“Friends and relations,
send salutations.
Sure as the stars shine above.
This is Christmas,
yes, Christmas my dear.
The time of year,
to be,
with the one you love.
Then won’t you tell me,
you’ll never more roam.
Christmas and New Year,
will find you home.
There’ll be no more sorrow,
no grief and pain.
And I’ll be happy.
Happy.
Once again.”
He took a long drag on his cigar as that haunting guitar hook played over his stereo. Happy, the song said. He was thirty-seven years old. No wife. No children. No real life beyond work. And that song was talking about being happy?
What on earth, he wondered, was that?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Janet placed breakfast on the table and seventy-year-old Morris “Mo” Riley smiled a big, toothy smile. “You’re going to make a great wife someday, Baby Girl,” he said as he stared down lovingly at those Oklahoma cheese grits, those eggs over-easy, and that country-fried steak he always adored. “Best meal of the day!” he added.
“Remember I’m taking you to your doctor’s appointment after work,” Janet said as she began stuffing papers into her briefcase. “Be ready to go. We’ll only have fifteen minutes to get there.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mo said. “We’ll get there with a minute to spare the way you always do it. You’re the one-minute girl. Always on time, but just by a minute.”
Janet laughed. A year after she left the Shetfield textile mill job and established herself at Rooney and Rice, she moved out of her room in that boarding house on Grundy Street and leased an apartment. And then she went searching for Mo Riley. She began where it left off for her: at the little house she moved into when she was four years old. At the house those social workers moved her out of when she was six years old after Mo’s wife had died. But he had moved out of that house, too, according to a neighbor, nearly eight years ago.
But Janet kept searching. She went from pillar to post searching at the various rooms he had rented and other places he’d stayed. Until finally she found him whittling away in a poorly run nursing home for the poorest of the poor elderly. The place reeked. He was filthy and severely overmedicated to a point of stupor. And Janet was angry. She told them she was his daughter (she had, after all, once been his foster daughter), and they allowed her to take him with her with no further questions asked. They seemed glad to be rid of him.
She moved him into her apartment, and later into the small house she was now purchasing. He improved immediately, got better as the years came and went, and was now his old self again. He was quite capable of taking care of himself and her beside, as he never ceased to remind her.
“What are we doing for Christmas this year, Baby Girl?” he asked her as he ate.
“Same thing we do every year. Eat and watch basketball.”
“And then on Christmas night. You remember, right?”
“Remember what?”
“Janet! I’m going to the casino with the Golden Girls like I do every year!” The “Golden Girls” were his gambling partners. All senior citizens. All retired. All flirty as hell. He loved it because he was the only male in the group.
“Just messing with you,” Janet said with a smile. “Yes, I remember. You know I remember. Ethel is driving, right?”
“With her half-blind self, yes, she is,” said Mo. “But I’ll take the wheel if I have to.”
“You don’t have a license,” Janet said. “You’d better not.”
Mo smiled. “Just joking.” Then he looked at Janet. “But what about you?”
“What about me?”
“What you gon’ do Christmas night while I’m gone?”
“I have this book I plan to read. With you out of the house, I just might get enough uninterrupted time to actually finish it.”
“You need a man, Janet,” Mo said bluntly.
“Don’t start.”
“You need a man! When since that became controversial? You’re twenty-eight years old. You’re gonna be thirty soon.”
“I thought I was going to be twenty-nine soon.”
“And you never even been on a date with a man before,” Mo continued.
Richard crossed Janet’s mind. It was six years ago, but could that have been classified as a date?
“You should be dating several men,” Mo said.
“Men don’t date women who look like me,” Janet said bluntly too. “At least not any man around here.”
Mo frowned. “Since when a good man don’t want to date a good woman?”
“Okay, I stand corrected. They don’t want to date me,” Janet said.
“Since when?”
“Since all my life, Mo! They don’t bother with me. So stop going on and on about something that doesn’t matter. Please.”
“But why?” Mo asked. “It don’t make no sense! You’re smart, there’s not a lazy bone in your body, and you clean your ass every single day. What more they want? And you’re beautiful, too, Janet.”
“Don’t,” Janet said, shaking her head.
“You are beautiful! And a good man will want to date you.”
“I’m shovel face. I’m horse face. I’m Plain Jane. Men don’t look at me, they look pass me to the other girl. Which is fine. I’ve resigned myself to that reality when I was still a teenager. I accept that fact. I don’t need a man to complete me anyway. I complete myself. My Lord and I,” she said with a smile. “So just don’t patronize me, okay? Your wife, God rest the dead, was a gorgeous woman herself. Even you wouldn’t have dated somebody like me had we been contemporaries, and they don’t get any better than you.” Then Janet grabbed up her briefcase and keys. “Just be ready for your doctor’s appointment,” she said to him as she walked over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she hurried to the back door that led outside to the carport.
“You just be here on time,” he said to her, “and I’ll be ready.”
“You know I’ll be here,” said Janet. “I’d never stand up one of my dearest friends.”
