After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
A Sunday vignette.
The Staten Island Ferry on a Sunday night in late October is the most democratic room in New York, and also the emptiest. The tourists have gone back to their hotels with their photographs of the Statue of Liberty; the commuters have not yet resumed their Monday faces. What remains is a scattering of nurses coming off shift, a man asleep beneath a newspaper, and the long orange hull pushing its patient way across the harbor at a speed that has not changed in living memory.
Celia Marchetti, forty-four, a court stenographer who had spent the weekend transcribing a deposition so tedious she suspected the lawyers of filibustering, took her usual seat on the open deck at the stern, where the wind is honest and the view runs backward toward Manhattan. She liked to watch the skyline get smaller. It made the week ahead seem manageable, a thing that could be held between thumb and forefinger.
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