“They won’t even bring it to the floor,” Neil says.
“But why not? What do they want?”
“A commitment from you that you’ll approve their tax cut package.”
“That fucking giveaway to the rich? Not happening.”
“Bobby, not so fast,” Gerard steps in and says.
I look at him. The reason I hired him in the first place, despite the fact that he was my best friend in Boston and we left that life behind together, is because of his levelheadedness. I can be a hothead when I want to be. Gerard, who was as thuggish as I was, but never with that thug temperament, never was.
But I’m not understanding why he would even question my position. “Not so fast? What do you mean?”
“We need to think this through,” Gerard says. “It’s election season.”
“So?”
“Tax cuts play well in election years.”
“I don’t care how they play,” I say to him. “I’m not sacrificing the poor and middle class so rich, fat cats can get a little extra in their bank accounts for their vacations to Paris.”
“You mean like you?” Neil says and then smiles.
But another aide, a young lady named Kathy, smiles too. “You got the boss all wrong, Neil,” she says. “There’s not an ounce of fat on his body.”
They all laugh. It’s supposed to be a joke. I get it, but I don’t laugh. They’re young, like I said. Early twenties. I remembered how messed up I was when I was their age. Somebody has to be the adult in the room. “What else?” I ask them.
They know when I mean for the jokes to end. They know me, and they know my patience level. They cut the crap and get back to business.
“The city council,” Kathy says, “is ready to deny your father permission to expand Jericho Inn.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Gerard says. He’s just hearing the news too.
“On what grounds?” I ask Kat.
“Some archaic law they pulled out of their asses,” Neil responds. He has that type-A, take-charge personality that got him the job. “They don’t have all the votes yet, but they think, with the right arm-twisting, they’ll get there.”
“They expect you to oppose the measure,” Kathy says, reasserting her own type-A personality. “But they’re prepared to override the veto.”
“If they can get the votes,” Neil says.
“Right,” says Kat.
And I’m getting pissed. This obsession this town has with putting my family in its place and doing all they can to curb the influence we already have is bordering on the ridiculous. Now they’re voting down expansionism? That great conservative credo? I can’t even deal with that hypocrisy right now. “What else?” I ask.
They all look at Gerard this time. “We need to prepare for reelection,” he says. “Last time was a bruiser. But this time, with Matt Capecchi in the race, it promises to be even worse.”
“Capecchi?” I ask. That name sounds familiar.
“The dirty trickster himself,” Gerard says. “He got former Mayor Cruikshank elected the first time he ran, and he pulled out every trick up his slimy sleeve to do it.”
“Great,” I say. “All I need.”
“But you’re up to the challenge,” Gerard says.
“You always are,” says Kat, and Neil, along with Tanner, my other aide, agrees.
But I don’t agree with that shit. The last thing I’m up for is yet another big battle. But that’s not their business. “Any early polling?” I ask Gerard.
“We did some internal polling, yes,” he says.
“And?”
“If Matt Capecchi gets in, and if the election were held today, he’ll beat us by twenty points.”
They’re all floored. They look at Gerard as if that has to be some twisted joke. But Gerard is dead serious.
“It’s the economy,” Gerard is trying to explain. “The economy is in the garbage. They don’t blame those boys in Washington and their policies. They’re blaming you. Before you got elected, the economy was roaring along, at least let them tell it. You take over and suddenly, it tanks. Not your doing. It’s a worldwide crisis. But you’re the mayor now. The buck stops with you.”
I open my suitcoat, place my hands on my hips, and let out a tough, exhausted exhale. And I just signed up for more of the same? Am I nuts?
CHAPTER THREE
After I get that pink slip, I refuse to slip into some useless depression the way Ollie has. All he wants to do is fuss and complain and insist it’s a racial thing because we’re both black. When I point out to him that most of the people who got pink slips are white, he doesn’t want to live in that truth. He wants to live in his truth. And his truth is that he’s mad, and scared, and want to believe it can’t possibly be his own bad luck, but somebody else’s bad will. But I can’t afford that way of thinking. I’ve got to get another job. I get in my car and leave.
First, I go to the public library, sit in front of one of their computers, and apply for every job I can apply for online: which are most jobs in Boston. I don’t care what it is. I’ll take anything. I have a son to take care of, rent to pay at the end of the month, and not a dime in the bank.
And I’m no kid anymore. That’s the thing. I’m thirty years old. How in hell did I allow myself to end up jobless, with no severance package, just a pink slip, and penniless but for my last paycheck they gave me today? Why didn’t I plan better than this? I worked every day. There was never a day that I didn’t go to work. But there was never enough money to save for that rainy day. So I just lived. Day by day by day. But that was my fault too.
But whoever fault it is, I can’t wallow in it. I have bills to pay at the end of the month. I have to get myself another job. That’s why I’m over here at the gas station. But I’m not just cashing my paycheck and putting gas in my car. I’m asking if Manny, the man who owns the place, can use another worker. I’d do anything, I tell him. But he’s telling me he has to lay off some of the workers he already has, and he can’t help me. He’s polite about it, but politeness don’t pay no bills.
