Free Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do by Pearl Cleage

who is so plugged in to the good in people that evil never occurs to her.
    “The worst,” I said, grinning at the accuracy of her musical assessment. “I hope he keeps his day job.”
    She laughed. “I think this is his day job!”
    She picked her way out of the collards, shifted the harvested bundle to the crook of one arm, and held out her hand. She was wearing gardening gloves with the fingers cut off. “I'm Flora Lumumba. Downstairs, right.”
    “Regina Burns,” I said. “I just moved in upstairs.”
    “Aretha told me. You get settled in okay?”
    I nodded. “Are you responsible for these beautiful collard greens?”
    “I don't know how beautiful they are this time of year,” she said, smiling. “This is the last of the lot. But wait until July. Nobody can touch these gardens in the summer.”
    “I'd like to see that.”
    “You will,” she said, still smiling.
    My stomach growled to remind me I had been on my way to lunch. The idea of company suddenly appealed to me.
    “I'm going to grab some lunch,” I said. “Would you like to join me?”
    “I'd love to,” she said. “Come on in while I put these greens away. Have you been to Soul Vegetarian yet?”
    “I haven't been anywhere yet.”
    “If you don't need meat, Soul Veg is great, and it's only a couple of blocks.”
    “Sounds great.”
    I followed her into her apartment, a cozy, colorful nest with lots of pillows, lots of books, and a couple of baskets of knitting sitting beside a comfortable chair in front of the TV. There were some very healthy house plants around, including one exotic flowering beauty that I couldn't identify. There were framed travel posters on the wall, featuring the kind of sparkling blue water and white sand beaches that make you leave home in the first place, looking for paradise three days and two nights at a time.
    When we walked in, Erykah Badu was on the CD player telling her clueless boyfriend he better call Tyrone. Flora laughed and turned it down a little.
    “That song cracks me up. ‘But you can't use my phone,’” she sang along and laughed again, dropping the greens in the sink and spraying them lightly with cold water. “These young girls are fearless. When I listen to the music my daughter, Lu, listens to, I understand why they talk so much stuff !”
    “How old is your daughter?”
    “Eleven going on thirty,” she said, rolling her eyes and reaching for a photograph on the front of the refrigerator. The picture showed a laughing young girl making rabbit ears behind the head of a man who was standing beside her wearing a father's indulgent grin. “She'd kill me for telling you this, but she started her period today.”
    “Congratulations,” I said. “Or should I be saying that to her?”
    She shook her head, grinning. “Who knows? This is a first for me. Other than my own, of course.”
    “Where is she?”
    “At school! When she called to tell me, I asked her if she wanted me to come and get her and she said no. She got a pad from one of her girlfriends.”
    The girl in the photograph looked like a little kid to me, but now she was a little kid capable of having a kid. It struck me that men bond over contests where one dominates the other, directly or through the NFL surrogates. We bond over the things that define our lives as women: our periods, our pregnancies, our men, our children.
    “So how does it feel to have a daughter who's almost grown?”
    “A little intimidating,” Flora said, shaking the greens and covering them with paper towels to absorb some of the moisture. “But you know who's not going to be ready for this at all?”
    “Who?”
    “Her dad. That's him in the picture with her. He thinks she's going to be his baby girl forever.”
    Lu's father was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a ruddy complexion and a large old-fashioned afro that framed his face in a perfect circle of sandy-colored hair.
    She had inherited her father's complexion and her mother's smile.
    “Are you