Hattie jumped at the familiar voice and turned to Angela, standing armored in full make-up with briefcase in hand. A warrior aphid. But maybe even warrior aphids could be distracted. "Hey, Angela, we were just talking about Rose's artwork."

Angela dropped her case and waved toward the painting. "Not bad." She flicked maroon fingernails through her short dark hair. "But you should work with some quality." She reached up and snapped the bottom of the plastic shade. "You're better than this."

Hattie took a deep breath, prepared to soften Angela's criticism, but was jostled as Angela slammed into the booth and extended her hand to Rose. "Angela."

"Rose." Rose smiled and Hattie considered that Angela's oddly given praise had reached its target after all.

"Rose works at the university radio station."

"Don't worry," Angela faced Rose, "I'm not holding you responsible for Biological Mishaps."

Rose pushed her cup aside and leaned her forearms on the table, watching Angela like she was the best show in town. "You're a friend of Hattie's?"

"Met in college." Angela waved her arm at the waiter, her silk suit moving like dark water over her shoulder. "Espresso." The waiter flinched behind the bar, and she turned back to Rose. "Pretty damn funny, huh?"

Rose nodded hard enough to shift her coffee cup over half an inch. "Yeah, I mean you both came from work--"

Angela raised her hand, "medical rep. Come sleet and snow and rain and rashes, everybody needs drugs."

"So..." Rose waved her hand between them, and Hattie could see what it would look like from across the booth. Hattie knew she was too tall, too pale, too light brown everywhere including, she looked down, coat, sweater, pants, and life. Angela had always been petite but giant in her flash of dark hair and eyes. Yep, it was pretty damn funny.

"Hey," Rose laughed, "there's a call-in game I play at the radio station."

"A game." Angela looked like she was trying to remember what that was.

Rose pointed at Angela. "If we were the three stooges who would you be?"

"The youngest one." Angela seemed prepared to deny that she was a decade older than Rose.

Rose held her hands up as if conceding youth to her. "Angela gets to be, um, Shemp? How about you, Hattie?"

"Oh," she sat back, not sure she could recall any stooges. Everyone knew, didn't they? It would surely be on a test of cultural literacy. She must know at least one of them.

Rose bounced a bit in her seat. "I'd be Larry. I mean great hair, huh?"

She thought she could summon up a picture of orange clown hair, but she wasn't sure she'd gotten it right. "Who was the one in the glasses?"

"Glasses?" Rose looked confused.

Angela waved at the waiter as he slowly made his way around the bar. "That's Mr. Magoo, Hat."

"Mr. Magoo?" Rose laughed. "Hattie, you're funny. That's on, like, the Cartoon Network."

Hattie sighed. Mr. Magoo, she knew that one. He'd been so great, hadn't he? Awkward, bumbling, but everything had turned out perfectly for him in the end.

"Fuck." Angela yelled and the waiter, finally arrived, backed up a step. She turned to Rose. "Mr. Magoo's on cable?"

"Well, yeah," Rose's eyes widened, "where else would he be?"

Angela turned to the waiter, "double espresso," then back to Rose. "What is the fucking world coming to? Mr. Magoo was a Saturday morning staple. He's only a re-run now?"

"What are kids watching these days?" Hattie hoped her casual question would turn the conversation to something less volatile than Mr. Magoo.

"These days?" Angela searched around the cafe. "These days? I love ya, Hat, and never say these days again." She leaned across the table toward Rose. "She needs encouragement, you know?"

Rose tipped her head side to side as if reluctant to concede the truth of it. "She's pretty. Just kinda..." Hattie felt Rose study her braid, her coat, the sweater peeking out. "Kinda beige."

Angela waved her finger at Rose. "That's been my point forever. She's fabulousness, underdeveloped." Angela turned, and Hattie felt the same critical eye she'd received from Rose. She vowed then and there to be more respectful of every creature she trapped under her microscope.

The clink of china brought Angela's attention back to the table, and Hattie noted that the waiter had been wise enough to deliver the espresso and head straight back behind the bar. She could fit back there. She considered for a moment crawling under the table but the image of getting tripped up in the ties of her raincoat stopped her.

Angela reached for the shot of espresso and slammed the small cup's worth of caffeine, "I've told her to relax." She shoved the empty cup to the middle of the table. "But what magic can one woman do?"

Rose grinned. "Half as much as she can with help."

Angela leaned towards Rose and whispered. "She's thirty-five."

"Thirty-four-and-a-half." She began to defend herself and then remembered. "So are you."

Angela shrugged. "But I don't care."

Hattie felt sympathy radiating from the Rose's lovely, unlined face and feared the sympathetic hand pat. It was worse when Rose sighed and tried to help. "You'll meet somebody, you know, fall in love? It'll happen for you, Hattie. Gosh, I'd think you'd trust in nature."

