Read Smart vs. Pretty for Free Online

Drizella?”
    Amanda said, “And that, right there, is your biggest problem.”
    Jingle. A guy ducked under the hanging paint tarp by the door and shuffled toward the sisters. He was skinny and wore scruffy jeans with holes and a too-tight black T-shirt with Timberland boots. His crew cut was so short, Frank wondered if he was shorn for lice.
    Amanda said, “Matt Schemerhorn?”
    “I’m early,” he said.
    “I have to ask why you have no permanent address.” That was Frank. She noticed his small backpack—hardly enough room to carry a full wardrobe. “Are you a homeless person?” she asked.
    “I have a home address,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s important or necessary to share it with people I may or may not be working with. Do you give out your home address to strangers on the telephone? To, say, someone who takes your airplane reservation? I hope you don’t. A lot of airlines and catalog companies employ prisoners to answer their phones and take orders. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a murderer or rapist knowing where I live.”
    Frank blinked. “Do you have any references?”
    “Aren’t references subjective to the point of uselessness? I could have worked as hard as anyone at my last job, but due to what’s euphemistically known as a ‘personality conflict’ with the complete fascist asshole who ran the place—forgive me, but there’s no other word for this man—my reference might be poor. You could call him and ask about me, ignorant of the depths of this man’s assholeyness, and get the mistaken idea that I wouldn’t do a good job for you. So no, I don’t have any references.”
    Amanda tried, “Can you at least tell us what your last job was?”
    “I was a barista at Moonburst. Midtown.”
    Frank asked, “How did you find that?”
    He seemed puzzled. “I looked at the street signs.”
    “I meant, did you enjoy working there?”
    Matt said, “I have complete contempt for the company and everything it stands for.”
    “Really?” Frank encouraged him to go on.
    “Yeah,” he said. “For one thing, they imported raw beans from all over the world, but they uniformly full-city roast, burning off the sugar and oil of each bean, killing its unique flavor. They turn everything from an Ethiopian Harrar to a Tanzanian peaberry into mud. Besides that, they pay shit.”
    Frank asked, “What were they paying you at Moonburst?”
    “Six bucks an hour.”
    “Make it ten. And shower every morning before work.”
    “Message received,” he said.
    Frank added, “I don’t ever want to hear the phrases ‘grassy knoll’ or ‘book depository’ exit your lips.”
    “Your loss,” he said.
    “What’s your jean size?” That was Amanda.
    “I have no idea.”
    Amanda walked behind him and folded down the waistband of his pants. “Thirty-two by thirty-six,” she read off the label. “Congratulations, Matt Schemerhorn. You’ll fit in perfectly.”

4
     
     
    Still Thursday
     
    P ride swelled in Amanda’s chakras. She had, after all, spent the last two days distributing fliers all over the neighborhood. She’d been Clarissa’s “poster girl.” Her efforts had obviously paid off. A couple dozen men had come to apply for the Mr. Coffee contest. The unspoken requirements—tall, athletic, under forty-five, hair on head but not on face, nice teeth, minimal intelligence—would mean instant elimination for at least half of the applicant pool.
    Amanda sized up a few hopefuls. The contest was only a day away, and Clarissa wanted to decide on the five finalists in the next hour. They’d handed out numbers, pencils, and information cards and asked the men to wait their turn for an interview. Coffee and Danishes were on the house. The idea of interviewing and vetting twenty-odd men tweaked Amanda’s senses. The aroma of romance, or the potential for it, commingled with Frank’s new house blend and the tacky paint, making Amanda dizzy. How would she do it? Pick only five