Within a hour, half a dozen more guests had came. We usually had twice as many folks on Friday night, but we was making good money anyway. Aunt Mattie waltzed through the door wearing some of her best jewelry. Her gray hair was covered up under a thick black hairnet, and she had on enough nut-brown face powder and blood-red rouge to paint the side of a barn. But I could still see the wrinkles and liver spots on her used-to-be-pretty face. The ankle-length, buttoned-up navy-blue coat she had on looked more like a choir robe. Under the coat was a low-cut blue dress that a woman her age didn’t have no business wearing.

All five of the women who prostituted for Aunt Mattie trailed behind her. Tiny, one of my regular pieces of tail, gave me a wink and made a slurping noise with her mouth. But the other four didn’t do nothing to acknowledge my romps with them, which was the way it was supposed to be. I was a very happy married man and I wanted to stay that way.

Aunt Mattie was pleased to be back in the mix. She couldn’t stop grinning and fluttering about like a butterfly. Four of her regular customers was in the house. Each one was grumbling and giving her mean looks. I assumed they was disgruntled about having to delay whatever romps they had previously scheduled for tonight. I knew that when Aunt Mattie and her girls left, them horny devils would follow them back to the whorehouse. I had a itching to drop in myself in the next day or so.

I gave Aunt Mattie a one-armed hug. Then I took her by the hand and led her to the couch. We dropped down at the same time. “I know this arrest thing done cost us a few customers, but I am so glad it didn’t scare you off,” I told her in my sweetest tone.

“This time. I don’t know about the next time, though.” She chuckled, but I knew she was serious. Her top moneymaker was a short-haired beanpole with a baby face named Wanda Sue Boggs. Everybody called her Sweet Sue. She had already hemmed Willie Frank up in a corner and was whispering in his ear. He was glassy-eyed and lapping up her words like the juice on a ham-bone. “Just look at that.” Aunt Mattie chuckled again. “I ain’t never seen a white man so fixated on a colored woman as Willie Frank is with that bald-headed hussy.”