Rabbit

by Patricia Williams

  How did Miss Campbell know I’d always dreamed of having the kind of job where you got to wear scrubs to work every day? Even after I quit forging checks, I still kept my fake “Grady Hospital Staff” ID in my wallet. I really liked the idea of helping people.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Medical assistant, I want to do that.”

  It turns out that getting a medical assistant certificate is not easy. First I had to get my GED, which meant learning all the stuff—eighth grade all the way through high school—I’d missed while I was slinging dope and raising kids. That took six and a half months. Then I had to enroll in a nine-month medical assistant program at a night school located in an office in the back of a strip mall. When I went to sign up, the lady at the front desk handed me a stack of papers to fill out so I could get the seven-thousand-dollar student loan I’d need to pay for the class. Nowhere on the forms did it say it was going to take me almost twenty years to pay off the loan.

  I went to Medical Assistant School five days a week, and learned how to draw blood, weigh babies, give vaccinations, and take blood pressure. On February 11, 1997, the school held a little graduation ceremony. Michael and our six kids all cheered when the program director called my name. Even Miss Campbell came to the ceremony. “I’m so proud of you,” she said, giving me a hug. “You’ve worked so hard!”

  After Medical Assistant School all I had left was a four-week class at the PEACH office, called Job Readiness. I joined a group of other unemployed “ladies and gentlemen,” as the instructor liked to call us, to learn important skills, like “dress for success,” which, lucky for me, turned out to be the exact same outfit as the one I wore passing bad checks at the mall. It took the girl with the giant pawprint tattoos across her bosom three separate tries to get the look of “appropriate office attire” right. One day she showed up in four-inch heels like she was hittin’ the club; the next day she came in a yellow satin church hat, which I’m guessing she got by jumping an old lady on Sunday morning.

  I’d taken three Job Readiness classes when I realized I was already ready. I started searching help-wanted ads in the back of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and found what I was looking for in the Monday paper, right at the bottom of the page. A doctor’s office out in Sugar Hill was looking for an assistant. I knew the area; I’d driven through it with Lamont. It’s what he called “quality.”

  “This is it,” I said to Michael, showing him the ad. “This is the perfect job for me.”

  I pulled up to the doctor’s office twenty minutes early for my interview, my stomach doing flips. At five to nine, I slipped out of the car, smoothed the front of my black slacks, and walked inside.

  The office manager, Miss Shelly, sat behind her desk and asked me all the questions I’d already practiced in Job Readiness: What’s your greatest strength? I’m a quick learner! Where do you see yourself in five years? Working here, I hope! What’s your greatest weakness? Sometimes I just care too much!

  She asked if I had any children. When I told her I was raising six kids, her face lit up. She had four of her own, she said, and proceeded to tell me all about them while I nodded and smiled. On her desk was a picture of her four-year-old daughter, Christy, dressed in cowboy boots and a Dolly Parton wig, looking like she was next in line for JonBenet Ramsey’s killer.

  “My baby girl got second place prize in the Miss Precious Baby Peach Pageant,” said Miss Shelly, with pride, when she saw me glance at the photo. To me, her baby looked like a miniature hooker. But I said, “She’s real pretty, ma’am. She should have won first place!”

  I guess complimenting Christy was part of the interview, because Miss Shelly offered me the job. “Hon,” she said, “you have such a sunny disposition, I’d love to bring you on board!” I was going be making twelve dollars an hour, plus benefits; Michael was going to be so proud.

  Miss Shelly stood up and walked around her desk to give me a hug. “There’s just one more thing,” she said. Then she dropped the bomb.

  She wanted me to go to the police station down the road and ask the officer at the front desk to run a criminal background check. “It’s nothing,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Just a formality. After you bring back the paperwork, we’ll sit down and look at the schedule. I want to get you started right away.”

  It had been seven years since Officer Harris had busted me on Ashby Grove. I’d done my jail time, cleaned up my act, and gone back to school. As far as I was concerned, I’d put the criminal part of my life behind me. It was history I wanted to bury. But I guess there are some things the world won’t ever let you forget.

