These gluten-free, avocado-toast-eating, green-smoothie-drinking, bougie country folk got on Marquita Lewis’s last nerve.
“Um, excuse me, but did you just roll your eyes?”
That Britney Spears song, “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” popped into Marquita’s head. She wasn’t trying to get fired from another job. She just got this waitress gig six weeks ago and had already been late five times. The last thing she needed was some bougie customer complaining about her because of some dumb breakfast order.
And it wasn’t really her fault anyway. She didn’t roll her eyes to be rude. It was an involuntary condition, brought on whenever she was in the vicinity of stupid. I mean, come on. How you gon’ ask for all these extra accommodations, then get mad because it costs more?
“I don’t think I rolled my eyes,” Marquita said back to the woman. “I’m not sure what you saw, but I’m just trying to get your order right.”
The woman’s friend lifted a finger to get Marquita’s attention. “Oh, and make sure there’s no pesticides in my smoothie. I only eat organic greens.”
“You did it again! How dare you roll your eyes. Is my order too difficult for you?” Bougie jumped out of her seat, grabbing her purse. “Come on, Lisa. We are not eating here. I have never in my life dealt with such a rude waitress.”
“Wait. Sit back down. I’ll put your order in. I’ll even throw in a gluten-free nut bar. And they are yummy.” The last thing Marquita needed was to cause a scene. She had already been put on probation because of her tardiness.
But now, all of a sudden, they didn’t care about the gluten-free extras. The woman got up, and the two of them three-inch heeled it out of the restaurant.
Marquita yelled, “It’s like that, huh? Y’all probably weren’t going to tip anyway. Go on to Burger King and get a sandwich you can afford.”
It wasn’t until she heard the gasps at the surrounding tables that she thought, I shouldn’t have done that. Rent was due next week. She was already behind and expecting an eviction notice any day now. She just hoped her manager was outside on another one of his gazillion smoke breaks and didn’t see what she’d done.
“Can I speak with you in my office, Marquita?” the manager said as he came up behind her.
Dog and double dog. Her nosy coworkers turned their heads—all up in her business. “Ain’t none of y’alls name Marquita, so there’s no need to look this way. Mind your business. Take orders.”
“Marquita!” the manager snapped. “Now!”
“I’m coming. I’m coming.” She sullenly walked behind him, taking note of the shirt sloppily hanging from the back of his pants as he slue-footed his way to the office. Marquita wanted to kick herself. She had just messed things up again for her and her son, Marcus. Since she was fourteen years old, Marquita had been working and taking care of herself. She’d had Marcus two months ago, a week before her nineteenth birthday.
They stepped into her manager’s Cracker Jack–box size office. Marquita took some boxes off the chair in front of his desk and then sat down. She’d been through this drill a dozen times since she took on her first job five years ago because her mother was in rehab again, trying to kick a habit she never should’ve had in the first place. So it became Marquita’s responsibility to make sure her younger sister and brother were able to eat.
“I’m letting you go, Marquita.”
He said those words with such calm, as if no check for Marquita didn’t mean eviction and that she and her son wouldn’t be on the street with no place to go.
“You can’t. I need this job.” She was close to tears as she stood. Why does this keep happening?
He shook his head. “We can’t afford to lose customers. I’ve had too many complaints about your behavior, and now you’re causing customers to walk out the door. You’ve got to go.”
“Look, I’m sorry about those customers, but they were too bougie for me.” She snapped her fingers. “I couldn’t help how I responded to them, but I promise I’ll do better. Just give me another chance.”
“I’ve given you too many chances. Most of you young girls weren’t raised right. I know y’all don’t know how to act on a job, so I try to work with y’all.” He stood, walked around his desk, and opened the door.
Marquita’s neck rolled as her hand went to her hip. “Who don’t know how to act? You don’t know nothing about how my mama raised me.” But her mother, Gloria Lewis, hadn’t trained Marquita for much of anything, unless teaching her children how to protest evictions and then how to quickly pick up all their clothes and pack them in their cars once the sheriff showed up to throw them out counted as some type of skill.
The manager backed up a bit and conceded. “I don’t know your mother, but I’ve witnessed how you act at work. It’s obvious that you have a lot to learn.”
Marquita’s eyes brightened with a thought. “What about a warning? You can’t just fire me without a warning first, right?” She’d received warnings on all her other jobs before getting booted out the door. It wasn’t fair not to get one here as well.
“Girl, bye, what did you think you were getting all those times you showed up late and I told you that couldn’t continue?”
“But you never said you were going to fire me. How am I supposed to pay my rent? Me and my son don’t have nowhere else to go.” She was talking loud and knew that the customers and coworkers heard her begging for her job, but what else could she do? She just had to find a way to keep a job so she could pay her bills.
Why did she have to roll her eyes at those customers? Didn’t she know better than that? Or was it like her manager said? She wasn’t raised right. If so, how could she possibly know how to act on a job?
“Do I need to call the police and have them cart you off my property?”
She scoffed at that. “It’s not your property. You up in here collecting a check just like the rest of us.”
