Although she knows she can’t afford it, Adele hails a cab.   The B and C trains are delayed, and it would take so long to get home, especially with a moody child still unaccustomed to the subway.  She follows Max onto the backseat, the vinyl sticking to her legs in the unforgiving heat.  She reminds him to buckle his seatbelt, and tells the white-haired driver their address in Queens.  He pulls out onto Central Park West as Max glances back at the apartment building with a doorman and an elevator.  Their small building in Queens has neither.

Max has been quiet these first two weeks in New York.  Their house in Oregon had three bedrooms, a huge living room, a yard.  Max’s room in the sparsely-furnished apartment in East Elmhurst is slightly bigger than his twin bed.  The air smells like plane fuel.  At night he can hear the elevated train.  He hates the elevated train.

Adele has been staying up late, drinking stale coffee and working on her résumé. Her references are three thousand miles away.  She wonders if her experience from years of seeing Michael, Max’s father, through low-level depression counts as having professional expertise with mental illness. 

Adele has promised Max pizza, explaining that New York is famous for its pizza.  Max talks about his favorite toppings, but she knows he’s thinking of home.  He liked to secret away pizza scraps to sneak across the fence to the neighbor’s yellow dog, who would spit out green peppers but eat everything else.  Max misses the yellow dog, and he misses his father.

Adele had convinced Max to go to a birthday party today, the party of an acquaintance’s seven-year-old son.  When she picked him up from the apartment, thirteen blocks from where she grew up, Max was sitting on a couch, watching other kids play a video game.  A barely-touched plate of cake sat at his feet.

Now, as they sit in the cab at the light, a group of Orthodox young men cross the street.  Irreligious a Jew as she is, Adele feels suddenly like she’s living where she belongs again, culturally speaking.

Max blurts out, “I liked the elevator buttons.”

“Did you like the elevator?  Maybe we’ll have one someday.” 

“They didn’t have a number 13.  That’s dumb.  If I had an elevator, I’d have a number 13.”

The cab moves forward.  Adele lowers the window, enjoying the slight breeze.  Max plays with his shoelace.

She tells him, “I know life here’s not perfect, but we’re going to have to be patient and I promise, we’ll get to have good things.”

“Like elevators.”

“Like elevators.  And all the pizza we can eat.  And a job for me.”  She looks out the window.

Max picks up a paper shopping bag from the taxi floor. “What’s this?” 

Adele shuts off her reflexive terrorism fears and examines the bag. She pulls out a shoebox and opens it.  It contains red high heels, thin strapped-ones made of nice leather.. 

“It’s the ruby slippers!”  Max has been into The Wizard of Oz for a few years now.  They dressed him as the Tin Man last Halloween, daubing his grinning face with silver paint.  Adele has carefully avoided unpacking the DVD, with its message that there’s no place like home.

“Hey, I think another passenger left a bag behind,” she tells the white-haired driver, sliding the box back into the shopping bag.  He looks into the rear-view mirror.

“Hang on.” He stops at another light and turns his deeply-lined face toward them.  He smiles and his eyes crinkle warmly.  “Okay, show me.”  He has a slight Eastern European accent, possibly Russian.

She lifts the bag so he can see it through the clear barrier.  “Ah!  That’s what I thought.  It was the lady an hour ago in Midtown.”  He looks at his watch.  “Half an hour ago.”

The light changes.  He navigates around cars and bicycles.  After a block he says, “Listen, I’ll make you an offer.  I don’t like someone to lose a belonging in my taxi.  I know precisely where I dropped her.  She was joining someone for a meeting over lunch.  If you aren’t in a hurry, I’ll stop the meter and we’ll try to catch her there.  Then, I’ll take you home, no charge.  Acceptable?”  Adele is in no hurry to get to the apartment, and no charge sounds appealing.  She agrees.

