Page 53 of Road Queens
“Having met every person involved in that fracas—”
“‘Fracas’?” Amanda said, delighted. “I only get to hear that word when I use it.”
“—nothing in that story surprised me.”
“How about this, then?” She fussed with the old-fashioned bulletin board behind the register, took out pins and put them in different spots, moved the calendar out of the way, and from underneath it all, she extracted a photo, turning it around to show him.
He took it, looked at it. Grinned. “Oh, my.”
“That right there is a photo that drips eroticism.”
“That was my first thought too,” he replied with an admirably straight face.
It was a snap from their first Halloween, taken about eight months after they’d bonded over Manners and his penchant for loogies. By then,they were too old for trick-or-treating (the realization of which is one of the saddest days in a kid’s life) but never too old for costumes.
Sidney was dressed as Anna Wintour. Who knew she’d grow to love hate-readingVogueso much that she glommed all Cassandra’s back copies? Cassandra went as Sally Halterman, and Amanda was in a head-to-toe Jersey cow costume complete with bright-pink udders.
Sean tapped the picture. “This should be blown up to poster size, copied, and mounted in every room in this building.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, pal. I spent the whole night running around saying, ‘My eyes are uphere.’”
He handed it back. “Wish I could’ve been there.”
“You do? Why?”
He didn’t hear the question, or ignored it. “Who’s Cassandra dressed as?”
“Sally Halterman, the first woman to get a motorcycle license in DC.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Uh-huh. She was a four-foot-eleven, eighty-eight-pound spark who wasn’t having any sexist nonsense. And she’d been riding nearly a decade before she decided she should get a permit.”
“I’m sure that went smoothly.”
“Alas, the man—of course a man—decided she shouldn’t have one. Not that there was a law against women motorcyclists—there wasn’t. But the cop giving her the exam thought there should be.”
“Is this a good time to throw in hashtag ‘not all cops’?”
“Hush. Anyway, the cop first insisted she was too small. Then he decided—though she was pushing thirty, which, in 1937, was like pushing, I dunno, one hundred?—anyway, he decided she was too young. He looked forward to failing her; except she passed the written exam. Twice.
“So the way she explained it—I’m paraphrasing here—‘I passed the written examination ... twice. The first time I got eighty, but thatwasn’t good enough for him, so I took it again and got ninety-two, and when that didn’t satisfy him, I got my lawyer.’”
“Ha!”
“This should have settled things, except it was 1937, so the cop tried a few more ploys to deny her a lawful license. In the end, he not only passed her, he had to admit, ‘Lady, you handle it as well as a man could.’
“Anyway, I told Sidney and Cass all about her, so that was Cassandra’s costume that year. And the next. And the next.”
“But why d’you keep the picture buried on a bulletin board? Never mind,” he added kindly. “I know why.”
“Yeah, yeah, because you’re a former copanda telepath.”
“All former cops are telepaths,” he replied with a straight face.
“Anyway. We met, we clicked, we bonded, shit happened, the end. None of which is any of your business.”
“Debatable,” he acknowledged.