I pump my gas and count, in my head, what’s left. In less than two weeks, rent will be due again. I was relying on half of this week’s paycheck and all of next week’s paycheck to pay that rent.
I’m trying not to feel desperate. It’s hard out here, but I have experience and know-how. I’ll find something eventually. But it’s the eventually part that’s bothering me. When you live paycheck to paycheck, missing just one has a way of taking you through the cracks. And recovery is never like a detox. It’s never fast.
I decide to go from factory to factory, and store to store, to see if anybody might be willing to hire me on the spot, rather than waiting to review applications that come in online. You never know.
I finish pumping my gas, place the nozzle back on the pump, and is about to get in my car to begin my door to door job search. And that’s when I see him.
But it can’t be him.
I squint my eyes, to make sure it’s him.
It’s him, alright, right across the street, pumping gas at the Shell station, a station too high-priced for me to bother with. But he’s right there. Pumping his gas like he’s a regular joe. But for me, it’s like seeing a ghost. A nasty, filthy, dangerous ghost. And I’m scared as hell.
I get in my car quickly, fumble with my cheap-ass Tracfone trying to swipe it open. And then I’m Googling him. I type in his name.
To my shock, there it is.
Drug dealer Jakeem Frazier, better known as Dance, has been released from prison after serving ten years for a series of murders, including the murder of rival gang members, the murder of Tyrell Jenkins, another gang member, and the serious wounding of Jenkins’ two-year-old son. The boy’s mother, who was also at the scene of the crime, identified Dance as the shooter during his trial.
And I’m numb. For a second, I’m sitting in my car, looking at the man who killed my baby’s father, and almost killed my baby, and I’m just numb. But
then I realize what I’m doing. I realize the man I sent to prison for a decade is right across a busy street, within eyeshot, and gunshot, of me. I crank up and back up, drive around the side of the gas station to a back street where he can’t see me, and take off.
Why didn’t they notify me? Why didn’t they tell me something? Aren’t they supposed to tell you something when the man you put in prison gets out???
Maybe they are. But they didn’t. And now I’m racing to the school to get my kid. I’m racing to get myself and my kid away from Boston as fast as that car can take us.
Which, to my great agony, isn’t that fast at all.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO WEEKS LATER
I open my eyes fast and suddenly, but it’s only darkness there. I wait, like you’re supposed to do, to adjust to the dark, but I already know where I am and what I’ll see. I’m in my condo, alone in my bed, sweating and breathing hard like a motherfuck. Like I just ran some marathon somewhere. But it wasn’t a race. It was a dream. And now, as I lay here, I can’t even remember what the dream was about.
The phone rings, which causes me to jump again. What the fuck is wrong with me? I grab my cell phone angrily and just answer it. “Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you come last night?”
Last night? I thought it was still night. I look at the clock on the wall. It’s pushing seven am.
“Why didn’t you come, Bobby?”
But I don’t answer, because I don’t know who the hell it is.
“Where were you?” she’s asking. “With that other bitch, I’ll bet.”
Emma? No, Pam. Or is it Rachel?
“Don’t play deaf and dumb with me, Bobby. You hear me talking to you. Where were you last night? I called you and called you. I waited for you.”
It’s Rachel. At least I think it is. I think I promised to take her to something or other, or to bring her over here, but I was at my office until late, handling another city council fuck-up, and didn’t even think about it.
“I forgot,” I say to her. Which is the honest truth.
“You could have called me.”
“You’re right.”
“Why didn’t you answer all of those text messages and voice mail messages I left for you?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. If it’s not city hall-related these days, I’m not interested. I haven’t fucked a girl in months. That’s how focused on my work I’ve been. I haven’t taken one out on a date in that time either, and didn’t want to be bothered with that drama anymore. Why I agreed to take this one out is a mystery to me. I’m trying to let go, not go back in. Why would I have promised her anything?
Now I’m wondering if I promised her at all.
“Are you coming over tonight?” she’s asking me. “And don’t you say no. You better not say no.”
Now I’m pissed. And my temper flares. “Don’t you tell me what I better not say. Who the fuck are you? Who do you think you’re talking to?”
It calms her down. She apparently knows me well enough to back the hell up. “I just wanna be with you, Bobby,” she says, but this time in a calmer voice.
“Look, I apologize. I forgot all about it, Rach.”
But then there’s silence. And she says, “that’s not my name,” with what sounds like clenched teeth, and then there’s a click. I look at my phone. And sure enough, she hung up on me. What the fuck? I was apologizing. Why would she hang up on an apology? Because you got her name wrong asshole, that’s why!
I check the Recent Calls menu. I realize it wasn’t Rachel at all, but some woman named Kim Barry. Who the fuck is Kim Barry?
But before I can pull that name out of my memory rolodex, my phone’s ringing again. And I answer quickly. I’m ready to apologize again for screwing over her name, not to mention her night.
Only this time it’s not her, whoever she is. Because I check the Caller ID this time. This one I know. Her name’s Laura. We dated, off and on, for nearly a year. Like all of my previous relationships, they never officially end. I just stop calling or coming by. I let my actions end it for me.
