TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK (Michael Mohr's Fictional NYC Covid Memoir)

Chapter 14 (PAID)

Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash

Chapter 14

I should have known better. Hadn’t I already learned enough about the rules of the game in Harlem? Apparently not.

            Twenty minutes after Sophia and I’d gotten off the phone, I stood outside of the grocery mart on Lenox and 116^th, carrying a waxed carboard-box crate which held my groceries. I’d taken longer than I’d hoped. It was deep dusk now, the sky a purple shade, nearing early darkness. There was a loose gray haze. Nightlife, I could tell, was beginning. And I’d promised myself to never be outside here after dark during the pandemic. And yet here I was.

            I started walking north on Lenox, slowly towards my apartment.

            I thought of Adinah, about our past. I remembered the trip we took in August of 2017—not knowing that five months later we’d …