Single Mom by Omar Tyree Page B

dress.
    I smiled and said, “Hello, gorgeous,” before handing her the two red roses I had bought for the occasion. I was trying to make the best impression I could. I told her one rose represented her and the other represented me, two hearts and souls coming together.
    “Aww, isn’t that the sweetest thing,” she gushed at me, with a peck on the cheek. As I walked her to the car with the roses in hand, she added, “Mmm, you smell good, too. What kind of cologne are you wearing?”
    I answered her like a king. “Armani.” Then I opened the passenger-side door for her and helped her to slide her sexy brown legs in. When I first went to lunch with Denise, I asked her if she worked out, because her body was in such great shape. She said, “Yes, every day from six-thirty A.M. until eleven-thirty P.M. ” I broke out laughing. The woman was so darn busy that her body remained skin tight naturally.
    “So, where are we going?” she asked me.
    “You ever heard of The Retreat, on the far South Side?” I asked her.
    Denise’s face lit up. “That’s the place where they turned a mansion into a restaurant, isn’t it?”
    I smiled. I figured she had heard of it. I said, “Yeah, that’s the one.” I was proud of my good choice of a first date.
    “Have you ever been there before?” she asked me.
    “I sure haven’t, but I always
wanted
to go there. Now I get the chance to do it with you.”
    “Dennis, you really didn’t have to do all this.” She seemed embarrassed by my hospitality.
    “But I wanted to,” I insisted. “Now get ready to enjoy yourself, because I put a lot of thought into this.” I damn sure wasn’t going to take her to some low-budget place to eat. I wanted the best, and I figured that The Retreat would represent success in black business.
    We got there and enjoyed the place and sucked in all of its elegance, but Denise seemed to be missing something. I could just feel it. She became too silent not to have things on her mind. The wisdom that age and experience gives you was beginning to kick in for me. You get a certain calmness that makes you feel you can tell what’s going on in a woman’s mind.
    I asked her, “So, what are you striving for now?” I wanted her to tell me that she needed something, or someone. Someone like me.
    “I’m just trying to maintain what I have, basically. I mean, we’re only human. All we can really do is strive to be better people.”
    “What if we never quite reach our goals, whatever they may be?” I asked for the hell of it. I just wanted to keep her talking to find out who she was and how she felt about things.
    “Well, in that case, I would ask, ‘How hard did you try?’ And if you gave it your all and still didn’t succeed, I’d tell you to come up with another game plan.”
    I smiled at her. I thought she was going to say that your all is the best you can do.
    Denise chuckled and proceeded to read my mind. “I get tired of people telling me they’ve done all that they can do. The truth is, many of us haven’t done
half
of what we can do. Everybody needs to push a little harder to accomplish their goals. That’s a major problem in society today; too many people are half-steppin’.
    “Like you, for instance,” she said to me. “Dennis, you could have taken me any place, worn whatever you wanted to wear, and spent a lot less energy on me, but you chose to do more, and I really do appreciate it. However, that still doesn’t mean that you’re gonna get under my dress anytime soon,” she told me with a grin.
    I laughed out loud. She was as honest as I was. “And that
is
the truth,” I admitted. What else could I say?
    She reached out and held my hand. “You know, it’s amazing how when people don’t get what they want the first time around, a lot of them just get sour and never put their hearts back into it. Because the bottom line is that we’re not gonna get everything we want
when
we want it. The world just doesn’t work that way.