Margaret sat back, and everybody exhaled. Then Les thought of something. “Has the school staff been notified?” he asked Fritz. “There are members of the senior staff that had been waiting in line for their chance at that promotion. They’ve been here for decades. Have they been told of this appointment?”
Fritz shook his head. For the first time, they all could see his frustration too. “No,” he said. “And I know already so don’t remind me. They’re going to be pissed.”
“And rightly so,” said Margaret, as she slammed that resume onto the table.
CHAPTER FOUR
The old but reliable Nissan Sentra she purchased a few months back pulled into the gas station and stopped at the pump. Charly sat behind the steering wheel and fumbled through her purse in search of some gas money. She’d driven all the way from L.A., filling up repeatedly, and was now on the outskirts of Hemingway, Kentucky. But she wasn’t sure if the quarter of a tank of gas she had left would be enough to take her all the way there.
But she found no ready cash. A few ones here and there, but no twenty dollar bill as she thought she’d still had.
If it had not been for the job also providing her with an apartment, and a small signing bonus, she’d be in trouble.
She’d been applying for teaching or administrative positions across the country, whenever a position arose. When she was offered the position of dean of students at a small, private, Christian school in Kentucky, she accepted without hesitation. She was grateful to be working at Rhee’s daycare center, but she was barely making ends meet. She jumped at the chance.
She left California with everything she owned stuffed into the trunk of her car. She left in the middle of the night.
Now it was day, she was in Kentucky, and her new life was about to begin.
But again, like almost every day since Darryl’s death, she was broke.
She grabbed her credit card. It still had four or five hundred bucks in the available balance column. But she also knew credit cards had to be paid back. And she was behind in payments already. At least her contract called for the school to give her a signing bonus on her arrival, which she hoped would tie her over until her first paycheck, where she could catch up on her bills and finally get back on track. But she never liked uncertainties. What if they didn’t come through with the signing bonus? What if she had to make her own living arrangements? She threw the card back into her purse.
She, instead, scoured the glove compartment and between the seats of her car until she managed to gather up eight bucks. Hoping it would pay for enough gas to get her to that school, she grabbed it and got out.
Men were looking at her hard, and with angry faces despite her smile, as if they’d never seen a tall black woman before. But she didn’t let it get to her. She’d been through hell and back again. A few angry faces meant nothing to her. She, instead, ignored them royally and made her way inside the gas station.
But for the Kentuckians she encountered, she was a sight to behold. Not because she was tall and African-American, as she had assumed, but because she walked with such confidence and grace that it made them wonder if she was somebody special. Like a movie star. Or a rich person. And they all gave her an extra look.
But it wasn’t as if Charly looked back.
She didn’t.
The last thing on her mind was getting a man’s attention. It wasn’t even on her radar screen. She was hoping and praying that this new gig would be the last job she would ever have to apply for. She was hoping and praying that she would finally find some peace and contentment and, most of all, stability, in this most unlikely place.
That was what she was thinking about as she walked into that gas station, plopped down her eight bucks, and paid for her gas.
Her three whole gallons of gas.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Hemingway Police Station was filled with laughter. A group of veteran cops were standing around Sarge’s desk watching a video that a student posted on his Facebook page the day before. They were laughing because, on the video, their chief had been recorded hitting Billy Ray Rogers with his truck and then tossing him into the back of his truck’s cab. When he punched Billy Ray, the cops nearly fell out laughing.
“We’re working for a mad man!” said one of the cops.
“Talking about arresting that drug dealer,” said another one. “We need to arrest that chief!”
“You arrest him,” said Sarge. “I’ll pay your mortgage if you do it.” And they all laughed at that too.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to him,” said yet another cop. “Not as long as his cousin Freddy is mayor.”
They knew how it worked in Hemingway. The chief would get reported for excessive force. The complaint would go all the way to City Hall and end up on the desk of the chief’s boss and cousin, Mayor Freddy Ryan. But Freddy didn’t mix it up with Boone either. He’d scoff at the chief’s unethical and illegal actions, and order him to stop it and stop it now, but take no further action himself. The Hemingway PD was now a three-ring circus, and Boone, not Freddy, was its ringmaster.
And the laughter continued as they kept re-looping the video. Until Dontay Culpepper, the African-American rookie whose desk was near the front window, saw a familiar sportscar speed into the parking spot beneath the flag pole. You’d think a kid was driving the way he sped in so recklessly. Dontay was a rookie, but he knew that car already.
The chief, it was said, had many automobiles, but he primarily drove two: his big, white Ram truck, and his red Ferrari. It was the Ferrari today.
“Chief just drove up,” Dontay announced to his fellow cops, and everybody stopped with the laughing and scrambled back to their desks to at least look as if they were busy at work.
Morley Davenport, who sat at the desk directly in front of Dontay’s, didn’t attempt to look busy at all. He looked out of the window, too, as Boone Ryan, already out of his Ferrari, was reaching back into the car to grab his suit coat. His very expensive suit coat.
Morley shook his head. “I’ll bet that suit alone cost more than every one of us makes, combined, in a month.”
“Jealous much?” another cop, further over, asked Morley.
“Is your mama jealous?” Morley said back to him, and the other cops laughed.
But Dontay was shaking his head, too, as Boone stood at his car, leaned his head back, and with a small bottle of Visine put eyedrops into his tired, bloodshot eyes. “He parties more than I do,” the twenty-two year old rookie said, “and I’m half his age!”
“I still can’t get over that suit,” Morley responded.
“It’s just clothes,” said Dontay. “It’s not that serious, though.”
“And why is he even here?” Morley asked. “I still can’t figure that out either. That guy’s damn-near the richest man in town, and comes from the richest family in the whole county, yet he still comes to work every single day. To a job like this. That sounds like an ailment to me.”
Dontay looked at the older cop. “It is an ailment,” he said. “It’s called having a work ethic. But you wouldn’t know anything about that ailment, now would you, Mor?”