CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
“Soap operas, yeah,” she said.
He laughed.
“Just kidding. I take it you love operas,” she said.
But Grayson had to think about it. “Not particularly, no.”
“Then why did you go to one?”
“It’s my father’s patronage. We’ve gone once per month since my childhood.”
She waited for an explanation that was more nuanced than that, but nothing else came.
Then he looked at her. “Tell me about yourself, Jameesha Latoya Morgan. Were you born and raised here in Maryland?”
“In Baltimore, yes sir. But I left as soon as I turned eighteen. I wanted out so bad I could taste it.”
He could relate to that. “Where did you end up?”
“Florida. Ocala. Well, actually Orlando at first but I couldn’t find any good job there. They had plenty of maid work because they had plenty tourists hotels there, but I promised myself I’d never be anybody’s maid.”
Grayson studied her. “Why would you make that promise?”
“I had high hopes for myself. I was afraid I’d turn out like my mama did.
She started doing maid work when she was really young, and she never did any other kind of work.
I was scared I’d get stuck too. So I figured the only way not to get stuck in all those low-level type jobs is to refuse to accept any.
But also, and I know this is gonna sound very superficial, but I wanted to dress up to go to work. Not dress down.”
Grayson laughed. “And you dress up very well.”
She grinned. “But it sounds really superficial doesn’t it?”
“Very much so,” he said. Then his look turned serious. “But if you don’t create boundaries for yourself, there won’t be any. And then you’ll settle for whatever you can get.”
She nodded. “Right. So while I was still in Orlando I refused those maid jobs and applied to be a desk clerk. But they gave the job to somebody else and offered me maid work. Which I turned down. But then I saw this ad about a brand-new accounting firm looking to hire a bunch of people for office work. It was in Ocala, which is like an hour-and-a-half from Orlando, but I applied anyway. I was called for an interview, and I got the job.”
“As?”
“As a file clerk. It didn’t pay much, but it was better than cleaning people’s toilets.
I kept putting in for a promotion, but nothing became of it until three years later when I worked my butt off, and produced better numbers than anybody else, and they had no choice but to make me team leader in Clerical. ”
“Is that the thirteen-year position you told me about?”
She nodded. “Yes sir.”
“So did the lead job pay better?”
“Better, but not great. That’s why I started applying for supervisor every time a spot came open. And many came over. But they would never promote me. I had to train the ladies they did hire. But they never hired me. Until ten years later.”
Grayson was surprised. “Ten years? It took that long?”
“Yes sir.”
“And that was the day you had to fight off one of the founding partners.”
Sadness appeared in her eyes. “Yes sir. Unfortunately.”
“It’s not unfortunate. You did right to fight back. That’s a good thing.”
Toya couldn’t believe he said that. “But you didn’t act like it was a good thing when I was fighting my sister.”
“That’s because you just got out of jail and I was terrified that the police would show up and you’d get locked up again.”
He was terrified? Why, she wondered? But she couldn’t pull herself to ask him that. Everything else, yes. But not that.
“And stop calling me sir,” he said to her. It was more of a deflection from the fact that he had used the word terrified. He felt exposed.
And Toya felt confused. “Why wouldn’t I call you sir? You’re my boss. Well, not my immediate boss. But you’re the big boss. Which is worse. What am I supposed to call you?”
“Grayson. My name.”
She smiled.
“What’s funny?”
“Your name.”
“I don’t look like a Grayson?”
She thought about it. “Actually you do look like a Grayson. But it’s just a funny name, that’s all.”
“Jameesha Latoya aren’t exactly tearing down the household names department either,” he shot back.
She laughed, lifted her glass as if to say touché, and took a sip.
And that was another thing he liked about her. She appreciated jest. And she took everything in stride. Not too high. Not too low. Except when it came to that sister of hers.
“What do people call you? Jameesha or Latoya?”
“I only use Jameesha when I have to use my first name. But most people call me Toya. My mother calls me both.”
“I take it you don’t care for your first name?”
“It’s not the name. It’s the story behind the name.
My mama named me after the woman my daddy married when he and my mama broke up.
And it wasn’t because she loved the name.
It was just to get back at him for leaving her and never marrying her.
It’s like she didn’t think about me at all.
Just her anger towards my father. I guess it never felt like my name to me. ”
Grayson nodded. “People can do the darndest things, Latoya. I get it.”
Toya liked that about him. Because he did seem to “get” her.
“Do you have a relationship with your father?”
“Not really. He and his wife had four or five children and he was the perfect daddy to them, and the perfect husband to her by all accounts. But he kind of forgot about me and Keisha. So we forgot about him.”
Grayson understood parent issues. He’d been at odds with his parents from the day he was born. “Have you ever been married, or have children?” he asked Toya.
“No kids, but I was married once.”
This interested him. “Were you?”
“I sure was. When I was twenty-three years old. We lasted less than four months.”
“That’s not very long. What happened?”
“He fell in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. Simple as that. So I divorced him. I wasn’t staying with somebody that didn’t want me.”
Grayson studied her. “But you loved him?”
She hesitated. Then she nodded. “Yes, very much so. Or I wouldn’t have married him.”
“Do you ever see him?”
“He and his new wife left Ocala like fourteen years ago. I haven’t seen him since. And even when I used to see him, he would blame me for our breakup. He said I worked too much. Like that was enough for him to go out and cheat.”
“Right yeah? It happened in my very first relationship too.”
Toya studied him. “You cheated?”
“No. I don’t cheat. She said I worked too much as well, and she didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. But it wasn’t about cheating.”
He didn’t cheat. If she had a dollar every time a man said those words and did the exact opposite she’d be a millionaire. But somehow she believed Grayson. “Did you love her?” she asked him.
“Hell no,” he said so quickly that Toya laughed at the way he said it.
“Besides,” he added with a smile of his own, “what’s love got to do with it anyway?”
Toya wasn’t smiling then. “Love has everything to do with it in my book.” She said it with all sincerity.
Which, at first, surprised Grayson by the level of her sincerity. But then it touched him too. Was this girl for real? Or was she playing him like a fiddle? As he stared at her, he was still trying to figure that out.
But trafficking in deep emotions was a road he made it his business to always bypass. He quickly got back to the subject at hand. “He blamed you for the breakup. Now they’re blaming you for something else that’s not your fault,” he said.
Toya knew he was deflecting, but that was okay too. She nodded. “It’s like no matter where I go, no matter what I do, I can’t get any breaks.” Although she said it with a smile, he knew she meant it to her core.
And the sadness of it staggered him.