Free Social Blunders by Tim Sandlin

Pops.”
    Pretty effective. I wish a woman had been there to watch.

8
    Gilia Saunders was waiting at my car. She stood, blonde in the sunlight, holding a purse-like gym bag on her right arm, wearing a jean skirt and a short-sleeved shirt with no collar and an alligator over her left breast.
    “Men piss me off,” I said. “Anything they can’t control is a threat.”
    “You’ve been talking to Dad,” Gilia said.
    “Do you think I’m dressed like a rag picker? What the hell is a rag picker?”
    She studied me with that non-judgmental look on her face. She had the cheekbones and neck of an Indian. I was real aware that she was an inch or so taller than me, which put her around five eight, tall for a girl. She also had considerably better posture.
    “You are dressed casually,” she said.
    I had on a Wyoming Cowboys T-shirt and button-fly Wranglers. The T-shirt—jeans, too, for that matter—had seen better days. But I was raised to think men who care about what they wear are vain.
    She did this shrug thing with her shoulders that made the alligator jump out at me. “I don’t mind. I like a man with the confidence to look like a slob at the country club.”
    Mixed signals here. Was she implying she likes me or I’m a slob? Or both?
    “How was your swim?” I asked.
    “Two miles of backstroke. Then I came here for lunch, hoping I would run into you.”
    Holy shit, I was having a non-typical day. “How did you know I was here?”
    “Mom told me the men sent you a summons.”
    “And you were hoping to run into me?”
    She nodded, but didn’t explain why she was hoping to run into me. She leaned the bag on one hip and stood with her shoulders square to the Dodge. She seemed to expect me to talk, only I couldn’t know what to say until I knew why she was here.
    To move the conversation along, I said, “Gilia’s a flower.”
    “You got it.”
    She put a hand on the chrome trim on top of the Dart. Her fingers were long and large boned, like her hips and knees. Four fingernails were shiny perfect—Mary Kay showpieces—but the index finger fingernail was torn short and ragged.
    “Could we go somewhere and talk?” she asked. “Dad might see us here. He wouldn’t like it.”
    “You want to talk to me?”
    “Why not?”
    ***
    We got in the car and I drove us to a city park. It was only a block-long grassy place astride a stagnant creek filtering down a weedy ditch. On the far end a couple of unattended children played on a wooden merry-go-round. I parked where we could watch the children but not be expected to run rescue on a skinned knee.
    Gilia scooted away and leaned against the far door. “Do you ever feel like you’re the only one left speaking the language you speak?” she said. “Everybody in the world knows words you don’t know.”
    I could tell this woman wasn’t into small talk. “Sometimes I can’t process waitresses or store clerks.”
    She nodded eagerly. “Exactly. It’s like the syllables are jumbled and I’ve lost the decoder ring.”
    “I don’t understand the relationship here. Am I supposed to treat you like a woman I would enjoy talking to, or a possible sister?”
    “Don’t you talk to your sister?”
    “I never had a sister, although my mom was more a sister than mother.”
    “I have two brothers.”
    “Actually, she was more a bad baby-sitter than a sister or mother.”
    “One of my brothers is Southern macho and the other’s a brat.”
    “I met the brat. He thought I was Jehovah’s Witness.”
    “That’s Bob. Ryan is the Southern macho. He lifts weights and watches TV sports and says ‘Bitchin’ when Mom isn’t around. I don’t understand how I’m your possible sister. Katrina Prescott didn’t explain and Mom wouldn’t stop crying, but it seems like either my dad is your dad or he isn’t.”
    “Is your mother Skip Prescott’s sister?”
    “How’d you know?”
    I ran a relationship chart in my head. “That means you might be my sister, but it’s