The Wisdom of Hair by Kim Boykin Page A

juice for wine. Sara Jane made the real thing with orange and lemon slices. She even brought a jar of maraschino cherries from the Red & White for our drinks. I took another sip of the cold, sweet wine and nipped a cherry off at the stem.
    “Oh, my.” She stared at the yardman, her hand resting on her heart.
    I popped the stem in my mouth and propped up on my elbows just in time to see the yardman taking his shirt off. I worked the stem around as I watched the muscles in his belly and his arms ripple each time he turned the mower. He never looked at us, just kept to his work like we weren’t even there, which kind of reminded me of Winston. I was trying hard not to think about him.
    “You think he’s good-looking?” I showed Sara Jane the perfect knot in the stem.
    “Uh-huh, don’t you?”
    “He’s all right.” She looked at me like I had cussed her mother. “I’m sorry, Sara Jane. I guess he’s cute. I really didn’t get a good look at his face, but he does have a nice body.”
    By the time he got to the side yard, he was cutting his eye around at her every time he turned the mower around in the opposite direction. After that, I don’t think she heard a word I said, and it wasn’t because of the mower.
    Sara Jane had a sultry power about her that was growing with each turn of that mower, so that by the time Jimmy was done, she had him sipping sangria right along with us.
    “It’s hot.” He downed the glass in a few seconds. “Real hot.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Thanks.” He set the glass down.
    “Want some more?”
    “Better not. I’ve got two more yards to cut.” And then he looked at her sexy little pout. “Oh, what the hell.”
    He included me in the conversation as far as asking my name and where I was from. The rest of the time, he sat at the foot of Sara Jane’s lounge chair. By the time their conversation was over, they had planned a date and he had rubbed baby oil on her back and the backs of her legs. I felt like I was at a peep show.
    “Jimmy,” she sighed.
    “Well, it ain’t Lex or Darren, but I guess he was nice.”
    “You guess?”
    “Well, Sara Jane, he said ‘Hey’ to you and it was all over after that. It was like I wasn’t even here.”
    Some clouds rolled in like there might be an afternoon shower, so we decided to go inside. Between the time we pulled up our bathing suit straps and packed up, she said five, maybe six words to me and she hadn’t looked at me once. I stored our lounge chairs under my bed.
    “I’m sorry, Sara Jane. I know I’m jealous. You see a man, offerhim a glass of sangria, and the next minute you have a date with him. I want Winston so bad and slave over a hot stove to prove it, and he doesn’t even know I exist.”
    She gave me that sexy little all-knowing grin. “Maybe you need to offer Winston something sweet.”

8

    Sara Jane made a D+ on the next test. Both of us were proud, like she had just won the Nobel Prize for hair. I’d figured out a way to help her memorize facts she thought she could never remember, like the names of frontal facial muscles, by turning anatomy into a trashy romance. One muscle was the heroine, another the hero, and nerves and sinus cavities were the villains. Smaller, less significant muscles were the servants or animals. I swear, if Mrs. Cathcart had written that test the way Sara Jane learned it, I know she would have made an A+.
    She brought some steaks over and some more Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, which had kind of become our drink of choice. Actually it was the only one we could buy at our age, except for beer, which was only good for boiling shrimp. I baked three potatoes and tried to roast sweet corn on the little hibachi, but I forgot to soak it first. Neither one of us was watching the grill and the silkscaught on fire. I beat them with an old wet dishrag, threw the smoldering ears in the trash, and put some salad in cereal bowls. It was a great dinner. Sara Jane said Winston would probably march right over