God Don't Play (9 page)

CHAPTER 18

I
felt pretty stupid just sitting in my office alone—so early in the morning that all of the lights on the floor in my area were still off, except the one above my desk. I must have looked pretty stupid, too.

“Mrs. Davis, is everything all right?” Mr. Royster asked for the third time in the last half hour. “Can I get you a cup of coffee or something? I just made a fresh pot.”

The security guard had a pained look on his face. I had never seen anybody as bowlegged as him. Not knowing that much about the condition, I wondered if it was painful. From the look on Mr. Royster’s face, it looked like it was a strain for him to stand or walk. With his leathery dark skin and bushy mustache, he reminded me of Daddy, even though Daddy was close to eighty now. Daddy often had the same look of pain on his face. In his case I knew that it was because on any given day something on Daddy’s body was aching.

I cleared my throat first. “I’m fine. And a cup of black coffee would be nice.”

I waited until Mr. Royster disappeared around the corner before I resumed my thoughts about Gloria. She hadn’t been the only one who had had issue with me firing her niece. To my surprise, Pee Wee considered it a bad move on my part.

“A triflin’ girl like that ain’t goin’ to be able to get another office job in this town. She’ll be pickin’ beans for the rest of her life. And don’t forget that’s what you used to do,” Pee Wee reminded me, as he lay on his back in our bed, naked and frisky. His hands couldn’t stop moving all over my body—poking, prodding, and squeezing, no matter how many times I pushed him away.

“And I’d still be pickin’ beans if I had acted the way Candace Watson acted.” As if picking beans had been the worst thing I’d done to get paid. I didn’t want to remind my husband about my brief stint as a prostitute shortly after I got out of high school. “You can hire her if you feel that sorry for her. I am sure a successful Black businessman like yourself can put your reputation, business, and sanity on the line just to keep another Black person employed.” I didn’t like being so sarcastic and it wasn’t something I wanted to do. But the sarcastic comment that I had made to Gloria in the break room about her niece had made her even more upset with me, and that was what I’d wanted. It was my way of reminding her that I was still the boss lady. As a supervisor I didn’t think I’d be that effective if I let my subordinates walk all over me. But sarcasm from me usually didn’t even faze Pee Wee. It usually took something pretty extreme to get a serious reaction out of him.

As soon as we ended our tense discussion about my firing the useless receptionist, things got really physical. It had been a while since Pee Wee had kept me up most of the night. When he finally climbed off of me, with both of his hands still prodding, poking, and squeezing various parts of my body, we both went to sleep smiling.

I considered myself one of the luckiest women in the world. Pee Wee was the kind of man that any woman would have been proud of. Not only was he good looking and great in bed, he was sensitive, generous, hardworking, and smart. His temperament was one of the many things that I loved about him. But there were times when he truly got on my nerves. Like when I told him that I was going to hire Jade to replace the slovenly receptionist I’d just fired. I had already run this by Rhoda and Otis. Jade had just graduated a few days before. She was scheduled to head off to college in September. Now, I had to admit to myself that it had not been my idea to hire Jade. I loved the girl. I loved her as much as I would have had she been my own daughter. But she had her moments and was a real piece of work by anybody’s standards. Once she set her sights on something, she didn’t stop until she got it. It took her a year of whining, moaning, and begging, but she eventually pestered Rhoda and Otis until they purchased her a car—a year-old Tercel.

And as soon as Jade had found out that I had fired the temp receptionist, she made a beeline to the same temp agency and signed up.

“Auntie, call up the Marchoke temp agency, ask for Pam Jackson, and request me for the receptionist position you currently have open. I am willing to work overtime at a moment’s notice, as long as it doesn’t interfere with anything else I have planned. I expect to be able to take time off when I need to, like my birthday, or if I need to stay home and help my mom run her child-care business. But that’s only if my absence does not cause any hardships…” Jade paused, but because I had no comment to make at that moment, she continued. “And, because the temp agencies don’t offer holiday pay or sick leave pay, I need a salary that will make up for that,” she instructed me over the telephone that same day.

Just like that. Like she had been sitting back waiting for this particular job to become available.

“Let me think about it for a while,” I said, so taken aback I wasn’t sharp enough to just say no.