“Quit lying,” said Mo. “I’m your only friend.”
Janet laughed, but hurried on out of the door.
But as soon as that door slammed shut, Mo’s smile left. Every night he asked the Lord to keep him on this earth long enough to see Janet happy and in love and ready to start a family. Because he knew she was telling nothing but the truth. And it angered him. Because, back in the day, she wouldn’t have been his type either. Great-looking whorish girls, with plenty of street smarts, were his type.
And that was a shame, he knew. Because they didn’t make women greater than Janet. What young girl in her early twenties would have searched up some old geezer like him and brought him home to live with her? He should have been forgotten in that nursing home. But Janet didn’t forget him. She brought him home with her and kept him with her for the past five years. Because that was the kind of wonderful woman she was. But how in the world were any of those superficial, foolish men ever going to know that if all they could see was the outside, and the inside didn’t matter to them? And when even he wouldn’t have bothered getting to know somebody like her better, either, back in the day?
He pushed his plate away in frustration. He just didn’t want her to end up alone. No husband. No children. No life?
He no longer had an appetite.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She parked her car in the nearly full parking lot, grabbed her briefcase and Dunkin Donuts cup of coffee, and hurried into the front entrance of the Rooney and Rice Consultants office building with just two minutes to spare.
“You time it like a pro,” one of her coworkers said jokingly as she hurried to her cubicle. She smiled, although she wasn’t pleased. Barely making it to work on time every single day wasn’t something to be proud of. Especially since she and Marveen W
hitaker and only a handful more were the only African Americans in the entire company, and appearances did matter. Even though she had yet to be late.
But as soon as she plopped down in her desk chair, one of her coworkers were already calling her name. “Jane? Jane?”
She knew it was going to be about one of them asking her to help them to do this, or show them how to do that. Knowledge was still power in that office, and everybody wanted to pick Janet’s brain.
“Jane? Jane?” her coworker whispered again.
When she first arrived at Rooney and Rice six years ago, she was Janet Evans to all of her coworkers. And she loved the fact that, just like at her other jobs, she had reclaimed her name that she felt the Henleys had stolen. But a few days into her tenure there, a young lady was hired who knew her from the Henleys’ neighborhood. She started calling her Jane since that was the only name she knew her by, and others took up the name too. The girl was fired the very next month, for insubordination, but the nickname stuck. Gone was Janet. She was Jane again. She corrected her coworkers incessantly in the beginning. She would prefer to be called by her Christian name, she’d tell them. And some honored her request. But most never did. Jane was simpler to remember, and seemed to fit better than Janet, one coworker had the nerve to tell her.
“Jane!”
“I heard you the first time. I’m putting up my purse.” She placed her purse in the bottom desk drawer in her cubical and then rolled her chair to the cubicle next to hers. Beth Pataki was her best friend at work. And also a big gossip.
“What do you need help with today?” Janet asked her.
“Help? I don’t need any help.”
Janet was embarrassed that she had assumed too much. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought. Never mind. What did you want?”
Beth lowered her voice. “Did you hear the news?”
“What news?”
“About Kimmie, girl. She got another raise!”
Kimmie Fisher. Hired three years ago. Janet trained her. Now Kimmie was the unit supervisor. “Didn’t she just get a raise last year?” Janet asked.
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Beth said. “They just gave her another one! We haven’t gotten any in years, and they keep handing it over to her lazy butt. But, of course, we aren’t sleeping our way to the top.”
“Um-hun,” said Marveen Whitaker, who sat in the cubicle on the opposite side of Beth, and who agreed with Beth without even showing her face.
Not that they had any proof that the girl was sleeping her way to success. They didn’t. But it was the only explanation that they could think of. The alternative, Janet knew, would say too much about them.
From the moment Kimmie was hired there were rumors about her and her sleep partners around the office, but Janet never trafficked in rumors. She left a job over rumors. She, instead, had facts on her side. And the fact was clear: she trained Kimmie. She outperformed Kimmie every single year. Kimmie got the raises. Kimmie got the promotions. Kimmie cozied up to William Rice like he was her man. And she was only one example of all the people who Janet had trained, that were now ahead of her.
After hearing the news that Kimmie continued to be rewarded for her lackluster work performance, it only confirmed for Janet that the decision she made just a few days ago was the absolute right one.
But when she didn’t respond to Beth’s news and Marveen’s amen, Beth looked at her coworker. “Did you hear me? She’s getting another raise. What do you have to say about that?”
“What am I supposed to say?” Janet asked. “Because all my raise requests are turned down, I should want hers turned down too? How will that help me?”
“Right is right and wrong is wrong,” said Beth.
“That’s right,” said Marveen from her amen corner. “And two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“You and me both have been here longer than she has,” Beth continued talking to Janet, “and we both have better results with every client we serve. But she gets the raise? She gets the promotion? It’s wrong I tell you. It’s so unfair!”
But being unfairly treated wasn’t news to Janet. That was the story of her life. The news would be if she were treated fairly.
