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right yet unpopular.   Knowing that she’d ultimately done the best thing but immediately inconvenienced herself.  
    I didn’t know exactly where   Deniessa   stood on all the hot dating issues, but I’d cut off sex altogether when I put my foot down on the kind of mess that I would no longer accept in my life. The vow to become celibate seemed overwhelming at first. After years of sexual activity, celibacy felt as if I were giving up womanhood itself.
    “I think I can relate to at least part of what you’re going through,” I shared with her. “Peaches, you remember when we first started talking about celibacy? That was what—two or three years ago?”
    Peaches nodded. I faced   Deniessa. “Girl, I thought I was going to fall out on the floor at the thought of celibacy. I had that booty-call phonebook right in my nightstand. I mean, I had some top performers on standby, okay?”
    “Well, I wasn’t getting any to begin with, so it wasn’t a problem for me.” Peaches pursed her lips. We laughed at Peaches as she continued with her testimony. “After I had Eric, I closed up the shop. Twenty hours of labor will do that for   ya, you know?”
    “Ooh, please, not the twenty hours again,” I begged her.
    “I cannot wait until you give birth.” She eyed me. “I am going to record every single hour of it.”
    The finale for the evening was dinner, which we made together in the kitchen. We prepared spaghetti, corn, garlic bread, and Peaches’ marvelous Caesar salad. I tried to see what she had going into that salad, but she brought the ingredients in a brown paper bag and refused to let us in on her secret recipe.
    “Get back.” She threatened with the tongs.
    “I’ve got my eye on you,”   Deniessa   told her.
    “You’re about to have these   tongs   on you.” Peaches waved them around and turned her back to us again, hunching her shoulders over her corner of counter space.
    I don’t know why we tried to eat while we were talking. It was a miracle that none of us choked on anything, as much as we laughed about life and work as black women in turn-of-the-century America.   Deniessa   told us how she almost got into it with a woman at   Walmart.
    “So I was in the express line and the sister in front of me has, I know, a good forty items in her basket. This white lady behind me said something about counting items and reading signs, but the sister in front of me thought   I’d   said it,”   Deniessa   clarified.
    “Next thing I knew, she was like, ‘You got something to say, you need to say it in my face.’ I just kind of smiled and told her that I didn’t have anything to say. The white woman behind me who   really   said it was as quiet as a mouse. I don’t think she meant for her comment to be heard. If I had told that sister in front of me that it was the white woman behind me who’d said it, it would have been all over in that store.”
    “I bet she’ll think about that the next time she’s   standin’ behind a black woman in the express line,” I smirked, climbing onto my racial soapbox. “White folks could stay out of a whole lot of trouble if they would just keep their opinions to themselves. They always got somethin’ to say, but when somebody checks them on it, they get scared.”
    “That’s true,”   Deniessa   agreed, “but sister-girl was wrong for having forty items in the checkout lane. You know,   we   can be pretty bad about following directions sometimes.”
    “Girl”—Peaches raised her hand to tell us a tale of woe about her world in human resources—“I was training one of the H-R representatives last week, and we sat down with a brother who didn’t realize he was making almost fifty cents an hour less than his manager told him he would be making. He had worked   six months   without ever sitting down with his paycheck and a calculator to make sure he was actually making seven twenty-five per hour. I couldn’t believe it. Girl,