“Good. But make it a short while. I would like to start on Monday,” Jade chirped. I was impressed with her level of enthusiasm. It had been a long time since I’d come across somebody so eager to work. From the determined tone in her voice, I knew that she wasn’t going to let up until she got her way.

I didn’t waste any time discussing this with Pee Wee first because I didn’t want his input. But I decided to let him think that it had been my idea to hire Jade. “Uh, I told Rhoda and Otis that I’d like to hire Jade to replace that receptionist I had to fire. It’s so hard to find good help these days…”

“Oh, shit,” Pee Wee laughed, giving me an incredulous look from his side of the bed that Sunday night.

I had agreed to let Jade start her new job that Monday morning like she had requested. I had even agreed to all of her other demands, making her promise not to share that information with the other employees that I supervised.

“This will be good for Jade. With my other collectors quitting left and right, we need all the help we can get. And Jade speaks Spanish so she could even help make some of the calls to the Spanish-speaking folks. It’s amazing how many of them forget how to speak English when a bill collector calls them.” I paused as I groped for more words. “Rosita Menendez is the only other Spanish-speaking collector we have right now and the way she’s been complaining, I expect her to run out of that place screaming any day.” I was rambling now. “Rhoda taught Jade how to speak Spanish when she was little. And when they lived in Florida, most of Jade’s friends were the children of the Cubans and Puerto Ricans who worked in the orange groves that Otis’s family owned. She even speaks it without an American accent.”

“And how would you know she speaks Spanish without an American accent? Unless there is somethin’ you ain’t told me, you don’t speak nothin’ but English yourself.”

I rolled my eyes. “I know because the Cuban lady who does our nails said so,” I snapped.

“Yeah, but do Jade speak the language good enough to be doin’ it on a job?” Pee Wee wanted to know. “With all the slang these kids use today, knowing Jade, she speaks Spanish like them Cholos over on Willow Street.”

“Well, the girl won’t be dealing with any diplomats from Madrid or Argentina. She’ll be dealing with some of those ignorant Puerto Ricans that come up here to work on the farms, and then jump into a cesspool of debt right off the bat. You wouldn’t believe how many of them run out and get new cars and charge accounts they can’t afford. One man we call on a regular basis lives in his car.”

“And how do y’all call him if he’s livin’ in his car?”

“On his cell phone, of course, which he can’t afford either!” I snapped. “I’m going to have Jade start right away.”

Jade showed up that following Monday morning, eager to begin her first real job. Not only was she dressed to kill, she had her own expensive-looking black leather briefcase in addition to her beloved yellow backpack.

CHAPTER 19

E
ven I didn’t carry a briefcase to work. The large black shoulder purse that I always carried around was cumbersome enough.

Rhoda thought it was cute that her daughter was so enthusiastic about her first real job. “My baby. My baby girl is growin’ up! It seems like it was just yesterday that I was escorting her to kindergarten,” Rhoda said, almost sobbing. As soon as I told Jade I would hire her, she and Rhoda stormed the mall and many other expensive stores along the way. “I want my baby to look as good as the rest of those young women office workers.”

“It’s a small-time collection agency office, not Wall Street. I am the supervisor, and even I don’t go to work dressed like my life depended on it,” I chided Rhoda.

“I doubt if I could talk Jade into wearing muumuus to work like you do,” Rhoda said with a sharp sniff.

“For your information, I do have a few suits and other business attire. But at my work, we encourage people to dress more for comfort as opposed to style and fashion. The owner from the main office even wears jeans and plaid shirts when he comes to visit our branch.”

Rhoda gave me a horrified look and shook her head. But even hearing that didn’t stop her from spending thousands of dollars on a new work wardrobe for her baby.

Rhoda was the one who had bought Jade the expensive leather briefcase with her initials on the handle. Jade carried her briefcase like it contained some of the most important documents in the world. A week after she’d started working for me, she confessed that all her briefcase contained was a can of hair spray, a jar of Noxzema, a few issues of
Essence
magazine, and an extra pair of panty hose. It was her yellow backpack that contained her most important props, like her wallet, her diet pills, her makeup, some romance novels, and anything she didn’t want her parents to see.

As I sat there thinking about Jade’s yellow backpack, I had to wonder if it still contained that Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue that she had stuffed in it on Saturday, the day I’d received that nasty note.