  When I handed my ID to the officer, I mentally prepared myself for what I was about to receive: a piece of paper detailing my charge of “Possession with Intent to Distribute.” I didn’t want to see it, but I knew I had to face the facts.

  I almost passed out from shock when instead of a single sheet of paper, the officer handed me a report almost twenty pages long. “Hang on,” he said, passing me the stack. “I gotta go put some more paper in the machine.”

  I took the report out to my car and read it over, my heart sinking lower with each turn of the page. There were charges from incidents I barely remembered, like “Abandonment of Certain Dangerous Drugs” in 1991, and, three years later, in 1994, a charge for “Financial Transaction Card Theft” for the time I went on a shopping spree with a stolen credit card DeMarcus had traded me for a ten-dollar rock. The most recent charge was only a year old: a 1996 misdemeanor for “Depositing Bad Checks.” The charge sounded a lot worse that it was. I imagined myself telling Miss Shelly: I can explain that one! Michael’s paycheck wasn’t gonna come till Friday. But it was Wednesday and the kids were hungry, so I wrote a check at the grocery store for twenty-seven dollars and thirteen cents on my empty bank account. But I paid it all back!

  But who was I kidding? Even if I could explain why I wrote one bad check, it wouldn’t make a difference. I had twenty pages saying I wasn’t to be trusted. And in case Miss Shelly wasn’t sure, right there on the first page of my Criminal History Report were the worst words of all: “Convicted Felon.”

  I felt like I’d been blindsided. Nobody at medical assistant school asked me if I was a convicted felon before they took my money. None of the instructors at Job Readiness ever brought this up. Maybe if I’d heard, even one time, “criminal background check,” I would have known this was coming instead of getting my hopes up, like a fool.

  I sat in the car for almost an hour staring at the pages until they began to blur. All that work, all that studying, all that time and effort and student loan money. Why did I even bother? Miss Shelly would never hire somebody like me. Nobody would. I felt stupid for even trying.

  I went home and told Michael the position had already been filled.

  When I told Miss Campbell what happened, sitting in her office later that week, she took my hands in hers. “I’m so sorry,” she said, leaning forward. “That must have been very difficult.”

  “I was so embarrassed,” I said. “I almost threw my jacket over my head and ran out of that police station. But I just got my hair fixed, so you know I wasn’t trying to mess up my weave.”

  She let out a little chuckle. “Of course.”

  “It’s not like I don’t know I’ve done wrong in my life,” I continued. “But I swear, I never even seen some of those charges before.”

  “Really?” Miss Campbell sat up in her chair, looking concerned. “If there’s been some kind of computer error on your records, we should look into it and have it corrected.”

  “Yeah!” I said, getting excited by the thought. If we could erase some of these charges, I’d have a chance! I pulled the papers out of my purse and scanned the first page. “Well, like this one here for assault . . .”

  “Yes?” Miss Campbell leaned forward. I could tell she wanted my criminal background to be a mistake as much as I did.

  I carefully reread the charge. “Actually,” I said, looking up from the page and b
iting my lip, “come to think of it, I do remember this. It’s from the time I hit one of my customers with my car. . . Yeah, okay, maybe I did do that.” I turned the page. “Okay, so this one right here! It says ‘Insulting or Abusing Public School Teachers, Administrators, or School Bus Drivers’ . . .” I paused, remembering an incident that had happened shortly after Michael and I moved to Riverdale. I’d gotten onto a school bus and cussed out the driver for driving off the day before without my kids because they weren’t at the stop on time. All I did was very carefully explain to the driver, “Do that again, bitch, and I will knock your gotdamn block off.”

  I looked up at Miss Campbell. “Okay, never mind that one. I just didn’t know it was gonna be on my permanent record . . .”

  I turned the page again. “Okay, this I didn’t do!” I tapped the paper with my finger. “. . . Oh wait. Maybe I did do that.”

