The Gift
We had been together just over one year. I was thirty-three; she was just thirty. Julie had been married for a few years in her early twenties; I had never been married, although I had once lived with the same woman for almost six years. Neither of us had any children.
I was a production manager for a large printing company—yes, there really still are such things—on Hudson Street. Julie worked for a medical supplies company in midtown. I had finished three years of college, and had had enough. Julie had her BA, and was pursuing a Master’s degree in hospital administration. Julie had a moderately large apartment in a fashionable neighborhood in Brooklyn known as Park Slope. I had a small apartment in an unfashionable part of Manhattan once known as Hell’s Kitchen, now renamed Cl
