“How come you holding the bottle in your hand?” I asked.

“Hmm?” He looked at me and then smiled this big smile and put the bottle on the table.

“So you play ball, too?” Aggie wiped her hands on the dishrag and turned towards me.

“A little,” I said.

“He any good?” She turned to Cal.

“Yeah, he’s nice, real nice,” Cal said.

“He must be to get you back in the game,” she said.

“Guess who I had a long conversation with this morning?” Cal said, undoing the bottle.

“Who?”

“Sweet Man Johnson.”

“He still the same?”

“Yeah, he still the same,” Cal said. “He ain’t gonna never change.”

“He’s the only one,” Aggie said. She went through a drawer full of junk and found a corkscrew and handed it to Cal. “Most of these people get more than two cents in the pocket, get their heads so big they can’t get their hats on. I saw Richie the other day, you remember that guy everybody used to call Buddha?”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “This cat was a Muslim when we first met him, see? Then a little bit later he turned to being Jewish. Then the last time we saw him he had joined the Jews for Jesus movement.”

“Right.” Aggie was stirring a frying pan full of onions and green peppers and sprinkling it with red pepper. “Anyway, I saw that fool the other day. He was on the downtown side of the A train platform, and I was on the uptown side, going to the hairdresser. He’s yelling and everything, and then he comes busting over. Now, dig it, he runs up one flight of stairs, across the station, and down the other flight of stairs, just to give me this card that says ‘Richard Thompson, Business Representative.’ He missed his train trying to impress me. And guess what he’s a business representative of? Avon Products!”

Me and Cal both laughed at that, but I was getting to feel really left out. It wasn’t like they weren’t talking to me, because they were. But I got the feeling I was supposed to leave, only I didn’t know exactly how to pull it off. And maybe that wasn’t it either. The thing was, like I said before, you got to see a guy with his woman before you really got to know him. With Aggie, Cal was different. He talked smoother, and they just seemed to touch bases in different places that I didn’t know because I hadn’t been there. “Remember this?” or “remember that?”

And Aggie was different, too. She had something, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. She was nice-looking, real nice, but she wasn’t sexy. Only she was sexy, but she wasn’t the kind of sexy that you would say anything to her on the street. She was like Joni, Lenny’s sister, in the way she carried herself. But she didn’t talk any different than me or Cal. I was sitting there all through dinner trying to figure out how she was different. I knew she was different, though, and I could really see her getting next to a guy.