I glanced at my watch and didn’t realize that I’d been sitting in my office reminiscing for more than an hour. All of the lights were on now, and I could hear people buzzing in the cubicles outside my office. I had a lot of work to do, so I planned to stay in my office with the door closed for as much of the day as I possibly could.

Our office area was fairly small. Other than my corner office and the ladies’ room, there were not many places where I could hide when I needed to be alone. The break room was like Grand Central Station throughout the day. I knew how stressful it was for the folks I had on the phones making the telephone calls. That was why I didn’t complain when most of them had to run into the break room for water to either drink or splash on their faces, after being on the telephone with some of our more difficult debtors.

I had thought that it would be easier for me to be at the office instead of in my own home. I changed my mind the minute Gloria Watson rolled into the office, half an hour late, with rollers still in her hair. Even though I had advised her not to come to work looking so slovenly, she still did so. It had been easy to fire her niece. But firing Gloria was a different story. For one thing, she was known for filing frivolous lawsuits. She had gone after the city bus company because she felt that they always arrived in her neighborhood late, if at all, because they didn’t like Black folks. With Gloria, when something didn’t go her way, she blamed it on racism. She had also filed discrimination claims against an airline, several department stores, and the restaurant where we’d had last year’s Christmas party luncheon. Her latest target was Mizelle’s. She felt that they routinely tried to collect from more Black and Hispanic folks than they did White folks because they were racist. I didn’t even bother to remind her that it wasn’t the collection agency who selected the people we went after, but the stores and banks.

Of all of the lawsuits that Gloria had instigated, she had been lucky with only one. And even that one had been settled out of court. It had been more of a nuisance payoff. A fried-chicken place had given her a few thousand dollars to appease her when she complained that they served reheated chicken to minority customers.

Mr. Mizelle was a kindhearted, fair-minded old man with a face like a lobster and thin hair the color of mud. He and his wife had adopted four Black children and one of his own daughters was married to a Puerto Rican. He didn’t have a racist bone in his body. Even though he’d hired a lot of minorities, whom nobody other than the farms would hire, Gloria was still a concern of his.

And mine.

I realized just how much a thorn in my side Gloria was when she entered my office that morning without knocking.

“Hey there,” she mumbled, with the same tight look on her face that usually indicated severe constipation. It had been a while since she’d greeted me with a simple hello. “Um, I got a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. I have to leave right after lunch.”

I sniffed and rose from my seat, hoping she couldn’t tell how frazzled I was.

“No problem. But since you came in late, again, this morning, you can make up that time, and the time for this afternoon, by working through lunch today. Otherwise, we’ll have to dock your pay.”

“Can’t I come in this weekend to make up the time? You know I can’t afford to have y’all messin’ with my paycheck.” Surprisingly, Gloria spoke in a gentle, low voice. “You bein’ a sister, I am sure you can relate to that.” Gloria lifted her chin and looked at me with her eyes narrowed into slits. “You know how we got to look out for one another. I don’t care how nice these peckerwoods seem around here, they still want to see us down and out.” I looked at Gloria, trying to read the mysterious expression on her face.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Gloria. Except for getting cussed out by some of the people I call, all of my experiences here have been positive,” I said firmly.

“Well, don’t let that fool you. You and me about the same age. We can’t just up and run off and get hired anywhere we want no more. Most people want to hire them cute young girls like Jade. My cousin Florene, she smaller than me, and she can’t get a decent job nowhere. Last place she applied at, that trendy clothing store at the mall, they said her size would be a concern. Not only were they concerned about her for safety reasons, they didn’t think it would be the right image for the people who come up in there to buy them youthful clothes. A big she-bull like her ought to have known better. I know
you
know what I mean,” Gloria concluded with a sneer.

I nodded. “Give me a list of your calls. If you decide to make up the time this weekend, just let me know so I can leave that information with the security guard.”

As soon as Gloria left my office, I shut the door and locked it. I called Rhoda.

“I think Gloria is the one,” I said.

“The one what?”

“The one who sent me that shit in the mail. The one who called my house yesterday when Jade answered the telephone.”

“Well, did you confront her about it?”

“No, not yet. I need more evidence first. If what I think is true, I am firing the bitch. She can sue me to kingdom come. I am not putting up with that kind of shit from her or anybody else.”

“I hear you, girl. But I do wish you’d share this with Pee Wee.”

“I will,” I said weakly, knowing that I would hold off on that for as long as I possibly could.