CHAPTER FIVE
“Where you going all dressed up this time of day?”
Toya had just come out of the bedroom she shared with her little nephew and was headed for the front door.
When she returned to Baltimore almost a month ago, she tried with all she had to fix up what she could of that shack of a house, but all the scrubbing and cleaning she did was quickly reversed every time they threw a party.
Which seemed like every other night. Liquor would spill on the sofa again.
Cigarette burns in the chairs. Holes in the walls. She couldn’t keep up, so she gave up.
“You heard me, Toya,” her sister Keisha said. She was standing behind a chair in the kitchen braiding her boyfriend’s hair. “Where you going all dressed up like that?”
Toya wore a lavender pantsuit with a black turtleneck tucked-in, and black heels. It was none of her sister’s business where she was going, but she was too excited to keep it to herself the way she did most things. “The temp agency just called. They got me a job.”
“A job? Who gon’ hire you after what you did? Burger King?”
Keisha and her boyfriend laughed. Toya ignored them.
But that was the very reason she kept herself to herself.
The only reason they knew what happened to her in Ocala was because she called her mother and her sister and begged them to try and bail her out.
She knew they couldn’t, and wasn’t sure if they would even if they could. But they were all she had.
“So where you got a job at?” Keisha asked again. “You was all high and mighty down there in Florida with your big-time office job. Didn’t have time for us then. Always had to work. But your ass gets fired and arrested and you found our number then, didn’t you?”
“I never lost your number.” But Toya knew the facts never mattered to her baby sister.
“You found our number then,” Keisha said again, “and had to turn-tail and run right back home to mama and get your high ass back down to earth with us little people. Seems you’re a little people too now.
Even smaller than us,” she added laughing.
“At least I can make money braiding hair. You gots to flip burgers to survive.”
Toya shook her head. Because that last comment was her baby sister in a nutshell. She made up something about somebody, like the job Toya was heading to was at Burger King, and then she talked about it as if it was a fact.
But Toya didn’t match her energy nor did she try to respond at all. She knew it was a receptionist’s job for Carrington Capital, a venture capitalist corporation headquartered on the outskirts of Baltimore. She knew she wasn’t flipping anybody’s burgers. But that was none of her business.
“But for real where you going?” Bam asked her too.
Bam was Keisha’s boyfriend and he was always checking out Toya’s well-put together, slender body.
Keisha had serious curves, but Toya had them the way he privately liked them: not too much, and not too little.
She was in between slender and curvy. She was perfect in his eyes.
And unlike Keisha, who had a pretty face but she also had buck teeth so pronounced they looked like horse teeth, Latoya had the face to match her gorgeous figure.
And what he loved about her even more than that was that Toya didn’t realize she was hot.
Keisha and girls like her gave themselves too much credit in the looks department.
Toya didn’t give herself hardly any credit at all.
“Where you going, Toya?” he asked her again.
“Don’t be begging her ass to talk to you,” Keisha said. “You know how she is. The only black woman in America who would leave the north to go work down south with all them crackers. Like they better than us. They showed her, though, didn’t they?”
Toya rolled her eyes. She and Keisha didn’t get along in ordinary times, let alone the worst time of her life when she really could use somebody in her corner.
She spent three months in jail, three long months, before they finally dropped the charges.
She lost her apartment and all her nice furniture and she would have lost her car, too, if it wasn’t paid for already. She needed them in her corner.
But she found out as soon as she returned back home to Baltimore that Keisha nor their mother was up for the job.
They were too busy stumbling around in their own corners to be in somebody else’s.
“I’ll be back, Ma,” Toya said to her mother, who was half drunk on the sofa arguing with her boyfriend, who also happened to live there too.
Her mother didn’t even glance her way. So she hurried out of that house without wasting another second.
Breathing that fresh air whenever she got out of that liquor-infected house of her mother’s was always a sigh of relief for Toya. She couldn’t hop into her Chrysler 300 fast enough and get away from there. But she was getting away, this time, with hope in her heart.
Not that it was some great job she was heading to.
The employment agency made clear that it was a temporary gig until the regular receptionist got off of maternity leave.
But Toya knew how to roll. She was bound and determined to outwork everybody else in that building and force them, by her work ethic alone, to never get rid of her.
She lost thirteen years of her career in one horrific, fateful morning four months ago. She wasn’t losing any more time.
As she drove to the address, she couldn’t stop thinking about what went down in that breakroom.
Richard Lowe tried to rape her. There was no other way to put it.
But when the cops arrived, they immediately took his side.
They believed him over her just like his wife said they would.
They handcuffed Toya. Threw her in their police car. And put her in jail.
Because she had no savings to mention, and her mother and sister didn’t have a dime to rub together between them, she was left to rot in that jail cell for three long months. That was when her public defender came with a solution: The prosecutor would drop all charges and she would be free to go.
“In exchange for what?” she remembered asking her PD.
“You drop your allegations of assault against Mr. Lowe. An assault, by the way, the state attorney’s office isn’t buying.
He’ll drop his allegations of assault against you.
And neither one of you can sue the other or ever mention what happened that day in that breakroom ever again.
