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  Paul tossed up his massive hands and said, “I’m not disputing what happened, I’m just telling you that you’re not looking at a nickel-and-dime job here. We’re talking quarters. And if anyone tells you differently, they’re lyin’ to ya.”

  Paul had to put his business bid in, but he worked from integrity as well, and there was no way he could ease down the price of repairing an up-to-date BMW, a well-crafted German import.

  “What year is it?” he asked her.

  “A ninety-eight.”

  He couldn’t help but smile, still pitying the woman. He nodded and said, “That’s what I thought.”

  Ant slid out from under the white Toyota and acted as if he had to stretch in their direction, just to get a good look at her. He knew that she had money before he could even focus on her.

  Shit! I’d fix that for free! he told himself, taking her sights all in. She had everything! The face. The hair. The body. The tailor-made dress code, and all the attitude of a regal black woman.

  “Give her a quote, Paul. I’d work on it,” Ant interjected.

  Paul knew exactly what Anthony wanted to work on. He may have been Italian and married, but he still knew a good-looking woman when he saw one.

  “Just calm down, tiger,” he responded to Ant with a chuckle, inspecting the damaged BMW further.

  Ant didn’t like that so much. Why the boss gotta show me up in front of this knockout? Maybe he wants her his damn self! Italians do go for black women. I’ve seen him in here spying a lot of sisters, and giving them extra discounts and shit.

  “I didn’t say that I was definitely going to get it fixed here, I just wanted to get a price range. That’s all,” the regal sister announced.

  Paul asked, “How long ago did this accident happen?”

  “Just last night.”

  “And you didn’t crash it, right?” Ant asked, overstepping his boundaries. He couldn’t help himself. He just had to say something to her. Or he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself.

  “What difference does it make?” she sized him up and answered. She knew damn well where his mind was, and frankly, she didn’t have time for the games. She was thirty-five years old with two small children. But she looked twenty-six and childless, until she opened her mouth with so much authority.

  Ant was too taken by her presence to be bashful with her. So he kept on going, putting himself and his boss deeper in the hole.

  “Well, excuse me for trying to be Mr. Fix It. I’m just trying to help you out.”

  “And what does that have to do with who crashed my car?”

  “Well, if your husband did it, then let him pay for it. But if it was your boyfriend or something, then I understand why you’d be mad, and trying to cut corners.”

  Damn the boy was good! That just made her want to cut his f-ing head off! As it turned out, she had just recently divorced, and her new man was not half as responsible as her ex-husband was. She had run her responsible husband away with her proud dominance. Did she care? Not really. As she argued to her social-status group of friends, “If he’s not man enough to handle me, then why should I settle?”

  “Well, how much would it cost me?” she looked back at Paul and asked him. She decided to ignore the young, worthless, asshole of a black boy who had the audacity to question her about her business! Boy was she pissed at him! And at her new boyfriend! She often asked herself the question, What the hell is wrong with all black men? Either they can’t handle a strong black woman, or they end up having other damn issues!

  Paul was actually amused by it all. Ant never failed to impress or to entertain him. But he always took care of business first. That was what Paul liked about his young employee the most. Anthony Poole knew his job and was always reliable. The price of the damage on that BMW was going to run the sister more than three thousand dollars.

  “I’ll tell you what. Are you paying for this with your credit card, or with a personal check?” Paul was assuming that she was loaded with a house, and with plenty of credit. And he was right.

  “It depends on what the price is,” she answered.

  He nodded. ‘You’re looking at three thousand dollars and some change.”

  “How much change?”

  “Two, three hundred dollars.”

  She frowned. “That’s a whole lot of damn change.”

  “If you want me to go piece for piece, I will. But chances are, it’s gonna end up running you a lot more than what I’m quoting ya.”

  “Well, that’s what I would like to see. The details.”

  Paul paused and took another look at it. “Okay. I’ll be right back out.” He headed to his office for the paperwork.

  Ant saw that as another opportunity to instigate.

  “That wasn’t a good idea,” he walked closer and told her.

  “Hey, Anthony, why don’t you get back to work and get your wide nose from out of the air! You’re sucking up all of the oxygen!” an Italian employee yelled from the garage. Ant was only one of two African Americans who worked for Paul. Paul employed up to eight men full-time, and six part-time. It was an all-man’s zone. They worked the telephones and all.

  Ant ignored his fellow mechanic and kept on talking. “When he comes back over here and does the real paperwork on it, it might come out to be more like four thousand and some change.”

  “Well, he needs to tell me that up front, and stop messing around with my time.”

  Ant paused. “Damn. Is your time that precious? We all need time to take care of things that need to be taken care of. I mean, how fast do you expect us to fix it?”

  An alert lightbulb went off in her head. “How fast can you fix it?”

  She didn’t want her car out of commission for too long. Too long of a time in the repair shop would give her husband something else to complain about. After all, their divorce settlement was what gave her the opportunity to afford what she wanted without having to sweat him for everything. She would hate for him to start coming back around with plenty of “I told you so’s” and “I knew you couldn’t handle it’s.”

  “You’re looking at at least two weeks, depending on how long it takes for the parts to come in,” Ant answered her.