  I glanced at Miss Campbell. She looked stunned. I cleared my throat and started neatly folding the papers and putting them back in my purse. “You know, now that I’m giving this a closer look . . .” I shook my head and laughed. “I guess I wouldn’t hire me either. I mean, damn. I look like a career criminal!”

  Miss Campbell’s mouth was beginning to curl up in a smile. She shook her head quickly, like she was trying to shake herself serious. But it didn’t work; she started to laugh, too.

  Ever since I first met Miss Campbell I noticed she wasn’t like any other caseworker I ever had. Those other ladies would listen to stories of my childhood, clutch their hearts, and tell me how sorry they were for all my troubles. When I told Miss Campbell how Mama taught me to pickpocket before I learned to read, or how Derrick had more baby mamas than most men had teeth, she cracked up. Sometimes she got to laughing so loud she had to close her office door because the other caseworkers were complaining about the noise. The more she laughed, the more I wanted to make her laugh.

  “Twenty pages!” I howled. “It was thicker than a phone book. When that officer handed me my Criminal History, I thought he was gonna arrest me on the spot for using up all his ink.” The next thing I knew, the two of us were cracking up so hard we could barely catch our breath.

  “Oh, Patricia,” Miss Campbell said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Honey, you’re out there trying to be a medical assistant, but I think you missed your calling. The way you turn a sad story around, you should be a comedian! You’re the funniest person I know.”

  Chapter 25

  Eight Minus Four

  Sweetie hardly ever came to see her girls. By the time they’d been with us for almost ten years, she’d only visited a handful of times. She’d show up, swear she was off drugs, and then months, even years would pass, before she’d come back. Every time she disappeared, I’d have to deal with the girls’ broken hearts. “Don’t worry about it,” I’d say, patting the back of whichever one of them was most upset. “You’ll see your mama when you see her.” But the girls weren’t stupid. They knew Sweetie was choosing drugs over taking care of them.

  I tried to teach my nieces that there was no point thinking about shit you can’t change. That’s how I survived. If I had a bad feeling, I pushed it away and kept it moving. That was the main difference between me and my sister. Sweetie and I had the same shitty time coming up—we both went hungry, got beat, and had Mr. John touch on us—but I shoved down those memories while she chased them away getting high.

  I thought if I could teach the kids to ignore their sadness, they’d be okay. But Jonelle was so little. Whenever Sweetie would show up only to vanish again, she’d cry her eyes out and start wetting the bed. Destiny would stop talking and Diamond would start acting up at school. Sometimes I wished Sweetie wouldn’t come around at all. Without her interrupting, our lives were pretty good.

  Michael and I were raising six kids. Most people couldn’t handle all the noise and commotion, but I loved it. The laughing and arguing, the clothes all over the floor, the missing toothbrushes, the shoe with no match, and the never-ending list of things I had to do to make sure everybody was happy, clean, and fed, being a mama to all those babies was everything I’d ever dreamed. That’s why when Jonelle, Sweetie’s youngest, was two years old, Michael and I decided to have one more.

  From the second I got pregnant, I’d never seen Michael so happy. “She’s got my nose!” he exclaimed, grinning and pointing at the screen when we went for our first ultrasound.

  I looked over at the technician and rolled my eyes.

  “Sir,” she said, “that’s the baby’s foot.”

  Our daughter was born March 25, 1998. We named her Michaela, for her daddy. After we brought her home, all Michael wanted to do was hold her in his arms and sing K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life” over and over.

  “You’re making me jealous,” I said one night when he wouldn’t come to bed. He just laughed and kept on singing. “I mean it!” I yelled, stomping out of the room. With all the love and affection he was pouring on that little girl, it’s a miracle I even got Michael to look my way. But I guess being a daddy put him in a baby-making mood, because eight months later, I popped up pregnant again. This time we had a boy. We named our son after his daddy, too, Michael Jr., but everybody called him Junebug.