“Good morning,” I say to her as soon as I realize it’s her.
But she’s in no mood for niceties. This is the first time we’ve talked in months, since I let her go. “I think I’m pregnant,” she says. “And if I am, you’re the father.” And then she hangs up too.
And I’m left with my cell phone in my hand, and my heart unable to keep up with my heartbeat.
“Fuck,” I say aloud, but somehow that don’t capture how thrown I truly am.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Mama, I’m still hungry.”
We’re walking out of a soup kitchen at a church in Concord, New Hampshire, and heading for the car. But Ayden wants more. “They don’t feed us enough,” he says.
I want to tell him they aren’t supposed to. They don’t want to encourage this way of life. But I don’t go there. It’s awful enough. Me and my boy eating at some soup kitchen. Me having to pull him out of school and flee the city. I need work and a roof over our heads, and stability. I need to get my boy back in school and back in a normal routine. Because how we’re living now? This ain’t normal.
But it’s been two weeks since I was laid off, and I’m still counting pennies and living off of that one paycheck like it’s good as gold. Staying in motels that offer hourly rates. Showing up in in the middle of the night, and paying to sleep there just long enough for us to get a little rest, and a good shower. I never thought, in a million years, I’d be living like this.
Never thought I’d be heading back to Maine, either. And driving to my mama’s house. But that’s exactly what I’m doing. She left me at my grandma’s back in Boston when I was something like six years old, and never came back and got me. I spend my summers with her and whatever boyfriend she happened to be living with at the time, but it always ended so badly that we wouldn’t talk, or want to talk to each other, until the next summer rolled around.
She beat the crap out of me was the main reason, and emotionally abused me with such nasty words that her boyfriends, time and again, had to call my grandma themselves and tell her to come and get her grandchild. They were never the problem. I know many people have nightmare stories about their mamas’ boyfriends, but those men weren’t my issue. They all treated me right. My mama was my issue.
And now I find myself in such a desperate situation that I need that same mama.
After hours on the road I pull up at her house in Porter, Maine. She used to live in Bangor when I was a kid, I was born in Bangor, but she moved around so much I lost track of her for many, many years. It was my grandma, before she died, who found her, and reached out to her, and that’s the only reason I know where she lives to this day. She never tried to find me, or reach out to me herself.
I park on the driveway of her modest house. It’s neat and clean and very nice-looking. Which makes it almost feel cruel. She treated me like a dog, but she’s the one on top? She’s the one with the nice house and the nice car in the driveway? I’m the one homeless with a car that barely makes it and a child I can’t take care of.
But even with all she has, I still want to leave Ayden in the car. But it’s his grandmother. He, at least, should be allowed to meet his own grandmother. So we get out of the car together, Ayden and me, and make our way to the front door.
It’s been a rough couple weeks. After discovering that the man they call Dance is out of prison, after my testimony and eyewitness identification put him there in the first place, I grabbed Ayden and left Boston for good. That entire gang got busted up during that trial, because of some other murders they committed that same day, and all of them ended up in prison too. But Dance’s case was the only case I followed because I knew that joker by sight, and because he was the man who I saw press down that window that day, and point his gun at Tyrell.
I never forgot that look on his face that day. When I saw him at that gas station two weeks ago, I knew who I was looking at. He m
ight have gained some sense in prison and wasn’t thinking about me since he knows I only told the truth, but I wasn’t banking on it. A man willing to kill another man is a dangerous man. I grabbed Ayden and we took off.
Now I’m knocking on my mama’s front door, shocking myself with this latest move. But desperate times . . .
And my mama, being my mama, didn’t just open the door. She threw the door open like she was mad already. And she was.
“Who that knocking on my door like they some damn police?” she yells. When she saw it was me, her long, lost daughter, she didn’t ease up either. “Knocking like I can’t hear your ass. What’s wrong with you?!”
I want to turn around right then and there, it hurts so much. But I can’t. Beggars can’t be choosy. “Hey, Mama.” I hate calling her that, but that was what I had to call her. That’s what she is. Mama.
She stares at me when I say that name, like it’s foreign to her too, and then she looks down, at my son. “Who that?” she asks.
“That’s Ayden,” I say. “My son.” Then I look at my boy. “Ayden, this is my mother.” And that’s as far as I can take it. I can’t fix my mouth to call that lady his grandmother for nothing in this world. Just can’t do it. I tell him she’s my mother. He’ll have to connect the dots himself.
“So this the boy you had when your ass was what?” my mama asks me. “Twelve?”
She knows good and well I wasn’t pregnant at no twelve. “Seventeen,” I say to her.
She looks at Ayden again. Then she looks at me. “What you want?”
“May we come in?”
“Not until you tell me what you want.” She says this with a hard edge to her voice. And I guess she realizes just how harsh she sounds, because she cut the crap and open her door. I actually hesitate, but I need her help. I take Ayden’s hand and we walk on in.
She’s looking at Ayden’s feet as she closes the door. “What’s wrong with him?” she asks me.
Bobby Sinatra: In All the Wrong Places (The Rags to Romance Series Book 1) Page 3
