Whatever It Takes

by Gwynne Forster

  “What makes you think I’d try to take it?”

  “You’ve already tried. Bradley told me that you would stop at nothing to get into that house and search it for Lacette’s brooch, and from the way he said it, I can imagine what you’ve been up to. One of these days, your recklessness and your self-centeredness are going to catch up with you. God is not pleased with your behavior, Kellie. Now, I want to know why you’ve stopped coming to church. If I’m forced to announce that I no longer live in the parsonage, the deacons will insist that my family leave there. Unless you want to hasten that day, come to church Sunday, and tell Lacette to do the same.”

  The more and the bigger the rocks people put in her way, the more determined she was to get what she wanted, and the more exciting the challenge. The morality of the issue, the rightness of it didn’t occur to Kellie; to her mind, she should have the brooch because she wanted it. He can’t frighten me. He’s too proud to indict his own daughter. Knowing his need to have the last word, she didn’t reply to his indictment of her, and when their food arrived, she used that as a reason to change the subject. He, too, seemed glad to avoid further confrontation.

  “You might want to start looking for a place of your own,” he said, giving her the same advice he gave Lacette. “Before long, some changes will have to be made.”

  “Mama thinks the two of you may get back together.”

  He stopped eating, and at the expression of incredulity on his face, she nearly apologized for having mentioned it. “She doesn’t think any such thing.”

  She didn’t probe, because she knew he couldn’t be led; he had said all he planned to say on the subject of his relationship with his wife.

  They walked out of the restaurant to an overcast sky. The wind whipped around her legs while she walked the half block with her father to his car. “I only have a block and a half to walk, Daddy, but thanks anyway,” she said when he offered to drive her back to City Hall. She reached up, kissed his cheek, wound the long woolen scarf around her neck, and headed back to work.

  “I need a plan,” she said to herself. “A good one.”

  While Kellie connived to appropriate her sister’s jewelry, Lacette was about to embark upon a life-changing adventure. Buoyed by the chance to demonstrate bread makers and other kitchen tools made by the Warren Pitch Company, she went about setting up her booth in the west lobby of the Belle Époque, a five-star hotel in downtown Frederick at the edge of the historic district.

  “If you need anything,” the manager of the hotel told her, “all you have to do is dial # 418 on the house phone. I’ll be at your service.”

  She thanked him and hoped she wouldn’t need so much as a thread; his leer wasn’t so blatant that she would dare accuse him of it, but it had sufficient strength to get his message across. And his strut announced that if she accepted his unspoken invitation, he was well prepared to back it up. She released a labored breath, symbolically cleansing her system and her thoughts of him and got busy organizing her booth, placing notices around the lobby and writing out press releases to send to local television and radio announcers. She wished the company had given her a longer engagement, but her contract covered November the fifteenth through January the second, the peak selling period of the year, and she intended to make the most of the opportunity.

  She decided not to wear a cook’s uniform, as most demonstrators of foods and kitchen products did; she wanted to meet people, especially men, and she wanted to be at her best. Early that afternoon, she noticed a man decorating the lobby near her with branches of autumn leaves, pumpkins, and gourds.

  Mmm, she thought, Wonder who he is. He didn’t come near her, but when he looked her way and she smiled at him, he smiled in return. But he didn’t walk over to her and introduce himself, and he didn’t speak. Quickly, her mind returned to the business at hand, for hotel guests began crowding around her. By six-thirty that evening, she had twenty-two orders, more than she had dreamed of getting in one afternoon. She closed for the day, and had started to the lower-level garage where she parked her car, when she passed a florist shop and, remembering the man she saw earlier in the day, she walked over to the house phone and dialed #418.

  “Could you please tell me who the man is who decorated the lobby for Thanksgiving?”

  “His name is Douglas Rawlins. Why? Did he get out of line?”