You’re fired already so you’ll go on your merry way and leave that firm alone forever, and they’ll leave you alone.
If you even apply for unemployment, which means they will be forced to contest it, then you will have breached the terms of this agreement and charges against you will reappear. That’s the deal.”
She knew it was a sweetheart deal for Richard Lowe, and a lousy one for her.
But she also knew how badly she was being treated in that jail.
How many fights she’d already been in. How everybody was telling her that she didn’t stand a chance in court against the Richard Lowes of this world.
And besides, her PD added, he was the one who had bruises and burns.
She didn’t have a scratch on her. She would easily get a decade behind bars. “If not longer,” he said.
It took her a couple more days, but she eventually caved.
Mainly because she knew her back was so hard against the wall that there was nothing else for her to do but cave.
She couldn’t bare another night in jail, let alone potentially ten years in prison where she’d share rooms with murderers and thieves and Lord only knew who else.
She agreed to the deal, left Ocala, and was on that long road of starting over.
That kind of terror, that she would have to begin at the bottom again, landed differently at her age. She was getting up there. It felt like her last chance to get it right.
But she was determined to keep it positive.
She wasn’t starting over per se. She was on her way to her future.
At least that was how she preferred to view it.
It was nearly four in the afternoon, but the agency said the job would start as early as tomorrow morning.
They just wanted to eyeball her and to show her the ropes so that she could hit the ground running tomorrow morning. Which sounded perfect to her.
But when she got on the outskirts of Baltimore in the upscale community of Brockhurst, Maryland, she felt so out of place it startled her.
It was like another world from Baltimore, although it was only twenty miles outside of town.
There were gorgeous tree-lined streets filled with gorgeous houses and huge office complexes.
Some of the largest corporations in America were in that community, including Carrington Capital, which was the company, she was told, she’d be working for.
But she had to drive past the massive Carrington Capital headquarters building to get to the address where she was told to report. Which wasn’t a business at all, but a house. Or more accurately, she realized when she pulled up to the guard booth, a compound.
She pressed down her window. “Hi. I’m here on a job assignment.”
The guard pressed a button on his computer. “Your name?”
“Latoya Morgan.”
He seemed stumped, as if he couldn’t find the name. “I see a Jameesha Morgan.”
Toya had forgotten. Latoya was her middle name and she always used her middle name. But she had to use her first name officially. “That’s me. I’m Jameesha Latoya Morgan.”
She gave her another look, as if he was certain he believed her, but then he made a phone call, and then pressed a button that allowed the gate to begin opening.
“Follow the driveway all the way to the steps, hook a left at the steps and then follow the driveway around to the side of the main house. Somebody will give you instructions from there.”
“Okay thanks,” Toya said, pressed up her window, and drove through the gate.
It was the longest driveway she’d ever driven down. And at the end of driveway was a huge, box-like brick mansion that looked so fairytale-like that it reminded her of an English estate that somebody in the royal family would own. It was huge.
She could only imagine how many bedrooms was in that bad boy. “Probably twenty,” she said out loud. And there were gazebos and smaller guest houses all over that property. And many cars were parked around the massively long driveway as if it was more a social club than a residence.
But as she hooked a left at the steps that led to the main house and made her way around to the side as she was told to do, she was beginning to feel nervous. Leonard and Lowe, she thought, was the big time. But this property, this compound, made that place look like a ma and pop candy store.
Were these people going to hire somebody like her?
Was she so out of her league that she was delusional?
Why would the agency send her here? Maybe because any other self-respecting woman of her age would be already settled into a good job.
Like she was once settled. Or at least she thought she was settled.
But established ladies wouldn’t need a temp agency to help them find employment.
They’d already be employed. Which meant she was probably the best they had.
Which, she knew, wasn’t saying much at all.
But before she got out of her car she pulled down the overhead mirror, checked out her mid-length, freshly done hair.
Checked out her modest but well-done makeup.
Showed her pearly whites to make sure no lipstick had escaped onto her teeth.
And then, after privately praying, and exhaling, she got out of her car.
She stood inside her open car door smoothing down her lavender pantsuit, and the necklace around her black turtleneck, and her hair. Then she flung her Gucci shoulder bag over her small shoulder and made her way toward the side entrance.
She always carried a big pocketbook to work because it had room to carry her essentials in it, like an extra blouse in case she spilled something on the one she was wearing, and a pair of more comfortable shoes if she had to stay longer than the agency said she would.
But she was determined to look as professional as she possibly could.
No matter what the job, she was going to look her best.
But as always when she was particularly nervous, she also had to pee. Which just angered her. But surely in this big place, she thought as she walked up the sidewalk to the side entrance door with EMPLOYEES written on it, there would be one toilet she could use right away.
She walked even faster up the long sidewalk that led to what she was certain would be called the servants’ quarters in the movies.
But just as long as they hired her on, and just as long as they gave her the ability to do all she could to stay on, they could call that entranceway anything they liked.
To work for a company of the magnitude of the office building she saw when she first arrived In Brockhurst, and the grounds she now walked upon, would be a major come-up for her.
This was her chance to prove herself. She felt it in her bones.
She felt that way, however, until she met Miss Javits.