  “Two weeks? Shit!” she snapped. She had no idea whatsoever about cars. She was thinking more on a timetable of two days.

  Ant could read her dilemma. She definitely had something to hide. Hell, he even felt like he was in some kind of a soap opera. “You could rent another green BMW if you had to. Replace the tag with your own, and nobody would know the difference,” he told her.

  She looked him in the eye and started to picture him more as a con man with every word he said. Maybe he was good for something after all. He still wasn’t her type, but she had to respect him for being cunning. He was indeed smooth, and he was standing his ground with her. Of course, he knew that already. Ant prided himself on standing his ground with any woman.

  “Okay, Anthony, could you help me out by finishing that brake job on the Toyota, please,” Paul announced, with fresh paperwork to fill out on the Beamer.

  “No problem, boss man. I’ll get right to it.” However, he still had his ears open. And when the final paperwork was done, the total cost came to four thousand, four hundred, thirty-two dollars.

  A “Thank you very much” was all that the regal black woman had to say. Then she drove off as abruptly as she had driven up.

  “What she say?” Ant asked his boss inside the office later.

  Paul didn’t even want to talk about it. He knew her type before he even opened his mouth. She was fast talk and slow action.

  “I gotta tell ya,” he said with a frown, “women like that are more trouble than they’re worth to sleep with.”

  Ant smiled. I knew the boss had the fever for the jungle in him, he thought to himself.

  Paul continued: “You have a lot more women these days that are like that, too. They want what they want right here and right now no matter what. Then they have these a
ttitudes that you’re just supposed to bend over backwards for them.”

  Paul looked into his young mechanic’s brown face and wanted to make sure that Ant understood that his words had nothing to do with race.

  “And I don’t say this as a black thing, Anthony, because it’s across the board with women nowadays.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to apologize to me, man. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I wouldn’t plan on being with a woman like her for too long either.” But I’d damn sure hop in the bed with her, he kept to himself with a grin.

  “Those are the kind of women who give the caring, decent women of the world a bad name,” his boss continued. “I went to high school with her type. And just because a girl’s daddy had X amount of donuts, and they lived in such and such castle, they thought that they were better than everybody. But those kind of women are very seldom happy. Because their entire world is based on a facade with no real feelings involved. They’ll just talk to whatever guy has the money and the status. And let me tell ya, that’s a sorry-ass way to live.”

  Paul was on a roll, so Ant just let him talk himself out, as some of the other guys began to hover around and listen in.

  “I’m sure glad I met my wife when I did back in the good old seventies,” he said with a smile. “Because I feel sorry for some of you guys. Divorce settlements and child custody cases are running wild nowadays. And I’m not saying that you guys have nothing to do with a lot of that, but Jesus Christ! You’d think that a good old-fashioned marriage was some kind of a disease for a lot of people nowadays.”

  They all laughed and added their personal pieces to the conversation, before getting back to work. All the while, Ant began to daydream about Dana Nicole Simpson. Could she ever be happy with a man. Really? He doubted it. He doubted that strongly! So he figured it was a blessing in disguise to finally lose contact with her. All that a woman like Dana could do was mislead a guy into bliss, and then drive him crazy when he realized that she was insatiable.

  •

  After work, Ant drove the short distance back home to Nebraska Avenue, and smiled his behind off while listening to Master P shoot the rap game at high volume from his car’s sound system.

  “She ain’t ’bout it ’bout it,” he told himself of Dana. He was in a state of euphoria. A new revelation had cleared his mind of the stress of playing “Top This” with high-cultured women. Who needs that shit in the first place? Let ’em all complain their asses off, he told himself. And just give me an around-the-way girl like L.L. Cool J’s wife.

  Like clockwork, as soon as Ant got a chance to make it inside his second-floor apartment and relax, he had that expected phone call from his boy Tone.

  “What’s up for the night, man?”

  Ant frowned and shook his head with the phone in hand. “Look, man, ain’t nothin’ up for tonight. I’m just relaxing. Can’t I just come the hell home and relax for a minute. Damn! I mean, I do work every day. Maybe you should get a steady-ass job and try it out. So you can see how it feel to come back home and rest.”

  “Oh, okay, you in one of them solo moods again. Like a damn girl.”

  Ant got pissed off and said, “Look, man, what the hell are you saying? Only women can chill by themselves and get some peace of mind? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Basically. Boys don’t go out on each other like that.”

  “Aw, man, save that shit, Tone. Look, I’m chillin’ tonight. So you go ahead and call me a girl if you want to. But if you ask me, you da one that seem more like a girl, by calling me up every damn day. What are you, lonely? You need somebody to talk to? I mean, damn! Let a nigga rest!”

  “Yeah, whatever, man. So next time you got girl problems, don’t call me up talkin’ that shit you talk either,” Tone countered.

  “Man, that was just a few stray occasions, ’cause you know I got mines in check.”

  Tone said, “That ain’t what I heard. Last time I heard, you was a lovesick crybaby.”

  “Yeah, aw’ight. I’m not lovesick tonight. So call me up when your ass got something to talk about. Like a job or something.”

