Free The Matzo Ball Heiress by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

I’d love a bigger challenge. My boss thinks I could host my own show in a year or two. I love to talk, and I love to eat.”
    The scent of the hot chocolate dessert at the next table wafts over, a cruelly pleasant smell that inspires Steve to call our waiter over again. I agree to a shared serving of blueberry cobbler with lemon ice milk, and an after-dinner sherry. I never diet on a date. Steve seems pleased that I didn’t put up a fuss.
    “But you know what really turns me on?” Steve says.
    “What?”
    “You.”
    “I have to admit, Mr. Meyers, you really turn me on too.”
    Steve smiles, a beautiful ferocious smile. He leans over to lick my arm of fallen blueberry-cobbler topping. He swirls his tongue suggestively with the prize crumb on its tip. “Does this evening end here?”
    I’m nicely drunk. “Not if you don’t want it to.”
     
    The taxi pulls up in front of my building’s green-and-white awning. Tito, my always drowsy night doorman—a third-year marketing student at Columbia University—is sound asleep when Steve and I walk past him.
    Since my co-op management crew has modernized my building’s elevator, we no longer have an elevator operator. This is the latest cost-cutting move by Westin Drimmer, the new head of our co-op board, a type-A man who lost his job on Wall Street last June. The changes to our building are coming fast and furious—Drimmer is practicing his management skills while he searches for another position for an unemployed fifty-something used to a high six-figure income.
    Steve and I ride the shiny new elevator to the upper floors alongside a dogged real-estate agent with pink-tinted glasses and a triangular face who’s been showing a three-bedroom apartment one floor below mine for the last two months.
    The agent and I nod hello. “Isn’t it late for you to be here?” I ask her.
    The agent fixes the flounce of her black skirt stuck halfway up her ass from static cling. She speaks as if confiding a secret. “I have the perfect buyer coming tomorrow. I’m making sure the place is swept.”
    “Good luck,” Steve says.
    The agent smiles and turns to me. “Is the B penthouse available yet?”
    “No, Mrs. Leventhal is on life support,” I say.
    “Are they going to pull the plug? Isn’t she in her nineties?”
    “She told her son not to pull the plug. She got her request notarized.”
    The agent passes me her card. “Would you be a dear and call me when she dies?”
    Steve shakes his head in disbelief.
    “Sounds awful, but that’s what you have to do to survive as a businesswoman in this city.” The elevator door opens at her floor and she scurries out.
    Seconds later the door opens on the seventeenth floor, and Mr. Kleinman, my other elderly neighbor, emerges from penthouse C with his fly open and the tip of his penis peeking out.
    I wince.
    “Good God,” Steve says.
    “You need to go home, Mr. Kleinman,” I say.
    “Is the girl here yet?”
    “Your nurse is here in the morning.”
    He offers me a hollow stare. “It’s nine o’clock. She should be here.”
    “Oh, but it’s 9:00 p.m.” My heart goes out to this poor man. His pants are soaked in urine. His bare feet are browned with toe rot. I lead him back to his apartment by his wrist. “Back to sleep, Mr. Kleinman. Do you understand? Tomorrow morning. It’s nighttime now.”
    “Yes,” he says. His look is grateful, desperate. Has a flash of awareness broken through his Alzheimer’s?
    I close the door on my neighbor. “You’re a good person,” Steve says. “Not many people can handle that kind of scene with such grace.”
    “I swear he was sharp as a tack when I moved in. I heard he was a senior vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank once, but with Alzheimer’s he’s a shell of a person. His kids have two homes each but they won’t foot the bill for an overnight nurse—so I keep an eye out for him.”
    “He’s hard to miss.”
    Can I recapture any of the romance from the restaurant? Is it