A Special Relationship

by Yvonne Thomas

  “No. Get somebody to take her down to Human Resources. Tell Walt that I’m hiring her to work on your staff.”

  Marva shook her head. What was Robert thinking, she wondered. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Come with me, young lady,” she said to Carrie but Carrie was still staring at Robert. This was turning out exactly the way she didn’t want it to. Robert, seeing her anxiety, looked at Marva.

  “Give us a moment,” he said and Marva, not forgetting that he didn’t have a moment to give to her when she asked for it, nonetheless nodded and left the office.

  Robert walked around his desk and looked at Carrie. “What is it, Carrie?” he asked her.

  “She doesn’t want me here.”

  “And what if she doesn’t? She’ll do what she’s told.”

  “But, Robert, she thinks. . .”

  Robert frowned. “She thinks what?”

  Carrie swallowed hard. “She thinks I’m your girlfriend or something, which is ridiculous, but that’s what she thinks.”

  Robert stared at Carrie. “Why would it be ridiculous for you to be my girlfriend?” he asked her. “Is it because of my age?”

  “Your age?”

  “Yes, Carrie, my age.”

  “Of course not. I don’t even know your age.”

  “Then why is it so ridiculous?”

  “Because you’re. . . and I’m . . . Because.”

  Robert smiled. “Let me handle Marva Cox, all right? You just do whatever she tells you to do.”

  “I will,” she replied and Robert began walking back behind his desk. “And Robert?”

  He turned and looked at her. “Yes?”

  “How old are you?”

  Robert glared at her. “What do you think?”

  Carrie thought about it. “Thirty, thirty-one?”

  Robert smiled. “Does it matter?”

  Carrie shook her head, although her face told a different story. “Not really,” she said slowly.

  Robert let out a booming laugh. “Just get to work,” he finally said.

  “Yes, sir,” Carrie said and smiled too, as she left.

  TWENTY-ONE

  She opened her suitcase and began putting her clothes away. She was home. It was temporary, she knew that it was, but it felt like she was finally home. Robert had taken her to Popena’s apartment that morning before they went to work and told her to get everything she owned. Everything, he emphasized, and she did. Popena started complaining, of course, and accusing her of lying on Willie Charles, but Carrie wasn’t thinking about her sister. In fact, her sister’s accusations only made her more determined to make certain she got everything, just as Robert had insisted.

  Now everything was all over Robert’s guest bedroom, a bedroom he was now referring to as her room. Her room. She didn’t know if she could go that far, but she was grateful just the same. She also had a job, as the assistant to his executive secretary, a job that paid her fifteen bucks an hour (the most she’d ever made anywhere). It also made crystal clear for her exactly what she had to do.

  Find herself an apartment was number one. She needed to have her own place, live by her own rules. Then she’d save, and eventually, when she was on her feet again, enroll in college. In that order. No more excuses. No more waiting until somebody gave her permission to live her life. She was going to live her life. For her sake. For her self-respect’s sake. For Millie’s sake, who always seemed to have such confidence in her.

  Then she sat on the bed thinking about Millie, about how kind she had been to her, and tears almost stained her lids. Poor Millie, she thought. Until she sniffed the smoke.

  “Robert?” she said as she got off of her bed and went out into the hall. She didn’t see any smoke, but she certainly smelled it and knew that it was coming from downstairs. Then she heard the smoke alarm begin to blare.

  “Robert?” she said again, this time louder and more desperate as she hurried down the long corridor and then down the winding stairs. She hurried into the kitchen where she saw, to her amazement, Robert with an apron around his waist grabbing a burning pan from the stove.

  Carrie immediately jumped into action, looking for and finding the fire extinguisher and spraying it with great precision over the sizzling burner.

  They both started coughing as the smoke bellowed upward. “Let up the windows and open the door!” Carrie ordered Robert and Robert quickly obeyed. He looked at the ruin around him and then at Carrie, who was still holding the extinguisher. “Good work, Sojourner,” he said.