What could she even say to that? She sipped her coffee, already too cool. There were small windows of opportunity for everything. "Falling in love, Rose, is the very opposite of nature."

"Yeah, right." Rose grabbed another packet of sugar, stopped. "Oh, you're serious."

"We're not intended, biologically speaking, to live happily ever after."

Angela shook her head. "Dr. Bug's not moving back to Seattle?"

Hattie felt a twinge of pain when she confirmed with a head shake that no, the entomologist she'd had a theoretical relationship with was not literally returning to her. "But we're talking pure biology right now, and it's fighting nature itself to try and stay together. A man's biological goal is to," she cleared her throat, "reproduce with a variety of women."

Angela flicked her long nails as if waving off a fly. "Men are put on this planet to spread their sperm from sea to shining sea. Ward Cleaver, and a couple of those TV dads, were the only notable exceptions."

"But if Ward Cleaver was alive, and he really stayed faithful, he'd still be driven to want to fertilize more than June's eggs." She tried not to picture the Beaver's dad naked with the moms from the Partridge Family and the Brady Bunch.

Angela put her hand over her heart. "A woman's goal is to protect our precious eggs from the dreaded sperm, to spare our bodies the torture and disfigurement of childbirth, and to save our silk blouses from the sticky paws of toddlers."

She sighed and made a silent wish she could feel that way too. "Like most women, I seem to be driven to reproduce and raise a child to adulthood. We're not unlike a female bird on a nest, designed to both hatch the eggs, feed and defend the babies, and make sure they learn to fly so they can survive."

Rose's eyebrows were drawn in concentration. "But lots of men sit on nests too."

Rose, like so many women seemed unwilling to let go of the myth of true love. "Most struggle with that, Rose. You know how divorce rates increase at seven-year intervals?"

Angela looked toward the bar as if she really needed another shot of caffeine. "Seven year itch. Fourteen year ditch. I can also medicate that."

"The seven year interval is for a reason. Those men who do stick around after conception still can't deny biology forever. At seven, children are less dependent, and men begin to leave."

"Independent at seven?" Rose shook her head. "I ate paste in first grade and puked everywhere."

"Well," Hattie tried to erase the image, "less dependent is relative, but at fourteen, a child, until very recently in human history, was considered an adult. At that point the man, biologically speaking, is driven to start over with another woman or women. Our coupling as a species was never intended to last past our physical need for a man."

Angela looked around as if to see who else was included in the statement. "You told everyone who can receive signals from the radio station that you're a self-fertilizing aphid."

Yeah, that might have been a mistake. "I was indiscreet, but normally I am very discreet." She took a delicate sip of coffee. Sure, she'd not had a lot of sex even when she'd been having sex, but didn't women, in general, have to concede that it was an awkward and sweaty event best left to professionals? Maybe not professionals, but at least those with some natural aptitude like flamenco dancers or double-jointed redheads.

"Discreet?" Angela snorted. "First of all you said on the public airwaves that you're looking to borrow some sperm, and second of all you can only be discreet if you're getting laid and just not talking about it. You're not talking about it because you wasted time on a guy who lived across the country and wasn't that great when he lived here."

Rose stepped in to defend her, and while misguided, Hattie appreciated it. "I'm sure the women in the hallways and the women who kept calling in after the show will get tired and leave her alone." Rose hesitated. "Probably. Eventually. And, you know, lastly, I think that Hattie's just having a slump."

Angela rolled her eyes as if the sexual definitions of discreet and slump were common knowledge. "You can only have a slump if you were getting laid regularly and then it stopped."

The waiter set a small cup of espresso in front of Angela, another cup of coffee in front of Rose, and inexplicably a pot of honey in the middle of the table. "Slumps suck."

Hattie noted that he had on a Kentucky Fried Chicken uniform top with Derek embroidered over the pocket. Derek had, no doubt, been fired from more than one fine dining establishment.

Angela pointed to the bar, and he darted away.

Derek also showed survival skills, but she needed to stand and defend herself. Heck, she'd had plenty of sex. It had just been a while, a good long while, when she did the math. She pointed at Angela. "September."

"Lord, Hattie, it's December. The statute of limitations has long run out on that lone encounter. And it was a lone encounter when Professor Bug stopped by on his way out of town, am I right?"

She didn't have to answer that question. She took a slow drink of coffee.

"It was rhetorical anyway, and you are not, legally speaking, in a slump. You're gonna have to start over again and lose your virginity."

Rose grimaced. "Don't do it in a Honda Civic. They are so small."

