I Wish I Had a Red Dress by Pearl Cleage

face lit up in a warm smile.
    “Just in time,” she said. “Welcome!”
    “Thank you,” he said.
    Sister turned to me. “Did you meet Joyce?”
    “He caught me doing what I thought was a very private mambo,” I said, looking at how tiny Sister looked standing beside him.
    Bill was delighted. “You were dancing?”
    “Good for you,” said Sister quickly, heading Bill off at the pass before he could start teasing me again. “Why don’t you get Nate something to drink?”
    “Sure,” Bill said, not through with me by a long shot. “You’re not going to break out again while I’m out of the room, are you?”
    “I’ll try to restrain myself,” I said.
    Nate stood leaning easily against the mantel, smiling and looking big. I sat down on the couch wondering how many timeshe’s been asked about the weather up there, and how long I could resist the temptation to inquire.
    “Sit down, sit down,” Sister said. “You have any trouble finding us?”
    Nate shook his big head, which was perfectly shaped without any lumps, rolls or razor bumps, and claimed a space at the other end of the couch. I waited for the end I was sitting on to rise up like a teeter-totter.
    “Not a bit,” he said. “I’ve been finding my way around pretty good, so far. Once I figure out which roads dead-end at the lakes, I’ll be fine.”
    That’s the biggest frustration for newcomers. A street that begins in a dense grove of pine trees can open up into a sandy strip of beach with no warning.
    “The only good thing about getting lost up here,” I said as Bill returned with a frosted glass for Nate and a pitcher to refresh the rest of our drinks, “is that anybody you ask can probably tell you how to get where you’re going.”
    “Men never get lost,” Bill said. “Didn’t anybody ever teach you that?”
    “No,” I said. “I must have been absent that day.”
    “How’s the house hunting?” Sister sounded sympathetic.
    Nate groaned. “I haven’t had time to make much progress. I’m still at the Motel 6.”
    “All the way out on the highway?” I said.
    He nodded. “I’ve been at the school until late every day, so I haven’t really had time to look around.”
    “I know a place you might be interested in,” I said. “It’s lakefront. Is that okay?”
    He smiled. “That’s a trick question, right?”
    “Why?”
    “Given a chance, is there anybody who doesn’t want to have water outside their front window?”
    I wondered if he liked to swim, but I refused to allow myself to imagine how he’d look in a bathing suit. “If you’re going to be at the school tomorrow, I can drop off the key and the directions. You can go over and take a look.”
    “I’ll make it a point to be there,” he said, looking relieved.
    “Good,” I said. “Around four-thirty or so?”
    “Great!”
    He was practically beaming. Sister was too, but I ignored her. I was just being neighborly.
    “Well, there you go,” Bill said. “The beauty of small-town living.”
    Nate nodded his agreement. “Absolutely!”
    “So other than the Motel 6,” I said, “how do you like it up here so far?”
    “It’s great,” he said enthusiastically, clasping and unclasping his big hands. “I was really ready to get out of the city for a while.”
    “How long have you been teaching?”
    I wondered how students reacted when they encountered him in the hallways of Baldwin High. It made me remember the scene in The Green Mile where Michael Clarke Duncan’s character first enters the prison and the white guards behold this black behemoth in tattered overalls and immediately share one thought: What the hell are we gonna do if this big Negro goes off? Nate was that kind of big.
    “Five years,” he said. “I was a Detroit beat cop for six years before that, until it occurred to me that my time might be better spent trying to interpret these young brothers before I had to put the cuffs on them.”
    “Well, don’t give up on those cuffs just