“You know this is different,” James says to his brother.
“If the girl had been black, it would have been next to the funnies.”
I look up to see a black woman standing in the door way.
“Hello, Gideon,” she greets me warmly.
“How’re you doin’?” James’s wife smiles as if I were their best friend.
Glad for the interruption, I stand up and speak, relieved I can call her name.
“Gloria, how are you?” My neighbor’s wife is an attractive woman. Her almond colored eyes are always smiling, and ever since I’ve lived in the neighborhood she has maintained a willowy, svelte figure. She is a conscientious gardener, and her long, magnificent legs have piqued my interest every spring while she tends the roses, azaleas, pansies, and violets that bloom in the front yard. Today, her legs are hidden by baggy blue slacks. Rosa had always commented on her flowers and if she knew Woogie had shit on them, she’d be livid at me. She only allowed him to defecate in our backyard and handled his turds as casually as if they were leftover breakfast sausages. I gag if they are the least bit soft, but as a registered nurse, she dealt with far worse on a daily basis.
“I’m doing fine,” Gloria says, putting her hands in her pockets.
“How’s Sarah? She’s a sophomore, isn’t she?”
I marvel at how much she knows. I can’t even come close to remembering the names of their children. I used to try harder at this sort of thing. We had deliberately chosen to live in a mixed neighborhood that the block busters hadn’t finished off. As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia back in Arkansas with a wife of mixed blood, I was going to make the old sixties dream of racial harmony come true in Blackwell County, the socalled “civilized center” of Arkansas. Had I been mat naive? Obviously so.