Free Seen It All and Done the Rest by Pearl Cleage

I remembered that when she bought the place, black folks weren’t allowed to buy these houses.
    As I sat there, sipping my espresso and getting my bearings, the door opened and a woman entered in a long, dark green skirt, a bright orange shawl, and a pair of hot pink Chinese slippers with roses embroidered on each toe. Her short, curly hair was pulled away from her face and behind her, she trailed the faintest scent of patchouli.
    “Good morning, Miss A,” Henry said as she stepped up to the counter. “The usual?”
    “Good morning, Henry. Thank you.”
    The woman looked to be about my age, give or take a year or two, and something about her looked so familiar I almost smiled and said good morning. Did I know her? I grew up in Atlanta, but I almost never see anybody from those days on my infrequent visits and when I do, I can’t hardly ever remember their names. What did the
A
stand for?
    “You two settle the season yet?” she said, her voice teasing the two at the counter who had nodded their good mornings when she first came in. Their discussion seemed to have ended in a draw that didn’t please either one and they were sulking.
    “This Negro doesn’t know a good first baseman from a hole in the ground,” said the one with the houndstooth jacket.
    The one in the stingy-brim hat just snorted and rolled his eyes. “At least I know what a shortstop does.”
    Henry chuckled as he expertly added a sprinkle of cinnamon to the takeout cup of cappuccino, which must have been “the usual.”
    “Don’t get them all riled up again, Miss A,” Henry said. “They’re running my customers away with all that mess.”
    She laughed, a sweetly musical sound, as Henry handed her a cup with a cardboard sleeve so it wouldn’t be too hot on her walk to wherever she was going. Was it Anna? Adelaide? Ava? Abbie?
Abbie!
Could this be Abbie from D.C.? How long had it been since I’d seen her? Twenty years? Thirty? Was it Amsterdam? Paris? She looked almost exactly the same as I remembered her and she still smelled like patchouli, which was always her trademark scent.
    “Sorry about that,” she said, handing over five dollars and declining her change. “I thought you two had called a truce.”
    “Ain’t nobody studying you, Henry,” the slightly older man said.
    “Besides,” said the one with the hat, turning fully toward Abbie with a twinkle. “We only come in here to wish you good day, Miss Abbie, and you know that!”
    It was her! Abbie Browning, live and in living color. What the hell was she doing in West End?
    “Mr. Charles, does your wife know you’re out here flirting so early in the morning?”
    “No, and don’t you tell her,” he said, holding up his hands in mock terror. “That woman ain’t got no sense of humor when it comes to me.”
    “She married you, didn’t she?” the other one said. “How much more sense of humor she gotta have?”
    Henry laughed at that and so did Abbie.
    “What do you hear from Hamilton?” Mr. Charles said.
    “The song is done and Gina said it’s a shoo-in to win the Carnival competition.”
    The two men nodded in unison and smiled as if hearing that a favorite nephew had just been accepted to college.
    “We ought to go down there for the show and surprise them,” Mr. Charles said.
    The other one rolled his eyes again. “That would surprise them all right. Two old fools trying to keep up with the young folks.”
    Abbie shook her head. “It’s not like that, Mr. Eddie. Everybody goes to Carnival. Old people, young people. The streets are full of all kinds of people dancing and singing and drinking that Trinidadian beer they buy off the trucks. What’s it called?”
    She looked at Henry, but he just chuckled and patted his ample belly. “Last time I went to Carnival people were still calling me
Slim.
The only thing I remember is all the beautiful girls.”
    Mr. Eddie poked his friend. “Then Charlie ain’t gotta worry about going. Iona ain’t takin’ him no place