  “No. He definitely did not. Thanks. Good night.” Let him chew on that, she said to herself. None of his business why I wanted to know the man’s name. She entered the elevator with the receptionist who worked across the corridor from her booth.

  “My name is Lourdes,” the woman said. “If you’re driving, could I get a lift to the bus stop? It’s starting to snow, and I didn’t bring an umbrella.”

  “I’m Lacette. Where do you live?”

  “On Elk, not far from that Baptist church.”

  “Then, I’ll drop you home.” She discovered that she liked Lourdes, a Ladino woman of African descent, and wanted them to become friends.

  At home, she found Kellie pacing the floor like a caged animal and the dining room air heavy with the odor of Kellie’s expensive perfume. Her initial reaction to it was to open a window, but she didn’t want the blast of twenty-four-degree air that would follow, so she went up the stairs, looked in on her mother, found that she wasn’t in what she and Kellie called Cynthia’s Sanctuary, went into her own room and closed the door.

  The following Tuesday at lunchtime, having settled on her plan, Kellie went to the house her father inherited and stood with her back to the great elm that for years had occupied a spot between the sidewalk and the street facing the house. Grateful for the warming temperatures, she leaned against the tree for over half an hour waiting to see what, if any, activity would indicate that the house was being renovated. She had to get in there before anyone disarranged it. As she was about to leave, disappointed, a white pickup truck with a wildcat logo and an inscription she couldn’t make out drove up into the front yard and parked. A man jumped out and started for the front door.

  She rushed to the door as the man inserted a key. “I was waiting for you,” she said. “I don’t have my key, and I can go in with you.”

  He stared down at her until she took a step backward. “No, you can’t, babe. Nobody’s going in here but me. You steal something, and there goes my job. My boss said nobody is to enter this house while I’m here but me. I don’t know what your game is, sis, but you’re wasting your time.”

  She wished it wasn’t so cold, and he could see how good she looked without her coat. Not many men would willingly pass up thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-eight measurements on a five feet, nine inch, good-looking woman in a size ten dress. “I’ll come back when you’re in a better mood,” she said. He narrowed his left eye, and she added, “I mean, when you can appreciate a real woman.”

  His grin affirmed what she had guessed, that his teeth hadn’t had dental care for quite some time, and she stepped away from him, certain that the offense might not be due to laborious work but to his hygiene habits. “When I get to the place that I can’t take care of a real woman,” he snarled, “I’ll be in a pine box.” He stepped inside, closed the door and locked it. She realized the man had a temper, probably an unruly one, and told herself to be careful with him. The thing to do, she figured, was to get there when he was leaving or ready to leave. She’d have to find a reasonable excuse for her boss, but she would find one.

  She managed to get back to her desk and sit down a minute before her boss walked in and dropped several sheets of paper in her incoming box. “I need these press releases before you leave today, and before you start typing, read them over for errors and correct any you find.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, her teeth clenched and her gaze averted. The woman left, and she would have given a lot to be able to throw the papers back at her and walk off the job.

  “Now, don’t burst a blood vessel,” Mabel said in her unique way of sympathizing. “The woman has ne
ver heard of the word ‘please,’ and she wouldn’t say ‘thank you’ if you paid her for it. I’d like to shorten the distance between her ears, too, but I’ve got a kid to take care of.”

  Kellie knew that her ire stemmed as much from her guilt about her lunchtime activity as it did from her boss’ treatment of her as a person who didn’t deserve common civility. She needed a job, and since utopia hadn’t come to Frederick, Maryland, neither she nor any other African American could count on getting a white-collar job if somebody white was equally qualified for it. It happened, but you couldn’t count on it; if you had a black face, you’d better be exceptional. She kept her mouth shut, and it needled her to do it. Every time she had to suck up, she hated herself and the person who’d made her a victim of the region’s genteel inequality. She finished the press releases a few minutes before quitting time and took them to her boss’ office.