She strokes Max’s hair.  “We’re going to go bring the lady her lost shoes.  A little less Wizard of Oz, a little more Cinderella.”  Their Portland friends, eager to see Max freed from any constrictive gender norms, had bought the boy a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a set of Disney DVDs.  The Wizard of Oz DVD had been a gift from Michael’s mother. 

“Like Cinderella’s slipper,” Max agrees. “Wait, Mom, except how will we find her if we have both of them?  It has to match, remember?”

“This man knows what Cinderella looks like,” Adele reassures Max.  “She’s been in his cab.”

Max is impressed.  The driver chimes in that indeed, he knows the story of Cinderella very well. With a crinkled-eye smile in the rear-view mirror to Adele, he tells Max that Cinderella usually lives in a castle in Russia and is an extremely successful business woman. 

Adele tells the driver that her grandfather was also from Russia.  “No kidding,” he says.

He looks a bit like Adele’s grandfather as she remembers him, the bushy eyebrows and wide, pronounced wide cheekbones.  She remember how intently her grandfather would listen whenever she told him that something was troubling her at school, which was often.  She feels an ache she knows well.

Alexander says he’s retired.  He was a historian.  He isn’t driving cabs for the money, he doesn’t need that.  But after his wife died, he missed having people to talk to.  He wandered here and there, did a little writing.  Then, after a few years, he became a cab driver on a whim, and got used to it.  It’s the best way, he insists, to keep his mind active in retirement.  “It’s not just the drivers, though boy do they keep you alert.”  He gestures with his thumb to the next lane, as though implicating the black Mercedes passing him. “But, you want to talk to the most interesting people in the world?  You drive New Yorkers around, I’m telling you.”

“And Cinderella.” Max is still listening.

“You bet,” Alexander agrees, “And Cinderella.  You get to drive a lot of Cinderellas.”

They drive a few more blocks.  As the cab approaches Columbus Circle, Max asks, “Why do they call them slippers in fairy tales when they’re shoes?  Because slippers are soft, like Daddy’s bedroom slippers.”

Adele explains that slipper is also an old-fashioned word for a woman’s small, delicate shoe, although she knows that wasn’t the real question.  Max used to put on his father’s size 13 fuzzy slippers and slide around the house, making his parents laugh.

Alexander maneuvers the cab to double-park outside a diner.  “We’ll wait here a moment.  You see how this red Mitsubishi’s parked?  A parking job like that, they’ll be back any second.”  Sure enough, a woman runs out to the Mitsubishi and vacates the space, into which Alexander deftly squeezes the taxi.

Max insists on meeting Cinderella, so they all head to the diner.  There’s a large street fair nearby. “I think the Armenians have a booth at this one,” Alexander tells Adele.  “A nice street fair.  Decent.  Don’t miss any street fair put on by a church’s old women.  If there’s a saint in the name of the street fair, you won’t believe the good things to eat.”

They enter the diner.  Alexander spots the well-dressed woman, who does a double-take when he waves.  Alexander gestures for Max to deliver the shoes.  Adele watches Max say something to the woman, who smiles and mouths, “Thank you!” to Alexander. Adele guesses Max asked if the woman is Cinderella.

After squeezing through the door past customers, Adele looks at the crowd outside.  She squeezes Max’s hand. “Do you want to see the street fair?”

She offers to take the subway home, but Alexander shrugs and says his shift is almost over.  If they don’t mind, he’ll accompany them.  “You kept your end of the bargain; I keep mine.  Besides, those Armenian ladies make lahmajoun that’s out of this world.” 

Sweat-inducing heat radiates from the pavement, but the mood is upbeat.  Like in their neighborhood in Queens, the passersby come from myriad cultures. Max looks around. She lets go of his hand and lets him walk alone, but close. 

Alexander says quietly, “The boy doesn’t love New York yet.”

“No, he’s a deer in headlights.  Subway headlights.  I grew up here, but seeing it through his eyes is something else.”  She thinks of her grandfather, arriving from Russia as a boy.

“If I may ask, where is his father?”

Adele sighs.  “He’s in Oregon.  We broke it off.”

