“I’m just saying, I mean, if you want to.” She says nothing after that, but her nothingness just spurs me on, because if we men possess genius for any one thing, it is the innate and uncanny ability to misread, misinform, and misunderstand. It’s our collective gift and curse. She smiled at me, after all; that must mean something. A smile is never simply a smile. I grab the red folder from her hands—carefully brushing two of my fingers across hers as I do it—and tear off a corner. Snatching a pen from among the twenty or so resting in a Styrofoam cup on the counter, I scribble my cell number down with a bravado that I usually reserve for picking up the tab when my supervisor is with me at lunch. With a little swagger I push the paper into the girl’s palm, and as a capper, I even lean forward and clean that errant smudge from her delicate cheekbone. Tammy’s cheekbone. I hold the offending smear up to her astonished eyes as a kind of exclamation point, to seal the deal. Afterward, I grab my keys from her outstretched fingers and shoot a look back over my shoulder. Whispering loudly to “Call me.”

As I’m fighting to pull that stupid paper floormat out from under my sandals, I become aware of a growing rumble nearby. Not a cacophony of voices, exactly, but a kind of rising chorus that makes me look up. I spot Tammy with some of the other employees across the way, pointing at my car and talking. Well, laughing might be more truthful, but it is the delicate mixture of pointing and laughter that turns into a general blur of humiliation by the time it reaches my retina. I take this in and digest it, swallow it all down along with my pride, and twist the key savagely in the ignition. Before the engine can really even catch I stomp on the gas, bolting forward through the opening in my late-model Cutlass. I catch Tammy’s eye one last time as I drive off, and I notice that she is crying, big harsh tears of merriment that rain down onto the unfinished concrete at her feet. And that’s what gets me, those tears of hers. That’s what really gets my goat about this whole incident.