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By Root 1081 0

all over the changing-room floor. Ramona laughed too, leaned up against the ledge under the mirror, arm pressed into her stomach; she laughed like she rarely did. In fact, it was only during these precious minutes when the women of the choir fused together in this tight closet of a room that she laughed like this. She had no girlfriends with whom she could laugh like this; her mean streak she knew would quickly alienate any woman who would seriously try to be her friend. So even though her choir members made overtures when she’d see one or the other on Sixtieth Street, the el, at Penn Fruit, or Miss D’s beauty parlor, they’d call out, “Hey, girl, call me, we got to talk,” Ramona never did call. She blamed it on her day job, tending to the fosters, trying to keep Mae off her back, spending nights with the man/men in her life, told herself that closeness between women was a frivolous endeavor that she would get around to one day when she could finally siphon off some free time. She really meant when she could sustain a decent attitude and keep her mean streak at bay. But during these segments when they changed in and out of their choir robes, sharing makeup and man stories, tucking one another’s bra straps so they wouldn’t show, knocking elbows and shoulders and behinds, Ramona felt loose, unfettered, like she rarely did.

But now she was standing on the choir loft, the giddiness she’d felt in the changing room was gone and her insides were locked again as she looked around the congregation and tried not to see the longtime married couples like Mr. and Mrs. John sitting right in her view, holding hands, Mrs. John elegantly middle-aged with her center city–coiffured hair, Mr. John glinting up at Ramona, vestiges of his and Ramona’s passion-filled trysts hanging in his eyes. And seeing it in Mr. John’s eyes made Ramona’s own eyes turn inward and recall it for herself.

She was only nineteen when she’d tried it with him. She’d just been promoted to assistant buyer, and Mae had bragged about it all over West Philly, and people were stopping Ramona on the street to congratulate her. Then Mr. John pulled up in a rented Fleetwood, backseat strewn with a dozen long-stem roses and an ice bucket cooling off fifty-dollar champagne. “Get in, Miss Ramona,” he said. “I’m going to introduce you to the high-class mature way of celebrating your notable accomplishment.”

She was young and impressionable, so she got in the car, let him take her up to Belmont Plateau, where she’d been so many times, too many times before, with any one of countless boyfriends, they could have been the same they were so much alike, so young, greedy, fast. But Mr. John was at least twice her age, and she tingled at the way the gray in his hair almost sparkled as they watched the city lights come on through the tinted windows of the Fleetwood Cadillac. They sipped champagne as he whispered compliments to her success and her beauty and her brains. She giggled and cooed and blushed inside. His hands were strong and smooth inching up her thighs, his lips hot and coarse barely sliding down her throat, until his hands and lips met a her center and it was so easy, too easy for her to part herself and let him take her, over and over, on the supple leather of the oversized backseat. After that it was those hands and lips and his slow-moving manhood in the best suite at the Airport Motel, or the borrowed apartment of his richest friend, even the back room of the real estate office when his wife took the evening off. And then there was his generosity, the fifty-dollar bills he’d fold into her bra, twice, sometimes three times a month—“Don’t want my baby to have to worry about lunch money,” he’d say—the better-quality stockings he’d surprise her with, six, eight pair at a time. “Love looking at those big, pretty legs under this smooth silk,” he’d croon. She’d go to get her hair done and get up out of the chair and reach for her purse and hear Miss D’s voice whispering, ringing in her ear, “Your sugar daddy done already taken care of it, sweetheart. What kind of mojo you gone