Girls Like Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

flap the apron out and work at tyin’ it ’round my waist. I didn’t look at Ms. D. Then she step up and hug me ’round my shoulders. I stiff up and tears sting my eyes. I don’t like touching, that’s all.
    Ms. D. sigh and say, “Good luck, Quincy.” Then she left.
    I look up at the lady. “You want these onions chop, dice, or mince?”

After lunch, Miss Lizzy said I can have time to myself while she take a nap. Then we’ll do her exercise. Miss Lizzy told me her inside ear make her balance bad. That’s why she use her walker — so she don’t get dizzy and tump over. To help her get better, she does exercise. But she needs me to help her tie cheese. I didn’t say nothing. If Miss Lizzy think tying cheese will help her not be dizzy, then I’ll help her tie cheese.

I cut and chop and mince and dice and mix most of the morning, then I clean and sort stuff in the back. The work ladies, Ellen and Jen, tole me I was a good worker. Like that surprise me.
    I got some potatoes, leeks, cream, and a loaf of fresh French bread that been teasin’ my nose all day, charge them to Lizabeth, and head for home.
    The sacker with a long, greasy ponytail and skinny little beard look me over when I was checking out and made a snort in his nose.
    “They shore hiring ’em ugly lately,” he said.
    Shoot-a-goose, I be used to hearing stuff about my face. I pick up my sack and say, cool as you please, “Look like they hired ’em ugly before me too.”
    His neck turn red and he look at me real mean. “Bitch,” he say, real low, but he say it with a pop. It make me feel like he wanted to bite a hunk out of me. He had that evil face that Mama’s boyfriend had right before he grabbed up that brick.
    I turnt around and hurried out the store. Once I put enough geography between me and the store, I forgot that boy a little bit. I couldn’t let somebody scare me on my first day. When I got to the ’partment, Biddy was talking into her tape with door closed. I change clothes and took the groceries to Lizabeth’s. That girl been a cleaning fool. It was clean this morning, but now that kitchen sparkle and smell like — umm, sort of — a cool day after a rain shower. I couldn’t get a oven or a floor that clean if I work two weeks. The girl got herself a talent.
    I peel the potatoes and set ’em to boil, rub a wood bowl with garlic, mix up a salad, and slice my French bread. I set the table purty, and when the potatoes ready, I finish the soup and call the hogs to the trough.
    Biddy help Lizabeth to her chair, and they dip they spoons into the soup.
    “There’s grass in mine,” Biddy say.
    “Fool,” I say. “That’s a parsley sprig. It’s call a garnish. You don’t got to eat it.”
    “What’s it for, then?”
    I roll my eyes up and Lizabeth say, “It’s to make the soup attractive and give it a bit of extra flavor, Biddy. And, it shows us that Quincy sees her cooking as an art and that she’s proud of it.”
    I squint my eyes, trying to study if Lizabeth be making fun of me. Too soon to tell.
    “Quincy,” Lizabeth said, “this is a lovely soup and it’s so smooth.”
    “I run the potatoes and the cream through the blender before I add it to the white sauce in the pot,” I say. “I don’t like no chunks of potato lumping ’round in my soup.”
    “Yes, I prefer it this way too. It’s wonderful.”
    Biddy was lapping her soup and using her spoon like a shovel.
    Lizabeth look at Biddy, then over at me. She say this was a meal like a princess would eat, and we ought to pretend we in long dresses at a fancy dinner and use “company manners.”
    Biddy look up with her mouth open and half full of soup.
    Lizabeth talk on ’bout a princess would sit with her back straight and on the front of the chair. Lizabeth was already like that. Biddy hitch up her back and waggle her big ole butt forward.
    Lizabeth pick up her spoon and say that a princess hold her spoon pretty and dip it in the soup, and a princess would