The Woman in the Window

NAILS. That’s what the neon sign says in capital letters the color of pale-pink petals. Wrapped in its rosy glow, Emily Zhang is sitting demurely like a mannequin at her little station inside the plate-glass window waiting for her first customer. When the door opens, her baby-doll hands with their severely short nails, sans polish, fly into action as they have every day for the last six years since she and her husband, Michael Guo, opened Butterfly Nail Spa. She’ll spend the next 10…

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The Woman Who Isn’t Lost in Translation

On the Near West Side of Chicago, there used to be an annual saint’s feast on the grounds of a Roman Catholic church. It was the early 1960s, and Josephine Traversa, the baby of the four-child family, was only 3 or 4. She and her mother were standing in a big, sprawling lot when a plane roared overhead. Her mother looked up at the sky and told Josephine that the family had come to America from Italy on just such a jet. “Was I on it?” Josephine asked innocently. Josephine is U.S.-born,…

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The Shows Girl

She had to work late last night and didn’t get to bed until after 2 a.m. So it’s coffee that Joanna Psoroyannis goes in search of. That, she hopes, will open her doe-like mocha eyes. Model tall, she’s a Greek goddess cloaked in black from the top of her turtleneck to the toes of her knee-high leather boots. She takes up coffee cup and settles into the sofa that faces her flat-screen TV, wrapping her lithe, long legs under her with the ease of a ballerina. Her bookshelves hold ragged…

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The Good Guy

The apartment is filled with bikes and Buddhas, avant-garde art and animals. Finster the French bulldog is sitting on the beige rug, the one that matches his fur, guarding the cats Raya and Zophee. The sweet scent of votives mixes with the acrid smell of Billy Bruckner‘s cigarette smoke. Coffee, as fresh as the morning, is brewing. Billy, a cherub with big blue eyes and tattoos who liberally sprinkles his sentences with “dear,” is sitting on the sofa. He doesn’t like to think…

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The Cosmopolitan Cafe Owners

Sometimes good things happen on bad days; in this case, it was one of those things that almost didn’t happen, but when it did, it made everything better. It was a year after the new century trumpeted its grand entrance when Guillermo Lucerofabbi and Canalp Caner were riding on the subway from Astoria toward Manhattan. They were strangers on the train. And to America. Guillermo, who is known as Willie, was a new arrival from Argentina, and Canalp, who goes by John, had just come from Turkey. Willie,…

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