After voting, Henry and Grace walked the three blocks to the Blue Coyote Café. It had been several years since they’d last been there. Henry’s heart attack. His knee. Covid. He was healthy now, more or less, but his running days were over.

The Café looked pretty much the same, but their favorite chairs, the one under the picture of the lovely brownie with a bite taken out of it, were occupied. And the brownie picture was gone. Nothing in its place. Grace found them another set of chairs across the way and went to place their order while Henry sat.

Not long later Grace returned carrying two green teas. “I almost ordered you a muffin,” she told Henry. “To celebrate our return—but so much sugar.”

Henry nodded. “Thanks for the thought.”

“Oh, I would have bought the muffin anyway, your favorite, the cranberry pumpkin, but they’d just sold the last one.” She nodded toward the chairs opposite them.

The woman was young and attractive. She had orange-red hair in wild ringlets. The guy was a little older and wore a hat. Henry watched the woman bending over the little table between the two chairs. Probably she was slicing the muffin. Her skirt was quite short. She had nice legs. Henry could almost see her ass.

“All those judges,” Grace said. “Whew!”

“I skipped them,” Henry said. “Who am I to judge?”

“A voter,” Grace declared.

“Yeah, but does it make sense to vote for someone you know nothing about?”

“It’s up to you to become informed.”

“I’m sure they all get their sixty percent approval,” Henry said. “Do you know any judges?”

“No. Do you?”

Henry wiggled his lips. “Not really. When I was in second grade a girl’s father was a judge. At recess one of the guys teased her that her dad was bald. I guess they were having some kind of spat, and he called her dad a penis head. She told him that her dad was a judge and he’d put this boy in prison and throw away the key.”

“Bald men are supposed to be more virile,” Grace commented.

Henry looked across the way at the couple, the man with the hat, the woman with the short skirt. She was sitting now, and he wondered if at a lower angle he could see her muff.

“Now that I think about it, the girl’s name was Mary Wiener. Maybe that’s why the guy joked about her dad. Maybe he wasn’t bald at all.” If the girl would only cross her legs, Henry thought.

“Grade school kids can be cruel,” Grace said.

Henry nodded. The girl across the way glanced at him, took a bite of muffin, and held Henry’s eyes as she swallowed. Her tongue swiped her upper lip. Henry looked down.

Grace said, “In junior high there was this Japanese girl. She said ‘erection’ instead of ‘election.’ The boys teased her about it. The girls too. Maybe I was one of them, at least in my mind.”