  Tone started to get upset. “Hey, dawg, why you gotta keep talking that job shit to me?”

  Ant gave a long sigh. “Can I get off the phone with you or what? Shit, man, I wanna call some girls up tonight. You tying up my line.”

  “I thought you said you was chillin’.”

  “I am chillin’. What that got to do with callin’ a girl?”

  Tone fell silent for a second. “She got a friend?”

  They both burst out laughing.

  “Come on, man, I gots to go. I’ll get with you later,” Ant told him.

  “Aw’ight, man. Go ’head and front on me like that, dawg. Go ’head and front.”

  Ant shook his head again. Tone was unbelievable. And to think that he was only two years away from thirty.

  “Later man! Seriously! I’ll see you when I see you!”

  He hung up the phone on his friend and felt hungry. He made himself a turkey and cheese sandwich and poured a tall glass of Pepsi from a cold two liter in the fridge. Then he stepped outside in the cool night air in a T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops, with his sandwich, drink, and telephone in hand with new phone numbers jammed in his pocket.

  “Damn, this a nice night out here,” he expressed to himself with a bite of his sandwich. Kids were still out running the streets. It made Ant remember how good things used to be before he got older and started to have so many expectations for himself.

  “I guess you just have to learn to take the bitter with the sweet,” he mumbled in between bites of his sandwich. Some of the kids would look to see who in the world he was talking to, but Ant didn’t care. Most people talked to themselves and were too ashamed to admit it anyway.

  “Now who’s gonna be the first lucky woman to get this phone call?” he asked himself once he had finished his sandwich and washed it down with his drink.

  The first number out of his pocket was Shawntè’s.

  “On a night like this, she probably ain’t home,” he said as he dialed the number.

  “Hello.”

  “Can I speak to Shawntè?”

  “This is Shawntè.”

  “This is Anthony Poole. You remember me, from the club on MLK?”

  Her voice became energized, and then it fell flat as she tried to catch herself. “Yeah, I remember you. Mr. Attitude.”

  “Hey, I was in a foul mood that night. I’m sorry about that. I’m not always that way.”

  “Okay, tell me anything. I’ve just about heard it all.”

  Ant began to chuckle. He liked her conversation already. She was going to try and make him work for it. A challenge. Just what the doctor ordered. He smiled and began to sink his teeth in for the slow kill.

  “Oh yeah? Well let me tell you a few things about me …”

  Damn the chase of a new woman felt good! The only way to compare it to what women felt was maybe by thinking about diamonds on their birthday. Nevertheless, some women had no use or desire for diamonds. But most men definitely had use for a new woman. A new woman was simply the bomb! An explosion of new energy. And I guess it would have to go down in the books of history as a man’s thing. Women just couldn’t understand.

  Sharron Francis couldn’t understand why she even desired to have a man sometimes. But she did. No matter how hard she tried to keep them off of her mind, she still wanted one. And the airport was flooded with men who had places to go. Progressive men. Men who had seen things and had been places. So less than a week after rearranging her priorities away from thinking about the opposite sex, Sharron found herself back at work, fantasizing about every interesting-looking guy who came into her direct line of vision: black, white, Latino, and Asian.

  Do they think about us as much as we think about them? Or is it just me? she asked herself, watching and thinking as each new man walked by and stuck his head and body into the gift shop. Her thoughts were more intense about me
n when she worked as a cashier. But once she’d moved up to an assistant manager position, she no longer had so much direct eye contact with men who actually bought things. Things like postcards, breath mints, Penthouse magazines, and different sizes, shapes, and brands of condoms. So maybe they did think about women. The things that they purchased at the gift shops proved it. Embarrassingly. It made Sharron’s new duties of counting inventory and stacking and rearranging shelves, moving from one shop to another, a needed relief from the embarrassing eye contact with so many men. And they all made her wonder, if not about them, then about the women whom they loved or lusted for.

  “Ah, Sharron, can you take over at the register for me? I have to run to the bathroom.”

  Shucks! she thought to herself. This is just what I didn’t need! The line was at least five men long, with three more hovering near the magazine stands. Perfect timing for a bathroom trip, right? But business was business.

  Sharron nodded and headed behind the counter without a word. Filling in at the register was how she first met Mr. Married Man, only to bump into him again at the Grab-n-Go Cafe. It was as if it was fate. Or a test of fate. Like that famous apple in the Garden of Eden. And Sharron had fallen for it. The mystique. The charm. The lore of forbidden fruit. But not this time. She effectively turned herself into a machine.

  TAP, TAP, TAP.

  “Four seventy-two. Thank you.”

  CHINNNGGG! WHAP!

  TAP, TAP.

  “Two forty-one…. Thank you.”

  CHINNNGGG! WHAP!

  TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP, TAP.

  “Six eighty-five…. Thank you.”

  CHINNNGGG! WHAP!

  “Looks like it’s gonna rain today.”

  “It sure does. And we do have umbrellas for sale.”

  TAP, TAP, TAP.

  “Three twenty-seven.”

  “How much are they?”

  “The umbrellas are all seven ninety-nine. They’re over to your left. Your total is three dollars and twenty-seven cents, please…. Thank you.”