  “You want to watch your lunch hour, miss,” her boss, Adrienne Hood, said, instead of thanks. “You’re entitled to forty-five minutes, and we give you an hour, but you returned twenty minutes late yesterday and half an hour late today. Your work is fine, but I won’t tolerate your long lunch hours. You understand me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.

  “That’s all.”

  By the time Kellie cleaned off her desk and was ready to leave, she had more than made up the thirty minutes, but that wouldn’t win her Brownie points with her boss. As she trudged home with the sound of wind rustling around her and her boots crushing the grainy ice that drifted down and obscured her vision, she wished for a warm, loving man. But she had long accepted that warm and loving men did not fall for women who did as they chose without regard to the circumstances or consequences. The kind of man she wanted preferred women like Lacette and her mother.

  At the corner that would lead her to Mama Carrie’s house, if she turned there, Kellie used every bit of her willpower to stay away from the house and from the repugnant man she met there at noon. Cleaned up and neatly dressed, the man would be an eye popper. And with that sexy swagger . . . She told herself not to think of the man; he wasn’t clean, and he probably didn’t know a necktie from a bolo tie if, indeed, he’d ever heard of either.

  “The best I can do right now,” she said to herself, “is not make anybody suspicious. I’ll start wearing the ring every day so Daddy and Lacette will think I’m satisfied and don’t care about the brooch.”

  Kellie’s cunning was wasted on Lacette, for her sister rarely remembered that she owned a brooch. Instead, she focused upon the business that she hoped to open early in the coming year. After receiving her first week’s report, the Warren Pitch Company offered to extend her contract until the end of January, and she promised to consider it. Everything depended on how soon Lawrence Bradley could get her papers in order and officially processed. She loved the work and, for the past week had rolled out of bed each morning and skipped down the stairs in her rush to meet the day. She gave a customer a lesson on the role of salt and sugar in making bread dough. The man ordered two bread machines and asked her if she’d be willing to demonstrate recipes from his cookbook.

  She said she would think about it and accepted the man’s card. She didn’t see Douglas Rawlins when he walked up to her booth, and she had to steady herself when a jolt of anticipation shot through her.

  “You’re really good at this,” he said, surprising her with those few words, because he usually nodded when he saw her but didn’t offer conversation.

  “I hope to open my marketing consultancy in a few months,” she said. “I’m enjoying this, because I’m learning how people decide to make a purchase.”

  “Where will you have your office?”

  “Right here in Frederick. My lawyer is checking out some possible places. I’ve dreamed about this since I graduated from college, and my intuition tells me my ship is about to dock.”

  “I’m glad for you. Mine is still a little ways out to sea, but I know it will come in. Well, I’d better be getting back to those miniature cypress trees. The manager wants dozens of them decorated and lighting the lobby for Christmas, and I can’t seem to convince him that one huge, well-decorated Frazier fir will be a hundred times more dramatic. Well . . . see you later.”

  “I wouldn’t mind getting to know him better,” she said to herself. “He’s hardworking, meticulous, and carries himself well. Dignified. I have a hunch something is going to happen, but it doesn’t point to him. We’ll see.”

  She saw him several days later with a replica of a huge turkey that he placed in the barnyard setting he had created for the reading room. “I love the scene in the reading room,” she said, and she did, for it represented Thanksgiving as rural folk still lived it.

  He smiled and kept walking, stunning her with his strange behavior. Annoyed, she followed him to the reading room. “How is it that you can be friendly one day and behave the next as if you’ve never seen me before? I hate that.”

  An expression that she thought suggestive of pain flittered across his face. “I’m sorry, but I have learned that it’s sometimes best to keep to myself, Miss Graham. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll put this bird over there and get on with my work.”

  Outraged, she told Lourdes, the receptionist, what she thought of him. “I don’t know what this is about,” Lourdes said, “but he asked me if you had a sister named Kellie, and when I said you did, he seemed disappointed. Then he nodded and said, ‘I see.’ Does he know your sister?”

