Every Woman's Dream by Mary Monroe

a few minutes so we can have a few margaritas. I only came here to pick up a bottle of tequila.” She faked a smile and held up a brown bag with a bottle in it and waved it in my face.
    â€œI’m listed in the telephone book if you ever want to call me sometime,” I told her.
    â€œThat’s good to know. I just might do that. Um, I’m glad we ran into one another. You take care of yourself, sugar. Have a blessed day!” She gave me another hug before she rushed out the door. She sprinted to the parking lot and got into a shiny black Town Car and sped off like a bat out of hell.
    Right after I cashed my check and got back outside, I pulled out my cell phone and called Joan. She answered right away.
    â€œI just ran into my other mother,” I told her, my voice cracking as I walked toward my house.
    â€œShirelle? Where?” she squealed.
    â€œShe was coming out of the convenience store on Grant Street. Guess what? She’s married to an architect. They have two little boys and she says she’s very happy.”
    â€œNo shit? A hoochie like Shirelle caught herself an architect? I’d sure like to know how she managed to pull that off! Let’s invite her to go have pizza or something. My treat. I’m dying to hear what-all she’s been up to.”
    â€œJoan, she met her husband on an Internet dating site. He’s in the Church, so she doesn’t want him to find out about her past. Because of that, she told me we shouldn’t keep in touch with one another.”
    â€œOh, well. It is what it is, I guess. So she found a husband in an online lonely hearts’ club, huh?”
    â€œI wouldn’t call the site she met her husband on a ‘lonely hearts club.’ She met him on a Christian dating site.”
    â€œWell, at the end of the day, all of the clubs on the Internet and in magazines are for people looking for love.” Joan snickered. “And money. Gotta run! Talk to you later.”
    â€œLater,” I mumbled, clicking my phone off and sliding it back into my purse.
    It made me sad to know that Shirelle didn’t want to have a relationship with me again, so I decided to put her out of my mind and forget about her. But I knew that if she ever changed her mind, I’d be eager to have her back in my life. In the meantime, I decided to focus on the “club” that I belonged to now.
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    The following Monday after school, Joan rented a small public-storage unit to hide some of the things we’d purchased. We made eight trips by bus and cab to the unit, carrying two shopping bags each that contained clothes, perfume, CDs, books, and other small items. We did it over a five-day period so nobody would notice. An hour after the last trip on the fifth day, we went shopping again and had to make another trip to the storage unit the same day. At the rate we were buying things, we were going to run out of space real soon.
    â€œWe’re going to need a much bigger place if we keep shopping so much,” I told Joan a week after she’d rented the storage unit. It was a Tuesday evening and hotter than usual for early October. We had both scored A’s on a math test that morning and had decided to celebrate with a nice dinner at Angelo’s Grotto, a very expensive Italian restaurant not far from downtown San Jose. “Between the two of us, we can easily afford an apartment. And it has to be one located in a neighborhood across town so we won’t run into anybody we know.”
    â€œLet me think about that,” she said. “We don’t need to get too carried away.”
    I tilted my head to the side and sucked on my teeth. “‘Carried away’? Duh? Don’t you think it’s a little late for you to be saying that? How much more ‘carried away’ can we get?”
    Joan huffed and gave me an impatient look. “I know that, so don’t even go there. We have enough to worry about. We