To minimize conflict, Winnow started working Fifth and L Northwest with the tykes. She’d been hitting it for a month now. She’d busted through more dates than any of the missies. She had a new friend too, Heidi. Heidi worked a club. It was tight. This place attracted professional athletes, television personalities, that level of clientele. Heidi had what she called a referral service. As yet, Winnow couldn’t safely estimate what her take would be. She had to be doing this for free straight out. Certain relationships come to pass; money would come into it.

Heidi was Chinese, or at least not black, Spanish, or a white girl. She had an accent like a kung-fu movie, and she could have been a stripper. But she had a scar that was not healing right, and that wasn’t all. She was missing her thumbs. Club let her work hostess wearing long gloves with a clothespin taped to each palm underneath to make her look normal. She didn’t have to bang bare on a bar, hold tight to a pole, anything needing five fingers.

Winnow, with her limp, felt she knew Heidi, really knew her. They had injuries. They’d met because a date came to Fifth in a taxi with Heidi, looking for another girl to make it three. The other tykes were dippy dumb about how to make proper love to another woman. Winnow knew how to look like she was pleasing girls, and it was not too far from the truth to say she felt more gentleness for Heidi than she did for any person, male or female, Stanley even maybe. Stanley was her every-so-often father. He was the one who asked her. Winnow had to think about it, was she or was she not a lesbian? Come to find out, she decided, she wasn’t. She just had a special situation with Heidi. Winnow could hang out with Heidi and stay away from Blagden Alley, not have to go home and listen to her sick mother, who was in bed with one bad cold or some ache or some drug that wasn’t making the grade to get her over.

Tonight the tykes on Fifth scowled at Winnow, slouched and jutted hips. Girls were swarmed up. Had to wear serious faces. Winnow, she had to laugh. Been in the world not long, girls have ideas that nasty faces make girls juicy looking. This market out here, this here is a sure grocery for pink. Instead, black jogging bras on these tykes. Jogging!

She took their business. Just now, a car full of brothers had stopped, rolled down a window. Winnow could feel a foot come off a brake, going on a pedal slow. What did her mama always say? “Evening, handsome. Looking for understanding?” She fixed that. “Evening, player,” she whispered to herself, practicing just before the headlights, silver-blues, marked up on her. For them, “Evening, players. Need understanding?”