Free The Long Good Boy by Carol Lea Benjamin Page B

she the one you need protection from. She a klepto. She steal easy as you breathe.”
    â€œWhat about the other one?”
    But the way their big feet ate up the distance between us, it was Alice, staring at me, who spoke next, not Chi Chi.
    â€œWho she?” Her wrist bent, one long, mahogany finger pointed in my direction. There was maroon polish on her nails, a white daisy painted near the tip.
    â€œDog groomer,” Chi Chi said. “She taking Clint, giving him the works, shampoo, plucking, nails. You got a problem with that?”
    Alice shrugged, pulled out a cigarette, fired it up with an expensive-looking lighter. “You got money for stuff like that, I got no problem with it. But I’m not the one you got to worry about, girl. Am I?”
    â€œYou shut up,” Chi Chi told her. “You don’t know as much as you think you do.”
    She made a big production about kissing Clint good-bye.
    â€œOther one’s Grace,” she whispered, her face half buried in the dog’s fur. “She new.” Then she turned her attention to Clint. “You be good,” she told him. “Don’t you bark and get her into trouble, you hear me?” Then, quietly: “Alice, she thinks she’s better than me, she on her own.” One look at my face, and she added, “She don’t have a pimp, out there with no one to watch her back, make sure she’s okay.” She shook her head, feeling sorry for poor Alice, then flapped the back of her hand at me, letting me know it was time for me to go. But I didn’t take her suggestion. I had something else in mind.

10
    I’m Saving Up, Grace Said
    â€œWhat you get for doing that?” Alice asked. “I’m thinking, down the road a few years, I’ll quit the life, do something else. It’s not that I don’t like the stroll. It’s fast and easy.” She put her arms out and shook her tits. “Nothing to it. But my counselor, he says I should think ahead, invest in my future. He suggested I consider selling beauty products, you know, door to door, like the Avon lady. I told him, I don’t know, I’m going to be on my feet all day, I might as well keep doing what I’m doing.” She poked at her hair, a puffy nest reaching skyward. “He says I need to get some job training, upgrade my skills.” This time she shook her ass and made obscene sounds with her mouth. “My skills among the best, I tell him. Don’t need no upgrading. You don’t believe me, try me out, I told him. If you think you can afford me on your salary.”
    Chi Chi leaned close. “Once she gets started, she never shuts up.”
    â€œThat pay good, what you do?” Alice asked. “Shampooing dogs, plucking?” She looked at Grace for approval, but Grace was on another planet. Grace was on fucking Mars. So Alice turned to Dashiell, staring, not the best idea in the world with a dog you’ve barely said howdy-do to, especially if it’s a male, all the more so if he’s a big one, and definitely if he’s sporting all the equipment the good Lord gave him in the first place.
    â€œHe bite?” She looked as if she’d been in more cars than Mario Andretti. “What you doing with him? He look pretty clean to me. He don’t need no plucking, do he?” She turned to Grace, who was picking at the skin around her press-on nails. “He don’t, don’t mean you don’t,” she said. “Look at your eyebrows, girlfriend, you growing a forest there, or what, the way they tryin’ to meet in the middle? You never heard of no electrolysis?” She turned to me now. Her eyebrows, I now noticed, were thin and arched, and she had no blue shadow of a beard. “You do that, too?” Then back to Grace: “They take that out, right up the middle, it never comes back.” She shook her head. “Least that’s what they tol’ me, and for