Willie Bea and Jaybird

When Willie Bea first saw Jaybird in The Place, she couldn't help herself. She wanted him so bad she sucked in her bottom lip, cracked with the cold, then she ran her tongue so slowly over her top lip that she could taste the red Maybelline lipstick she had put on hours before. He looked like something that would be good to eat, like peach cobbler or a hot piece of buttered cornbread. She had just entered the bar clutching her black purse under her arm and smiling to try to make herself look attractive among the 6 o'clock crowd of drinkers and dancers and socializers, every one of them glad to be done with work for the day. He was there at the end of the bar in his golden Schlitz uniform sharing a quart of Miller High Life beer with a buddy. Willie Bea noticed right away how he leaned his long frame clear across the bar, bent at the waist, his elbows resting easily on the Formica counter. There didn't seem to be a tense bone in his lean efficient body. "He look like he could go anywhere in the world," Willie Bea thought as she followed her big-butt friend Patricia as she weaved her way to a nearby table already jammed with four of her friends, two men, two women. "If somebody put him in a white jacket and a flower in his buttonhole, he could pass for an actor in a Technicolor movie." As the juke box started up again, playing a driving Sam and Dave number, he looked around the bar, picked up his glass of beer and headed toward her table with his chin held high over the other patrons. When he smoothly pulled up a chair to her table and straddled it backwards, Willie Bea crossed her stick legs and pinched her friend Pat's thigh under the table to give her some Sen-Sen for her breath. "Hey, Little Mama, you got time for a tired working man?" She had to remember to wipe the uncomfortable moisture from the corners of her mouth with her fingertips before she could respond to him. She still felt that way, four years after they had started going together, when she looked at him. Nothing gave her more pleasure than to be asked her marital status with Jaybird around. "Willie Bea, girl, where you been keeping yourself?" some big-mouthed woman would shout at her over the din of the jukebox at The Place. "I ain't seen you in a month of Sundays. You still living with your aunt, ain't you?" This last expectantly with pity. Willie Bea would roll her shoulders and dip her ears from side to side a couple of times in feigned modesty. "Naw, girl, I been moved out of my aunt's," Willie Bea would answer. "I'm married now. I live with my ... husband."