  Carrie looked at him as if he’d lost his mind calling her that. Then, when she saw he was smiling, his red face smudged with smoke, his white apron black, she smiled too. “What in sand hell were you doing?” she asked him.

  “Cooking you dinner,” he said.

  “Well,” Carrie said, looking around at the damage, “I don’t know about cooking, but you sure know how to light a fire.”

  Robert laughed, quietly at first, and then bellyful. Carrie shook her head and laughed for the first time in a long time, too.

  ***

  At work the next day, Carrie found herself with very little to do. Her desk was in the same office as Marva Cox’s, Robert’s secretary, and both their desks were outside of Robert’s huge office. Carrie had seen him off and on all day, as he went to meetings, came back from meetings, and had numerous meetings with different executives in his own office. He was so busy and so in the zone at work that many times he would forget Carrie was even there and walk right by her without speaking or smiling or anything. It was a decision he made that Carrie actually liked. Although she lived with him, which made her more than just a casual acquaintance, their business at Dyson was strictly that: business. Robert’s behavior made certain of it, and Carrie made sure that hers did too.

  But she still couldn’t shake the feeling that her arrangement with Robert, if that was what you called it, could easily be perceived the wrong way. Marva Cox certainly perceived it that way. Especially when she discovered that Carrie’s home address was the same as Robert’s. She knew she knew because some chick from human resources came by the office and called herself whispering it to Marva and Carrie heard her. Marva looked at the girl as if she didn’t believe her. “You have got to be kidding!” she said loudly before remembering that the target of their gossip was right in the same room with them. Then she quickly handed Carrie a stack of papers and asked her to take them to the senior VP.

  As soon as Carrie grabbed the papers and closed the office door, she stood there long enough to hear the gossip get going full blast. She couldn’t hear every word, but she did hear Marva comment that she’d never known Robert to bring “one” to his home for any reason, let alone let one live with him. He had an apartment in town, according to Marva, that he kept for entertaining the ladies.

  Carrie remembered taking the papers downstairs to the senior VP’s office and thinking as she went how Marva Cox knew so much about Robert, and how she knew so little. She remembered how Millie also said that he was always coming into Jetson’s with different females too. But the idea that he would have a sex apartment, if Marva was to be believed, still surprised her. Robert just didn’t seem like that kind of man around her. He was warm and caring and didn’t seem to have eyes for any other woman. But, of course, she’d only started being around him. There was a lot, she knew, she didn’t have a clue about.

  And a lot, she realized, she had to put up with. That happened as soon as she came back from her sudden errand. She went back into the office she shared with Marva and found none other than Tyler Langley sitting and waiting for Robert. Her heart pounded when she saw the one female she classified as a true enemy since she’d been in Florida. The woman who had slapped her. She even began to itch for a confrontation as she entered the suite and began heading for her desk, daring that female to get aggressive with her this time. Although her situation was still precarious, she was fairly certain that, unlike Alphonso, Robert wouldn’t fire her for defending herself.

  But
the witch didn’t even remember her. She looked Carrie dead in the eye, even had the nerve to smile and nod at her in a kind of arrogant greeting, but there wasn’t an ounce of recognition in her eyes. Carrie sat down behind her desk a little off put. But it only confirmed her theory. People like Tyler Langley, the so-called jet set, never paid attention to the help.

  Robert’s office door opened as a gentleman he had been meeting with was shaking his hand and saying his goodbye. Tyler stood up as the man walked passed, speaking to her but ignoring Carrie, and Carrie could see a sudden but subtle change in Robert’s demeanor when he saw that Tyler was waiting for him.

  “I need to see you, Robert,” she said before he could say a word. He cut a glance at Carrie, which worried her, and then he stepped aside so that Tyler could enter. When the door closed, shielding them both inside, Marva was staring at Carrie.

  “What?” Carrie asked before she realized it.

