“Probably not,” I admitted.

“So take my number down,” she told me. I guess she must have been around twenty-three, but she appeared eighteen, nineteen from a distance. You had to get up close to see the serious concerns of life in her eyes and read how old she was. But when she smiled, she looked like a teenager again.

I took out my cell phone and punched her number in. Then she reached out and touched my hand. “Don’t be afraid to call me before you leave, all right. I’m up late most of the time.”

“Doing what?” I asked her for the hell of it.

She shrugged. “Watching TV. I got nothing better to do.” She squeezed my wrist and said, “So call me.”

“Okay,” I told her.

I tried my hardest not to look back when we went our separate ways. Old neighborhood girls were always asking me to call them, every time I came back home.

Speaking of old neighborhood women, my mother invited one of her favorite neighborhood daughters over to the house to eat with us that night.

I said, “Why did you do that, Mom? You’re gonna play matchmaker while I’m trying to eat.”

My mother continued preparing her meal of boiled chicken, corn, greens, and potatoes at the stove. She was forever the busybody and was still in pretty good shape to prove it. She wore the apron, the cooking gloves, and everything.

She said, “I just wanted you two to compliment each other on how you’re both doing. Geneva’s going to law school now.”

“Mom, you know how many lawyers and professional women I know?” It was no big deal to me. But I usually tried to stay away from those kinds of women. I guess, since I was a model, they tried to treat me like a plaything who needed a real job. So I never really liked their attitudes.

“Well, she’s right here from Indiana, and we need to support each other when we make it,” my mother explained.

She was always trying to show me off to somebody, and since it was her house—that I helped her with the down payment on—she could invite over whoever she wanted. I would just have to deal with it. That’s why I never enjoy staying home that long. If I stayed for a week, my mother would introduce me to five different women. I was amazed sometimes that she even knew so many young people. I guess that came from running her mouth to everyone’s parents.

The Geneva Pitts that I remembered was a bashful yellow girl with curly light brown hair, who reminded me of a television kid you would see on The Cosby Show. She was the oldest daughter of one of my mother’s old friends. Geneva was Ms. Goody Two-shoes all the way, another grown-up Raven-Symoné, and I was not attracted to that at all.

She arrived at my mother’s house at ten after seven, and my mother gave me a final warning.