Travis waited patiently with the crowd of people gathered around the counter for his number to come up. Each time the number on the Now Serving sign changed, he’d look at his number and think, Damn, how long is this going to take? Finally his number appeared on the screen and he stepped up.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Yeah, let me have ten pounds of your tiger shrimp and two pounds of-Ouch!” Travis screamed as someone ran a shopping cart into the back of his ankle.
“Oh, I am so sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going,” the woman said.
“Well, maybe you should look,” Travis started to say angrily until he turned and saw her. She stood before him looking so innocent and very apologetic with a box of cereal in her hand. “That’s all right,” Travis said with a brand new attitude. “I shouldn’t have been in your way.” But in his mind all he could think was, My God, she is so beautiful.
“Say, you want ten pounds of your tiger shrimp and two pounds of what, sir?” the counter attendant said to snap Travis back to reality.
Travis turned to face the attendant. “That was two pounds of scallops, please,” Travis said quickly and turned back to the woman, but she was gone. He left the seafood counter and walked across the back of the store, looking down each aisle as he passed. “Where did she go so quick?”
Travis returned to the seafood counter to pick up his order and headed toward the front of the store. All the while he kept looking for her. Damn, Travis, the least you should have done was ask her name.
He searched up one aisle and down the next, but she was nowhere to be found. He finally gave up and went to the cashier. Travis paid for his items and headed out of the store to his car, still looking. He couldn’t get the picture of her out of his mind.
She was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. She stood about five feet seven inches tall, about 150 pounds, he guessed. She was dressed very conservatively in a blue pants suit and modest two-inch heels. And she had pretty feet; he loved a woman with pretty feet. Her skin was the color of coffee once the cream was added. Her hair was jet black and pulled back in a ponytail. She had very pretty eyes, even though she hid them behind small-framed glasses that sat on the end of her nose. The sound of her voice floated around in his mind as he drove home.
Oh, I am so sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.
Travis was hooked and he knew it. Only problem was, he didn’t know her name; he didn’t know where or how to find her; he didn’t know anything about her. He just had a picture of her that he couldn’t get out of his mind, and the sound of her voice rang continuously in his ears. He stopped at a red light and closed his eyes. Like a movie playing in his mind, he saw her standing there with that box of Special K in her hand. Oh, I am so sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going. The sound of horns honking behind him quickly brought Travis back and he drove on.
When Travis got back to his house, Jackie and Ronnie were not only there, they were inside the house waiting for him. That was cool, since they all had a key to each other’s houses.
He entered to find Ronnie in the dining room, seated at the table with an ounce of weed and four boxes of Phillies in front of him. “What’s up, Ronnie?” he asked.
“Yo! I was startin’ to wonder if you were comin’ back in time for tonight’s set.”
“Been back for a couple of hours,” Travis said as he put the beer in the cooler. “Just ran to the store to pick up some meat to throw on the grill. Where’s Jackie?”
“You know grill master Jay is outside firing up the grill.”
“Good. I wanted to talk to you alone,” Travis said. He had wondered how he was going to approach the subject with Ronnie. He didn’t want to come right out and say, “If you keep fuckin’ up, Freeze is going to kill you.” All that would do is make Ronnie want to confront Freeze, and that definitely wasn’t the way. Travis would have to find a less dramatic way to go about it.
“What’s up?” Ronnie asked as he continued to roll blunts.
Travis sat down at the table across from Ronnie and looked at his friend. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these last couple of days. Thinking about the how things went down in the jewelry store.”
“I kinda figured that was what this was all about, and before you say anything, I want you to know that I’m sorry. I lost my head and that will never happen again. Jackie was right, those extra fifteen seconds I spent kickin’ old boy in the face was the difference between us walking away with no problems and us havin’ to shoot it out with the rent-a-cops and gettin’ chased by the cops.”
“Not only that, it cost us big with Murray,” Travis added.
“Yeah, I know.” Ronnie laughed. “Now I got to be on a budget. Couldn’t get my after the job freak on the way I like to. Got to make this money last until the next job.”
“I been thinkin’ about that too.”
“You got something planned out already?”
“No. I been thinkin’ about gettin’ out,” Travis said.
“Hold up. You ain’t thinkin about quittin’ because I fucked up, are you?”
“It’s not just that, Ron. It’s a lot deeper than that. Maybe I’m slippin’. I should have had a contingency plan in place if anything went wrong while we were in the store. It wasn’t the tight timeline, it was my failure to plan for the manager having a weapon and include that in the timeline.”
“You ain’t still blamin’ yourself for that, are you? I’m tellin’ you the shit was my fault, plain and simple.”
“That and my lack of contingency planning once the alarm was triggered.”
“That shit went without saying. Get the shit as quick as we can and get the fuck out of there. It don’t get no clearer than that. We didn’t need no contingency plan for that.”
“Yes, Ronnie, we did. We need to have a plan in place to counter anything that could possibly happen.”
“Okay, I can see where you’re right about that. So what’s up, Travis? You in or out?”
“I’m still down. I don’t have enough money to retire. All I’m sayin is that I thought about it, and we-and that definitely includes my planning-need to tighten up.”
“Tighten up on what?” Jackie asked as she came in the house.
“Nothing, Jackie,” Travis said quickly, and Ronnie gave him a look.
“What’s up, Travis? I hope you got meat, ’cause the grill is hummin’.”
“It’s all in the kitchen waiting for you, Jackie,” Travis said.
“Travis talkin’ about quittin’, Jackie,” Ronnie said with an attitude.
“What?”
“That we need to tighten up,” Ronnie said, looking very seriously at Travis. It was obvious that he was angry and bitter about what he had just heard. “More to the point, I need to tighten up.”
“No, both y’all niggas need to tighten up. Ronnie, you need to stop your bullshit and stick to the plan. No deviation, just do what the plan calls for,” Jackie said. “Travis, you need to do a much better job at planning for contingencies. You got to have plan, and a contingency plan for that plan. And then you need contingency plan for that plan, just in case any one of us fucks it all up,” she said as she began to season the steaks.
Ronnie and Travis sat across from one another at the dining room table and stared. Other than the sound that Jackie was making in the kitchen, silence and tension filled the room. Ronnie extended his hand. Travis reached out and grabbed it. “You know, it’s funny, Travis. Jackie said exactly what you did, but I was mad at you for sayin’ it. All you were tryin’ to say is that we both need to tighten up, and I took it like you were just comin’ down on me. I’m sorry, man. I don’t know where my head was. Probably been smokin’ too many blunts. But I got it in check, Travis.”