Although, deep down, hearing that news did hurt. But what could she do about it? She had to work for a living. She needed that paycheck. “Welcome to life,” she said, slid back behind her own desk, and turned on her computer.
Both Beth and Marveen leaned their chairs back so that they could look each other in the eyes, and then they rolled their eyes. Janet never played along. She always tried to stay above the fray. “But those are the ones,” Marveen once told Beth, “that show up for work the next day and shoot everybody in sight. She’s as pissed as we are!”
But when the doors opened from the executive office suite, and William Rice, the boss, came hurrying out with Kimmie and another new hire, a brownnoser called Sheldon, Marveen and Beth both quickly rolled their chairs back behind their desks and pretended to be busy.
Janet glanced up when she heard them enter, but she looked back down at her computer screen. Another one of her clients, a local pastor falsely accused of money laundering, had a successful outcome. She was reading how the DA decided to drop the charges.
But if she thought her lack of attention to the boss and his lackeys would be enough for her to read the article in peace, she was mistaken. As William Rice approached her desk, he pointed at her. “You come too, Jane,” he said and didn’t break his stride. “I can use your insight on this one.”
Janet looked up at him. Mo Riley once said she was all eyes because they were so large, and when she was shocked they grew to a whole other level. Did she hear him right?
William looked back at her. “Yes, I’m talking to you,” he said. “Come too!”
“Yes, sir,” Janet said quickly, grabbed her purse out of the bottom desk drawer, and hurried behind the boss too. Four people on one case? It had to be a big one.
Beth and Marveen knew it too. They looked over their cubicle walls at Janet, and then rolled their chairs back to look at each other. Why didn’t they get selected? They never got selected to go on a case with the big man, not ever! But Janet got to go?
Now Janet was in their crosshairs too.
“Ain’t that some bull?” Marveen said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
William Rice drove into the parking lot at the Shetfield Office complex in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma and stopped his car. Then he turned to Kimmie, who sat on the front passenger seat, and then to Janet and Sheldon, who sat in the back. “I’m sure all of you have heard of the Shetfields.”
Janet stared at William. She most definitely had heard of the Shetfields! But what did they have to do with them?
“Of course we’ve heard of them,” said Kimmie. “They own most of the state.”
“And Texas, too, from what I hear,” said Sheldon.
“That’s right,” said William. “They’re big in Texas too. And Richard Shetfield, at least here in Oklahoma, is at the top of that food chain.”
Janet’s heart began to pound. Richard Shetfield? She was about to meet Richard again?
“He’s the one who’s giving us this chance to represent him,” William continued.
Sheldon smiled. “You mean he’s hired us?” he asked.
“Not yet, no,” said William. He was the younger of the two men who owned Rooney and Rice, and he was a hot shot who, as Mo Riley would say, thought more of himself than he ought. But he knew how to rope in their biggest clients. “That’s what this meeting is about,” he continued. “We’ve got to earn his business.”
Janet was stunned. She was about to see Richard again? After all these years of never seeing one hint of him? It seemed surreal to her now.
“Why would he want to hire a firm from Cope,” asked Sheldon, “when he could have easily chosen one of the major consulting firms right here in Tulsa?”
“Because the problems he’s having involves his textile mill here in Cope,” s
aid William.
Janet remembered that mill. She worked there for just one week once upon a time.
“What problems are they having at the mill?” Kimmie asked.
“Lawsuit threats over harassment of some sort. His assistant wouldn’t give me the details. But we’re about to find out,” William added, as he began unbuckling his seat belt.
“Why didn’t you tell us sooner, Billy?” Kimmie asked and Sheldon immediately elbowed Janet. And Janet knew why. It was because Kimmie called the boss Billy. Because that was how personal their relationship had become. But for Janet, that was their business. Mo always told her: “Stay out of white folks’ business.” And she did.
“Had you told us sooner,” Kimmie continued, “we could have been better prepared.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you. I don’t want you better prepared,” William said. “He’ll see right through those preparations. He doesn’t like to hear rehearsed pitches. That’s a well-known fact. He wants a straight answer to whatever question he asks us, not some three-point presentation response.”
“He wants us to fly by the seat of our pants,” Janet said with a smile, trying to ease her own discomfort, and Sheldon laughed.
But William gave her a hard, cold look through his rearview mirror. “He doesn’t want your ass to do anything,” he said to her angrily. “You just keep your mouth shut. If I’m not talking, Kimmie will talk. He has a thing for beautiful women, and Kimmie’s the only one in this car who fits that bill. You’re only here to give me insight after the fact, not during it. You watch and you listen. That’s all you will be doing. You feel me? Isn’t that how you people say it? You feel me?”
Then William got out of the car. Kimmie got out with a grin on her face. She loved her elevated status.
But when Sheldon and Janet got out of the backseat and began walking behind the boss and their supervisor, he leaned toward Janet. “He’s an asshole,” he said to her in a low voice, his blue eyes filled with compassion. “Don’t let him get to you.”
Plain Jane Evans and the Billionaire Page 7