“Travers, you got to remember, I seen you dance,” Teddy said, straightening out the folds in his tent-sized black double-breasted suit. Teddy was 300 pounds plus with a deep insulated voice from all the fat around his neck. His words seemed to come from inside a well. “Ain’t pretty.”

As I leaned back into my thirty-year-old truck, I noticed his newest electric blue Bentley parked outside. Chrome rims shining like mirrors into the sun. I’d heard the inside was lined with blue rabbit fur. Real rabbits died for that.

One of those new Hummer SUVs painted gold with black trim pulled in behind the Bentley, shaking with electronic bass. Teddy’s brother, Malcolm, walked across Julia.

I grunted as I fit a pipe plug into the heater hose outlet of the new water pump. Malcolm wandered into the garage, decked out in hard dark denim, a tight stocking cap on his head and a platinum cross ticking across his chest. “What up?”

“Hey, brother,” I said, reaching back from the hood and giving him the pound. I liked Malcolm. Always streetwise and hard. Sometimes in and out of trouble but always himself.

“Came by to see if you want to have lunch at Commander’s,” Teddy said.

“I’d settle for fried chicken and greens at Dunbar’s.”

“Travers, you are the blackest white man I know.”

I cleaned my hands with a gasoline-soaked rag and ran my fingers over the sleeves of his suit. “Nice.”

Malcolm laughed.

You would’ve thought I was a leper, the way Teddy yanked his arm away. “Get yo’ greasy-ass monkey hands off me.”

Malcolm crossed his arms across his ghetto denim, a scowl on his face. “Teddy don’t want no one messin’ with his pimpin’ clothes.”