  “I didn’t say a word,” Marva said.

  “Yeah, but your eyes said plenty.”

  “That’s Mr. Kincaid’s girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Marva was surprised by Carrie’s response. “You know?”

  “Yes. Of course I do. She’s one of many, right?”

  Marva hesitated. “Right.”

  “Since I’m not one of any, I don’t see where it concerns me.”

  Marva smiled. “You mean to tell me you ain’t his girlfriend?”

  “No. Why would you think that? Just because a girl lives with a guy and he gets her the best job she’s ever had doesn’t mean they have a relationship. Wait a minute. I’d better rephrase that.”

  Marva laughed. “Yeah, I think you’d better.”

  Carrie smiled. “But for real, me and Rob, I mean Mr. Kincaid, are just friends.”

  “No hanky panky?”

  “None,” Carrie said. Unless you counted that morning in that hotel room. Then Marva laughed even at that.

  “That’ll change,” she said confidently. “You’d best believe that’ll change.”

  Carrie didn’t like the sound of that, but she ignored it just the same. Her mind was still on Tyler. And why Robert seemed so displeased to see her.

  The answer came almost three weeks later. Robert and Carrie had had dinner, Chinese takeout, and then Robert suggested they go outside on the patio and play a game of cards. He seemed almost giddy with happiness, it seemed to Carrie, and she therefore readily agreed.

  Once outside they pulled up a small, round, wrought iron table and two matching chairs. It was a warm Florida night and both were coolly dressed in shorts and t-shirts. Carrie sat back as Robert, claiming to never lose, began shuffling the cards, and she could hardly believe it was her. Carrie Banks. Sitting in the backyard of a beautiful, luxurious home, about to play spades with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. She wanted to pinch herself. She wanted to question if this was real, or was she playing this out in her overactive mind.

  And best of all was Robert. He treated her like a queen. Over these last three weeks, he’d take her to work, bring her home from work, and never leave the house again. That didn’t mean that he didn’t work past midnight most nights, he did. But he never left her to visit one of those numerous girlfriends everybody kept telling her he had. Not that his ladies weren’t calling him. They were. He’d get tons of calls every single night. And at first Carrie would never answer the call, believing that it wasn’t her place to try and upstage some woman Robert still planned to be with. But then he started asking her to answer the calls, and to tell them that he was unavailable. Although it was painfully obvious in those women’s voices that every one of them wanted desperately to know who Carrie was, none of them, not one, dared ask. It was as if they knew they were sharing Robert and had decided, in some kind of sick logic if you asked Carrie, that part of him was better than none of him.

  Carrie could understand why they would feel that way. Robert was simply wonderful, not just because of the kindness he showed to her in her hours of need, but because of the way he’d been treating her since she moved in with him. Not once had he tried to come onto her sexually. Not once had he intimated that she had to “pay” to stay with him. Not once had he disrespected her.

  On one level, her womanly level, his chivalrousness was a little disappointing. Perhaps she just wasn’t his type, she decided. Or, she’d think, when she was especially disappointed, his color. Marva even told her that she’d only seen Robert with one black woman in the last two years, and that relationship didn’t last but a few weeks. Carrie had wanted to ask why Marva was always focusing on the last two years only whenever she talked about Robert and his girlfriends, especially since Robert never told her anything about his life, but she didn’t go there. It would seem like cheating. “Maybe the sister didn’t like the idea of sharing her man,” Carrie had said instead. Marva, who was coming around to actually like Carrie, and, Carrie felt, seemed to be pulling for her as if she was in some kind of contest, smiled. “You right about that. You know how we black women can be. You got a point about that.”

  But sometimes Carrie wondered. In her experience some of the most progressive whites in Attapulgus, the waitresses and store clerks and fast food restaurant workers that she’d come into contact with on a daily basis, treated her like a sister when they were on the job, and like a stranger when they were with their friends and saw her on the streets. Maybe Robert was like that, too. Privately he enjoyed your company, but publicly he didn’t know you. She didn’t believe he was that way. But she was cautious about it, just the same.