“I see.  My daughter, she also left her husband, a long time ago.  He hurt her and the child terribly.”

  “It wasn’t like that with Michael.  He had depression though, and after a while I felt like his therapist, not his partner.”  Alexander’s accent is so close to her grandfather’s. 

Max watches some musicians play steel drums, and Adele and Alexander watch him.  Alexander says, “He looks like my daughter’s child.  My grandson.”

Adele looks at him.  His tone has shifted slightly.

“They both were killed, unfortunately.” Adele murmurs her shock and condolences.  She wonders silently whether the deaths were related to the violent husband.

Alexander reads this in her expression and quickly explains, “It was simply an automobile accident.  Not even a drunk driver.  Some idiot who didn’t know how to drive.”  He shrugs.  “I wish I could have protected her.  I’d like to have driven her home that day.”

Amid the rhythmic clanging of the steel drums, Max looks up at Adele.  She thinks, Michael would like this music. They’ll call Michael tonight.

Across from the musicians, Alexander is beckoning Adele and Max toward a food booth.  His smiling expression is back, although Adele now sees something sad behind the crinkles next to his eyes. 

They join Alexander.  At this booth, with streamlined and quick movements, old women from the Armenian church are dishing out thin, tortilla-like breads baked with a fragrant, browned-meat topping.  “Lahmajoun,” a women in a blue apron tells Adele, while squeezing lemon onto a steaming bread, rolling it up, and handing it to a customer.  This, Adele thinks, they didn’t have in Oregon.

Adele is about to pay for three, but Alexander has her beat.  “Your welcome to New York,” he says.

Max is looking skeptically at the lahmajoun.  The woman in the blue apron smiles.  “You ever had lahmajoun?  This is my grandson’s favorite snack.”

“What is it?” Max asks, more to Adele than the woman.

The woman doesn’t miss a beat.  “It’s a pizza,” she says, “A really super tasty meat pizza.  From Armenia.  You want yours cut like a pizza or rolled like a tube?”  Max wants his cut like a pizza.  The woman obliges, deftly slicing it into four triangles and stacking them on paper, while Adele silently thanks any listening Armenian saint for the wisdom of this woman’s choice of analogy. 

It works.  Max loves the lahmajoun, eating all four quarters.

While Alexander and Max look at knock-off t-shirts, Adele slips back to the lahmajoun booth.  Keeping an eye on her son, she quickly gives the woman money for two large frozen packages of lahmajoun.

The ride home is quiet except for the radio, which Alexander keeps on 1010 WINS, listening for traffic updates and snippets of news.  Adele thinks about her grandfather, and about Alexander’s lost family.

As they cross the Queensborough Bridge, Adele points out Roosevelt Island. Portland had bridges, but New York’s are larger, more dramatic.  Max presses against the window, watching the Roosevelt Island tram above his head.  She thinks of the tram in Portland, and wonder if he is remembering it too.

As they turn on Northern Boulevard, she tells Max, “I promise we’ll still have real pizza.  New York pizza.”

“Can we eat it on the tram?”

“We’ll see.”

“Or on the train?  Or a cab.”

“I thought you didn’t like trains.”

Max shrugs.  I don’t know.  Maybe with pizza I’d like them.”

They drive through her neighborhood, which Alexander navigates expertly.  He pulls in front of her building and smiles.  “Delivered safely,” he says.

He gets out the cab to say goodbye.  Adele gives him the second package of lahmajoun and thanks him.   His eyes crinkle into a smile, and he shakes her hand and touches the boy’s cheek before getting back into the cab.

As Adele and Max start to leave, Max turns and asks Alexander through the open window, “Wait, if Cinderella lives in a castle in Russia, how come she’s here?”

Alexander shrugs.  “What can I tell you?  She’s sick of Russia.  She prefers New York.  She likes the people.  She likes the pizza.”  With another shrug, he drives away.

The elevated train screeches a few blocks away.  Adele unlocks the front door, and together she and Max climb the stairs home.