Hattie felt the unraveling of the conversation like a class question and answer session gone horribly wrong. "Okay, this isn't about me at all. It's about women, and the pure science of it is that we no longer need men to find a cave or kill our food. After impregnation, which we unfortunately still need them for, it's biologically over. I'm just suggesting, theoretically, that we need to work with nature not against it."

"I don't know." Rose looked confused. "I think maybe it's still a slump since you did have sex before, and I think someday you'll just see a guy, fall in love, and know he's the one."

Love. As if she was just waiting for the juvenile experience of infatuation. Women were so illogical. "I'd know when the right one came along, but it wouldn't have anything to do with love, and I can prove it. What do you think of Denzel Washington?"

Rose made a tiger-like purr.

"No shit." Angela nodded in agreement. "There isn't a woman on the planet who doesn't think Denzel's beautiful."

"Exactly, because if you draw a line down the center of his face..." Hattie traced her finger along the length of her nose.

"Would I get to lick it off?" Angela asked.

Hattie laughed. After more than a decade of friendship, Angela still could surprise her into laughter. "At any rate, his features are perfectly even. It's a sign of genetic health. And men find women with an hourglass figure the most attractive. This is true through all cultures and all time. And do you know why?"

Angela nodded. "Because it's the hardest fucking shape to keep."

"Because it's the body shape most associated with reproductive health for females. Women whose waists are bigger than their hips have statistically lower fertility rates. And so men are looking for fertility, and we're looking for a good sperm donor. Why mess that up with a relationship?"

Rose looked like she might cry. "What are you saying?"

Angela shook her head. "Let Cinderella go, little sister."

Cinderella's drive made perfect sense. It was the prince that was biologically skewed. "An intelligent woman could embrace biology, get exactly what she wanted, and avoid the inevitable disappointment of a relationship with a man. I mean, what I would instruct a woman to do would be to heed the desire to reproduce, if in fact, that was what drove her. She should use her inherent skills to choose the right sperm donor then have the common sense to not get emotionally involved."

Rose blinked. "You're serious about that aphid thing. You'd really pick a guy just to get you pregnant?"

"Most households are run by single moms. I'm just cutting out the middle man, so to speak." She thought of all those beautiful wedding photos and ugly divorce proceedings. "It's what man has ultimately evolved to do."

"Well," Rose appeared to be digesting a large meal, "women do go to sperm banks."

Hattie put both hands up. "I wouldn't advocate a sperm bank."

Angela pulled her empty cup back from the edge and licked it. "Not enough exercise."

"A sperm bank only utilizes some of our biological wisdom. It would offer a list of the man's known traits like height, health, intelligence, but we're animals. There are aspects of our ability to choose that are beyond logic."

Rose looked pleased with her grasp of the subject. "You'd draw a line down the center of a bunch of guy's faces and then see who was most even?"

"I'd determine criteria, what was important to me personally, and then study men for those criteria, but also accept the elements that couldn't be understood logically. I'd honor those animal instincts we all possess."

Rose reached for more sugar and held the packets as if for support. "How'd you know if you hit that right?"

Angela smiled. "You'd want him to ruin your virginity, right, Hat?"

"Attraction is the biological marker, but it's really nothing more than the understanding you're in the presence of an appropriate sperm donor. You want to avoid inbreeding, obviously, but you need to avoid outbreeding too."

Angela rolled her eyes. "Gross, Hat."

But it wasn't gross. It was fascinating and so clear and crisp and logical. "There's some evidence that women are attracted to the body odor of men who resemble, genetically, the woman's father because it helps us avoid someone too genetically different, which wouldn't be an optimal match either."

Rose seemed to really consider that. She just may be coming around. "Kind of love at first smell?"

Well, she was kind of coming around. "Minus the love, Rose. Women don't need to manufacture love anymore because they don't need help raising children to adulthood."

"Hat."

She felt Angela touch the sleeve of her raincoat then drop her hand as if it were too soft a gesture. "You should just adopt."

Hattie saw again the toddler boy brush by her on the sidewalk and ached. "It's not that easy." And there was, she hated to admit it, a picture she'd secretly carried around in her head. There was the firm swell of pregnancy, a moment of nursing a baby girl that smelled of apricots. Occasionally in her dreams she could feel the baby's soft curls like whispers on her fingertips.

"Okay," Angela wore her sarcastic expression again, "just shag Denzel Washington and call it a night."

"Yeah," Rose shrugged, "show all those women out there they can be their own aphid."

She felt the electric jolt of it, the whole body zing, the crackle of possibility. Why couldn't she be part of the evolution of women? She could find a man, an appropriate genetic contributor, and have a child of her own while she still could.

Angela rolled her eyes. "I think you've got the wrong aphid there, Rose."