carry on their life right out in public the way they did, and another part felt sorry for them and un-Christian if I didn't give them money. Like what if they were the old angel-in- disguise beggar from the Bible story, testing my compassion? I would flunk big-time, because I really needed every quarter I had. The subway was thirty cents, and that added up if you had to go several places in a day. Which was another reason I had decided to walk it this morning, since the day was pretty and sunny, and I didn't know exactly how far it was. I was going to have to study a map of Manhattan, and soon. I crossed the street to Union Square Park, found a bench near a statue of Abraham Lincoln, and sat down to reglue my eyelash and try to figure out what might be the best way to go to find more Broadway. My blistered feet didn't want to make too many detours. I made a mental note to carry Band-Aids in my purse from now on. Thank goodness I had gotten up early and left myself a lot of time, having already found out the hard way how long it took to get anywhere in this town, and another little phobia of mine is being late. Sitting in the park under green shade trees with the cheeky pigeons pecking on the ground right by my feet, I still had a hard time believing I was really in New York City. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't what had gone on in the last crazy week. Everything had happened so fast that, like Alice, I felt I was running as hard as I could just to stay in place. Up until last Saturday, I had never been on an airplane in my life, or out of the state of Arkansas, for that matter, except for a couple of trips to Vian, Oklahoma, to visit my aunt Juanita's family. "I just can't understand why you want to go to New York and try to be one of those models, Cherry," Mama said for the umpteenth time. "It's a big old dirty city, and there are young girls in the papers every day up there who get killed or worse. I won't get one good night's sleep worrying about you in that place. I thought you wanted to be an art teacher! That's what we paid for you to go to college and do. Is all that money wasted? And what are we supposed to do with that big box of expensive oil paints and brushes you brought home? Your daddy and me sure can't use them. I couldn't paint a straight line with a ruler." Daddy just saidMailer, Norris Church is the author of 'Cheap Diamonds ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400062607 and ISBN 1400062608.