  And even all of those thoughts couldn’t spoil the peacefulness of the evening. This was heaven on earth to Carrie, she thought, as she leaned back and watched Robert deal the cards. And even when he had stopped dealing and she picked up her hand to see how many spreads she could make off the bat, she found herself unable to stop smiling, unable to fully believe that this was Carrie Banks of Georgia living this life of Riley.

  “Did you hear me?” Robert said through her fog and she had to look up at him to realize he was addressing her.

  “Oh, sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said you’re glowing.”

  “Glowing? What an odd thing to say. How does a person glow?”

  “You seem happy, that’s what I mean.”

  “I am happy. And grateful. I didn’t think I would stand a chance here in Florida, what with so many setbacks and then with Millie dying, but now the good Lord has really blessed me. I’ve got a place to stay, a job I’m getting better and better at doing, and I’m making more money than I’ve ever made in my life. I’m real happy.”

  “Good,” he said, as if it pleased him mightily. “Very good.”

  After a moment of them staring into the other’s eyes, they began to play cards. Carrie’s mind was only half in the game, however, as she knew there was a subject she needed to broach. She didn’t want to sound ungrateful, or otherwise somebody who didn’t know a good thing when she had one, but she was nobody’s fool. She couldn’t continue living this way with a man like Robert Kincaid. He wasn’t bothering her now, he wasn’t making any demands on her now, but sooner or later, she knew, something would have to give. Paying him rent was out of the question, she knew he wouldn’t take it because she’d already offered it, and just allowing things to remain as they were wasn’t an option, either. She wasn’t living in sin, she and Robert had a completely platonic relationship, but ever since Marva’s friend from Human Resources had spread the word that she was living with Mr. Kincaid, Carrie would never avoid, as the Bible instructed, the appearance of sin. In other words, it wasn’t sin, but it sure looked like it could be.

  “Robert?” she said, deciding to get on with it because of that last point alone.

  “Yes, honey,” he said, his voice sounding almost soothing, familiar, as if he’d known her all of his life.

  Carrie hesitated. “I’ve made some decisions,” she finally said.

  Robert looked at her. “About
what?”

  “My future.”

  It was Robert’s time to hesitate. He knew this conversation was coming, he just didn’t want it to be now. “What about your future?”

  “Since you’re helping me out, since you’ve been so unbelievably good to me, I thought that I should let you in on what my plans are.”

  Robert’s heart became queasy. He was beginning to like things just the way they were. “Okay,” he said.

  “I plan to begin searching for an apartment.” He didn’t say anything. He just stared at her. “And then I plan to save enough money to enroll in college, even if I have to take one class at a time.”

  “You don’t have to move out to do that, Carrie,” he found himself saying, trying his best not to sound in any way panicky, although he were. Because there was no denying it any longer. He wanted her with him. “You can stay here and I’ll send you to school.”

  She began shaking her head.

  “And why not? You’ll get your college education. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Yes, but on my own terms.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, your own terms?”

  “You’ve done too much already, Robert. And I know I’m cramping your style.”

  “What?” Robert asked incredulously. “What style exactly are you cramping?”

  “You know.”

  “What?”

  “Robert, you’re a handsome, very eligible bachelor who spends every one of his evenings at home with me.”

  He knew where she was going with this, he just didn’t want to go there. Not yet. He decided to obfuscate. “I’ve offered to take you out many times, but you refused.”

  “What about your girlfriends,” Carrie said bluntly.

  Robert had not expected her to be so direct. He dropped his cards on the table and leaned back. “What girlfriends?”

  “Your girlfriends.”

  Robert stared at Carrie. Hadn’t she seen the change in him, he wondered. Didn’t she realize what had transformed in him over this past month? “I only have one girlfriend,” he said slowly, “and I’m looking at her.”