"That'll be twenty-three ninety."
Michael smiled at the checkout counter girl and produced a battered wallet from his back pocket. He had a twenty and a five sitting right at the front of the wallet. If there were anyone else behind him, they would have seen that he had exactly enough money. If there had been anyone else in the store, they would have seen the reason he was taking so long at the checkout counter.
However, the family-run hardware store at the corner of Lafayette and Newport was never exactly "bustling" even on it's busiest days. Local handymen and shade-tree mechanics frequented the store enough to keep it not only afloat, but prosperous in a neighborhood whose storefronts were usually offering cheap liquor and lottery tickets.
Michael's father and uncles used to bring him here every Sunday. They'd work on cars in neighbors backyards, they'd work on friends roofs, they'd fix leaky faucets and replace cracked sinks all for little more than a thank you, a glass of cold lemonade (or hot cocoa depending on the weather), and occasionally a few crumpled dollar bills which usually didn't even cover the supplies needed to make the repair.
Michael's father and uncles did it because they were from a different era. A time when folks around this neighborhood took care of each other simply because they had the means. They were able to look at their neighbor struggling and, unable to escape the grim knowledge that it could very easily have been themselves on hard times, offer empathy and support.
Baldwin's Hardware always offered Michael's father and his uncles special prices...usually at or below cost. That was why they came here. Also, Mr. Baldwin, the original owner, had been something of a mentor to Michael's father and although he died before Michael could really come to think of him as a grandfather, he still felt like family around the store.
Even after going to school and getting an engineering degree, Michael spent his sundays as the neighborhood handyman. Not only did it earn him more invitations to Sunday dinners than Reverend Poole at First Baptist, but it also gave him the opportunity to really use what he'd learned. His rise through the ranks at Ford had been what people call "meteoric" and before he knew it, the joy of actually shaping metal with his bare hands was behind him. Now he led a team of eager young engineers who wanted to get where he was.
It was only on sundays that he got to really enjoy his work. Monday through Friday, he sat in his office, supervised, filled out forms, and struggled to stay interested in a job that had quickly lost a lot of it's original appeal.
The past few sundays though, Michael had been visiting the corner hardware store not out of tradition or loyalty to one of the few neighborhood business he still held in esteem, but because of the new clerk working the store's one and only cash register. Her name tag said Jada and Michael had a hard time reading it. Not because of the name tag so much as the swell of the breast beneath it.
Michael wasn't shy, but for some reason, the past two sundays the shop was busier than usual. He hadn't been able to catch her with a moment alone. Ironically, the first time he'd seen her the shop was as dead as it is now. She threw him a few inviting glances but he'd decided to play it smooth and seem uninterested. Now here it was nearly a month later and he wouldn't even know her name if it wasn't stamped in plastic and pinned to her dress two inches above her left nipple.
"Jada", assuming her name tag wasn't lying, was about six or seven inches shorter than Michael. Her skin was a buttery pale brown and freckled at her shoulders and in a fine spray across her nose. Her hair was done up in braids that fell between her shoulders in a thick cable. She was wearing a sun dress that, in the orange glare of the late afternoon, became transparent depending on where she was standing in relation to Michael and the store windows. What Michael could see of her figure hinted at firm, generous curves.
After lingering long enough over what was in his wallet to give impression that he was in no hurry to finish this transaction, but not so long as to give the impression that twenty-four bucks was a daunting sum, he pulled out the money and handed it over to Jada. He was thinking of the right way to break the ice. Trying to get to know a girl while she's working is tricky and depending on the girl, can be a surefire way to blow your shot. Michael was going over in his mind how he should approach her when she broke the ice.
"So, you fixing up your porch?"
"Why do you think it's a porch?"
Jada picked up a roll of wire mesh, the sort used to repair screen doors and enclosed porches. There was a picture of some smiling middle-aged man repairing a porch right on the packaging.
"Yeah, I'm fixing a porch, but it's not mine."
"Oh, whose is it then?"
"Are you from around here?"
"I grew up around here, just back from college."
"Well, there's a sweet old lady called Miss Mabel who likes to sit on her front porch with her cats. Some of 'em got out last summer through a hole in the screen. Since then, she's got strays coming in and out, some pregnant cats...it's a mess."
"How much are you charging her for all this?"
"Miss Mabel? I'm not charging her anything. She used to watch me and my brothers while my folks worked. She's just...you know...Miss Mabel. Everyone watches out for her."
At this, Jada just smiled and looked Michael up and down. He hadn't really expected to impress her with that though. It was well known that Miss Mabel had no family (that visited her at least) and as she got on in age, the neighbors...many of whom she'd baby-sat and fed when their own parents couldn't, took care of her in return. Taking care of Miss Mabel was as natural as brushing your teeth or showering in the morning.
"So, what are you doing when you finish with Miss Mabel?"
"I don't know actually. Probably heading home and cooking something up?"
