in her flash of dark hair and eyes. Yep, it was pretty damn funny.
"Hey," Rose laughed, "there’s a call-in game I play at the radio station."
"A game." Angela looked like she was trying to remember what that was.
Rose pointed at Angela. "If we were the three stooges who would you be?"
"The youngest one." Angela seemed prepared to deny that she was a decade older than Rose.
Rose held her hands up as if conceding youth to her. "Angela gets to be, um, Shemp? How about you, Hattie?"
"Oh," she sat back, not sure she could recall any stooges. Everyone knew, didn’t they? It would surely be on a test of cultural literacy. She must know at least one of them.
Rose bounced a bit in her seat. "I’d be Larry. I mean great hair, huh?"
She thought she could summon up a picture of orange clown hair, but she wasn’t sure she’d gotten it right. "Who was the one in the glasses?"
"Glasses?" Rose looked confused.
Angela waved at the waiter as he slowly made his way around the bar. "That's Mr. Magoo, Hat."
"Mr. Magoo?" Rose laughed. "Hattie, you're funny. That's on, like, the Cartoon Network."
Hattie sighed. Mr. Magoo, she knew that one. He’d been so great, hadn’t he? Awkward, bumbling, but everything had turned out perfectly for him in the end.
"Fuck." Angela yelled and the waiter, finally arrived, backed up a step. She turned to Rose. "Mr. Magoo’s on cable?"
"Well, yeah," Rose’s eyes widened, "where else would he be?"
Angela turned to the waiter, "double espresso," then back to Rose. "What is the fucking world coming to? Mr. Magoo was a Saturday morning staple. He's only a re-run now?"
"What are kids watching these days?" Hattie hoped her casual question would turn the conversation to something less volatile than Mr. Magoo.
"These days?" Angela searched around the café. "These days? I love ya, Hat, and never say these days again." She leaned across the table toward Rose. "She needs encouragement, you know?"
Rose tipped her head side to side as if reluctant to concede the truth of it. "She’s pretty. Just kinda…" Hattie felt Rose study her braid, her coat, the sweater peeking out. "Kinda beige."
Angela waved her finger at Rose. "That's been my point forever. She's fabulousness, underdeveloped." Angela turned, and Hattie felt the same critical eye she’d received from Rose. She vowed then and there to be more respectful of every creature she trapped under her microscope.
The clink of china brought Angela’s attention back to the table, and Hattie noted that the waiter had been wise enough to deliver the espresso and head straight back behind the bar. She could fit back there. She considered for a moment crawling under the table but the image of getting tripped up in the ties of her raincoat stopped her.
Angela reached for the shot of espresso and slammed the small cup’s worth of caffeine, "I’ve told her to relax." She shoved the empty cup to the middle of the table. "But what magic can one woman do?"
Rose grinned. "Half as much as she can with help."
Angela leaned towards Rose and whispered. "She’s thirty-five."
"Thirty-four-and-a-half." She began to defend herself and then remembered. "So are you."
Angela shrugged. "But I don't care."
Hattie felt sympathy radiating from the Rose's lovely, unlined face and feared the sympathetic hand pat. It was worse when Rose sighed and tried to help. "You’ll meet somebody, you know, fall in love? It’ll happen for you, Hattie. Gosh, I’d think you’d trust in nature."
What could she even say to that? She sipped her coffee, already too cool. There were small windows of opportunity for everything. "Falling in love, Rose, is the very opposite of nature."
"Yeah, right." Rose grabbed another packet of sugar, stopped. "Oh, you’re serious."
"We're not intended, biologically speaking, to live happily ever after."
Angela shook her head. "Dr. Bug's not moving back to Seattle?"
Hattie felt a twinge of pain when she confirmed with a head shake that no, the entomologist she'd had a theoretical relationship with was not literally returning to her. "But we're talking pure biology right now, and it's fighting nature itself to try and stay together. A man's biological goal is to," she cleared her throat, "reproduce with a variety of women."
Angela flicked her long nails as if waving off a fly. "Men are put on this planet to spread their sperm from sea to shining sea. Ward Cleaver, and a couple of those TV dads, were the only notable exceptions."
"But if Ward Cleaver was alive, and he really stayed faithful, he’d still be driven to