  Then we had eight; Junebug in diapers, LaDontay and Ashley in high school, and the rest of the kids filling the space in between. We put the older kids in every kind of after-school activity—track, cheerleading, football, and baseball. Ashley played viola in her high school orchestra and LaDontay was in the ROTC. I went to PTA meetings, volunteered for school field trips, and spent hours standing on the sidelines, in the sun and the rain, cheering for whichever kid was on the field.

  At night I put all the kids to bed, just like June Cleaver, turning out the lights: “Good night, Ashley. Good night, LaDontay. Good night, Diamond and Destiny. ’Night, Jonelle and Michaela. Sleep tight, Nikia and Junebug. I love you!” Then I’d climb into bed beside Michael and listen to him snore like a gotdamn freight train pulling into the station.

  LaDontay ran track. She was good, too. The summer after she finished eleventh grade, she was invited to a meet in Florida to qualify for the Junior Olympics. Michael and I weren’t about to let her go down there by herself, so we packed everybody into the back of our Montero Jeep, drove six hours to Orlando, and checked into the Marriott hotel. The trick to having eight kids in a single hotel room is you can’t walk in with them all at the same time. You have to send them through the lobby and past the front desk one by one, telling them to run when the clerk looks the other away.

  Back then, Michael and I were both working the assembly line at General Motors. Before the trip, we did two months of overtime, scrimping and saving almost five thousand dollars between us so we could show the kids a good time. In Orlando, we took them to the beach, the movies, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. When we got home, Michael pulled out his wallet. Thirty-four dollars was all we had left. It was worth every penny. That trip was the last time we’d ever have that much fun with Sweetie’s four girls.

  The older kids were at school and I was home with the babies one morning, when the phone rang. It was Sweetie on the other end of the line. I felt my heart stop when she told me why she’d called. “Rabbit,” she said, “I’m coming to get my kids.”

  Sweetie had gone to family court, she explained, and filled out all the paperwork to take away my temporary custody. I guess she knew by the way I hung up on her that I’d put up a fight, because when she turned up at my house later that day, she brought along the cops.

  We all crowded into the kitchen: me, Michael, Sweetie, two police officers, and Miss Campbell, who rushed right over after I called her in tears. The kids were upstairs and Michael had his hand on my shoulder, trying to keep me calm. “Why are you doing this?” I asked Sweetie. “You know you can’t take care of them.”

  “They need to be with me. I’m their mama,” she said, folding her arms in front of her chest. “Besides, I got the papers. You can’t stop me.” I stared at my sister,
trying to think of something to say to make her change her mind. Maybe if she knew how much work it took. It wasn’t just the times the girls were sick, or crying, or bickering with each other, stomping on my last nerve. Parenting required shit Sweetie would never even think of. Like the time I had to run to school on picture day and beg the photographer to do a group shot with four kids at once because I couldn’t pay for eight different photo packages. Or the time I had to get LaDontay a date for the ninth-grade dance. It wasn’t just any dance, it was the ROTC Military Ball. Ashley was going with our neighbor’s son, but LaDontay didn’t have a date. I was the one who saw the nice-looking boy working behind the counter at Subway and said, “You want to take my niece to the dance?” I hired a limo. I bought LaDontay and Ashley sequined dresses and had them looking like superstars when the boys came to pick them up. Sweetie would never do all that. She had her chance to be a mama to her girls. She was a fool for missing out.

  “How you gonna take care of them?” I asked. “You still getting high . . .”

  “Nah, Rabbit,” she said, cutting me off. “I don’t do that no more. I cleaned my shit up. I got my own place, and I want my kids.”

  Looking at her standing in my kitchen, waving the custody papers in my face, all I could think of was the night I picked up her babies to come live with me. In my mind’s eye, I could still see Sweetie kneeling in the middle of her filthy living room, trying to get her daughters to give her a hug. I remembered the way the girls were covered in sores, with no shoes on their feet. I pictured little Jonelle, so tiny and helpless. In that moment I realized it didn’t matter if Sweetie swore on a stack of Bibles that she would spend the rest of her life taking care of those girls. It didn’t matter because when I looked at my sister, all I saw was Mama. That’s when I lost it.