  “Probably. He worked at City Hall before he came here, and she’s in the transportation department.”

  “Maybe something happened between them. Why don’t you ask your sister?”

  “Thanks.” But she didn’t say that she would. If Kellie had been as forward with Douglas as she was with most men, Douglas probably expected her to behave the same way. She let out a groan and went back to her booth. Would there ever come a day when there was a man in her life that Kellie didn’t touch?

  Lacette’s somber mood was short lived, however, because shortly thereafter her salesman at Barney’s New and Used Cars called to tell her that her new Mercury Cougar had arrived. She drove her old car, got six hundred dollars for it and headed home in her white sports car.

  “This, I gotta see,” Kellie said. “You didn’t even tell us you were getting rid of that old junk.” She grabbed a jacket from the downstairs hall closet and dashed outside to see it. “Well, would you look at this. Lace has backed into the twenty-first century with a white Mercury Cougar!” She gazed at it, standing near the passenger’s front door with her arms folded to ward off the cold, then dashed back inside.

  “Mama, go look at Lacette’s car.” She looked at Lacette. “Girl, you’re gonna have to get some tight jeans, a tight, red turtleneck sweater and some dark sunglasses and show that baby off. That is a man getter if I ever saw one.”

  Lacette leaned against the sideboard that rested in the dining room by the door leading to the hallway, folded her arms and crossed her ankles. Her sister was not a scatterbrain but, at times, you had to dig deep to find evidence of mature intelligence beneath that long mane that she was so proud of.

  “I’m, thirty-three, Kellie, not thirteen. And who’d want a man tailing behind you because he liked your car? That kind of guy is looking for a meal ticket, and trust me, no man is washing down my food with my wine on a regular basis.”

  “All right. All right. Get off your soap box. Poor thing; you’re gonna die a virgin.”

  Lacette raised an eyebrow. It had never occurred to her that Kellie perceived her as unfulfilled and man-shy. Her white teeth sparkled in what was half a grin and half a grimace. “You think so, huh?”

  If Kellie was after confirmation or denial, she would get neither. During their formative years, she shared everything with her sister, her thoughts, dreams, and possessions. But by the time they reached junior high school, she’d begun to notice that their sharing went one way, from her to Kellie, and that her sister was not averse to takin
g what she wanted if Lacette refused her. After Kellie made a date with the boy she knew was to take Lacette to their high-school senior prom, leaving Lacette without a date and unable to attend, she shielded her private life, including her dates, from her sister.

  Lacette went into the living room where Cynthia sat crocheting and watching Judge Mathis. “If you’d like to try out my new car, Mama, we can go for a ride Sunday afternoon.”

  “I’d love to, dear, but I promised my cousin Jack I’d go over to Baltimore with him Sunday afternoon. He’s a football fanatic and loves the Ravens.”

  “I didn’t know you liked football.”

  “I don’t, but it’s a chance to get out of this mausoleum. I never liked it, but I had to support your father, and living in the parsonage was a part of his salary. I didn’t complain, at least not where anybody could hear me.”

  “We can do it another time.” She left her mother and climbed the stairs. Who were these people who she had lived with for thirty-three years? She didn’t know them. She’d have staked her life that her parents had the perfect marriage, that they would live together until death separated them. She’d thought her mother a mild, conservative housewife, and though she knew her sister flirted on the edge of immorality, she hadn’t thought her capable of what she now suspected—that Kellie was involved with Lawrence Bradley, a married man.

  She left work later than usual the next afternoon owing to heavy sales late in the day that made up for the morning slump. As she walked through the garage on the way to her car, she saw a man fiddling under the hood of his car.

  “Do you need a battery charge?” she asked him.

  “I sure do.” He straightened up, and she could see both the surprise and the disappointment that blanketed his face. “I’ve been trying to start this thing for half an hour.”

  She positioned her car, and he clamped the jacks on his battery. “Your car is relatively new,” she said, “how could the battery die?”