Should Have Known Better

“What’s wrong with my hair? I like my hair blond. It’s hot. And wasn’t your little friend’s hair blond?”

“Well, Sasha’s like three shades lighter than you and she’s on television.”

“Please, we’re the same color!”

“No, you’re not—” I stopped myself, realizing I was getting nowhere on the hair. “Fine.”

“Exactly. The hair stays. They’ll just have to get used to the hotness in”—she looked at the paper in her hand—“Champaign, Illinois. And where is that anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Look, let me get out of here. I’ll be back tomorrow. Can you hold down the fort?” I looked out over the floor to see that Mr. Lawrence and Mrs. Harris were gone.

“I got this. You know these are the slow days of the week,” she replied. “And while I’m watching the books, you watch Ms. Thang.”

“Why do you keep calling Sasha that?”

“I don’t like her. There’s something about her.”

“Oh, she’s just different. Hollywood type.”

“If you say so,” Sharika said as I walked to the door. “Just watch her,” she add

ed louder.

When I got to the exit, I looked down the hallway and saw two hobbling old bodies heading toward the bathroom. “What is it with these two?” I said. I turned back toward Sharika. “Bathroom check!” I mouthed to her.

We investigated three nail salons before Sasha would approve of a technician. She’d done some feature about fungus in nail salons and scared the workers in the other salons after pointing out all of their violations. By the time we sat down in the plush massage seats to get pedicures at some posh spa downtown, I thought the only crime was that we were paying double what was charged at the first shop. While the first shop’s version of a massage chair was a bucket and folding chair, there’s nothing wrong with saving money.

I was slowly getting over Sasha’s impromptu kiss, blaming it on the alcohol that had me acting funny, too. As I began looking her directly in the eyes again, I realized other people downtown were, too. Walking around with her was probably the closest I’d ever come to being a celebrity because people—and I mean old, rich, white people (which means Republicans in the South)—would stop and look at her kind of like they’d known her at some time in their lives and couldn’t place her, and whisper to the person next to them. Some, I’m guessing the non-Republicans, even smiled. A few came over and asked for her autograph or a picture. Sasha was always beyond sweet and accommodating. And it was very interesting to see her in that way. She actually used her phone to take a picture of herself with a woman who didn’t have one. She said she’d have her assistant mail it to the woman and I thought the woman was about to cry. “You eat this stuff up,” I said to her as we walked.

“All in a day’s work, baby,” Sasha answered playfully.

“I don’t know what it is about hometowns in the South,” I said after telling Sasha about Sharika’s letter and fear of leaving Augusta. We were sitting beside each other in the fancy massage pedicure chairs at the spa. “It’s like, if you don’t leave right out of high school, you’ll never leave.”

“That’s not a Southern thing. It’s a people thing. There are some folks in New York who have never left the city and people in Los Angeles act like they have their own country,” Sasha said, laughing.

I bent down to help the technician roll my jeans up above my knees.

“So, what about you?” Sasha asked. She was enjoying the five extra minutes she’d requested to allow her feet to soak in the pedicure pool. “What’s your dream? Are you going for your PhD?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Well, honestly, I didn’t even know you were interested in library science in college. You never mentioned it. I was surprised when you said you were working at the library.”

“It just came to me,” I said. “I didn’t work when I first got to Augusta. But I got bored when I got pregnant. I found an online program. That was it.”

“Do you like it?”

“I like that the job gives me a little bit of money to help out around the house—and it’s definitely not a lot of money. I get to be out of the house and meet interesting people. You saw them! It works for me. I enjoy it. I can’t think of anything else I’d do. It’s not like in Atlanta here. If you don’t work for the medical district or the riverfront, there’s not much else for someone with a general degree to do.”

I eased back to meet the pulsating pressure from the chair.

“Sasha Bellamy?” A white woman I’d seen eyeing Sasha from the front of the salon now stood behind the technician doing Sasha’s feet.

At first, I thought she was another fan, but looking in her face, I wasn’t quite sure. She looked annoyed. Maybe angry. A little younger than both of us, she had a tight, college-girl body and the same diamond earrings Sasha wore the first day she came to my house.

“That’s me,” Sasha said happily, curling her lips up at the edges and poised to take a compliment.

“So you know my husband?”