No. 17
"I use to be pretty," said Granny, "not that you'd ever believe it," and she held up her hand in my face when I tried to protest. "You don't have to say anything. And my hair! I bet you wouldn't believe that I almost was hired for a shampoo commercial. The people said they'd never seen anyone with the kind of sheen I had in my hair, especially for someone with light brown hair. Light brown hair usually doesn't do much of anything. But I was eating back then. I think it was the nuts. They say peanut oil has a lot of vitamin E."

Was that so, I thought. My hair was starting to thin on top and I wasn't ready to reach for the Rogaine. Maybe I should eat more nuts. "So what happened?"

"I can't wash it, brush it, so I just keep it braided down my back. But it's so dirty, it weighs two tons. I can hardly hold my head up."

"No, I mean about the commercial. For shampoo."

"Oh, that," she laughed. "They hired someone else. And you know what? She scrunched up her face. "That girl hardly had any sheen. She and the photographer were sleeping together."

"Sometimes that happens," I began, wanting to say something to Granny about bum breaks. I kept feeling I had to be nice to her to help make up for society's injustices.

"But that's the way my luck has been. Never knew my father. My mother went crazy by the time I was ten. Not that I really could tell the difference. It was all crazy. I thought that was the way everything was. You could say that these past two years on the streets have been my most sane."

I could tell this was going to be an all-nighter. "What do you mean?"

"You're not interested."

"Why do you say that?"

"You're just being nice. I'm not going to sleep with you. Now don't think just because you're listening to me..."

"I'm not the least bit interested in sleeping with you. First of all, I've got at least four hours of work I still have to do. And second of all, we're on a project together, which means we can't sleep together."

"Why?"

I stumbled for an answer. "Because it's unethical."

"Oh," she said, folding her hands into a neat pile on her lap and looking more relaxed. "So what do you do?

"I'm a programmer," I said.

"TV? Radio?"

"No, I program languages. Like XML."

"What about XXL?"

"Do you program also?"

"That's my t-shirt size." Oh, by the way," she said, "I lied to you before. It wasn't peanuts that gave my hair that sheen. It was rosemary oil."

Rosemary oil. I made a note to ask her tomorrow where I could buy the stuff. If my hair had more sheen, it might help to make up for everything else it was missing. "Good night," I said.

"Good night," she chirped back, and shook out a sleeping bag from somewhere inside her shopping bag upon my old couch.