“Oh, okay, but I’m the only one of us”—his finger wagged from her and then back to him—“who’s still collecting a check, because you fired, boo. And I will call the police if you don’t take that apron off and get out of here.”
The last thing Marquita wanted was for the police to come in here and drag her out like they’d done to her mother on multiple occasions. Marquita still had nightmares about neighbors watching them being thrown out of one place after another. Those were scary times, but things got even scarier when Child Protective Services took them away from their mother when Marquita was eleven. They spent an entire year in foster care, waiting for their mother to get out of yet another rehab and find a place they could move into. When Marquita had her son, she promised him that no one would ever take him away from her.
“No, no. You don’t have to call the police.” She snatched off the apron. “If you don’t want me here, then I don’t need to be here. It’s not like I can’t find another waitress job.”
As she walked through the eating area, making her way to the front door, she turned and shouted to the customers, “Don’t order the chili. Bugs fall in it all the time, and my wonderful manager feeds it to unsuspecting customers anyway.”
He ran toward her, trying to chase her out of the restaurant, while simultaneously providing the customers a nervous smile. “We don’t have bugs. Don’t believe a word she says.”
Marquita opened the door and ran out. Her manager was a smoker. No way would he catch her.
“Don’t think you’re going to get a reference from me. You can forget that!” he yelled as she made her way to her 2003 Chevy Cavalier.
Snapping her fingers and twisting her lip as she got in the car, she forgot about needing a reference. She’d been on this job for less than sixty days. Her last job had been almost ninety days because she’d worked up to two weeks before giving birth to Marcus. She’d experienced back pain on that job and had to take a few days off. She probably couldn’t get a reference from them either because she’d showed out when they fired her too.
Sighing deeply, Marquita pulled out of the parking lot and headed to her mother’s apartment to pick up her son. He was the bright spot of her day. She hated having to leave him at her mom’s place while she worked, but day cares were too expensive. Marquita didn’t know how people could afford childcare and be able to eat too. It was all just too much.
When she arrived at her mother’s place and saw the eviction notice on the door, she was outdone. Marquita lived on her own, so her mother’s constant evictions didn’t affect her like they used to. But her brother, Mark, was sixteen and her sister, Kee Kee, was thirteen. Where were they supposed to sleep once Gloria was kicked out of yet another place?
Marquita already didn’t like bringing Marcus over here because she never knew what kind of drama might be popping off. She didn’t have the money for day care, but if her mother went to another women’s shelter, she’d have to find it because she was not letting her son step foot into a place like that.
Rolling her eyes, she snatched the notice off the door and entered the apartment. “Why aren’t you in school?” she asked Kee Kee, who was sitting on the sofa, bouncing Marcus on her lap.
“Mama wasn’t feeling well so I stayed home to take care of my little man.” Kee Kee made cooing sounds. She kissed Marcus’s cheeks. “Isn’t that right, Moochie?”
Moochie was the nickname Kee Kee had given Marcus. Marquita thought it was cute, but there was nothing cute about her sister skipping school. “You are too smart for this, Kee Kee. Out of the three of us, you have a real chance to get a scholarship, go to college, and get out of here. You are not going to mess that up just because I had a baby.”
“I’m just trying to help. I didn’t want to leave Moochie with Mama today.” Kee Kee nervously cut her eyes toward Gloria’s bedroom. Then she plastered that same don’t-want-no-trouble smile on her face that appeared whenever Gloria got to acting like she needed Iyanla to fix her life.
Marquita figured that her mother must have gone into a rage, for God knows what, and scared Kee Kee so bad that the girl feared for Moochie. Marquita didn’t get why Kee Kee wasn’t immune to Gloria’s antics by now. The girl was just too soft, too good-hearted to be in this family.
Marquita went into her mother’s bedroom. Gloria was lying in bed with a heating pad on her head. The heating pad normally came out after Gloria ranted and raved through the house about some perceived injustice. The whole world always against her.
“What happened now?” Marquita asked.
Gloria lifted the heating pad from her head. “Why are you back so soon? Get fired again?”
Marquita tossed her mom the eviction paper she’d taken off the front door. “Yeah, I got fired and you got evicted again. Let me know when I’m saying something that sounds like a surprise.”
“You getting fired sure isn’t a surprise. It happens all the time.” Gloria sat up, legs dangling from the side of the bed as she turned off the heating pad.
“And you getting evicted certainly isn’t a surprise. It’s been happening every five months like clockwork since I was a kid. When will you realize that you have to pay rent if you want to keep a roof over your head?” Marquita had no room to talk, since she was a month behind on her own rent and had just lost her job. But she was new to this. Her mother was true to her eviction game.
“I told that landlord that he had to give me another month to come up with the money. He can’t just evict me without getting a court order.”
Marquita pointed to the eviction notice. “Isn’t that from the court?”
“Don’t get my blood boiling again, Marquita. They not just gon’ throw me out on the street without a fight.” Gloria’s hands went to her head.
Marquita didn’t want to give her mother another headache, but she wasn’t finished. “Don’t let Kee Kee miss school to keep Marcus anymore, Mama. It’s not fair to her.”
“I wasn’t feeling well after talking to the landlord. Kee Kee asked to help with Moochie, and she did her school assignments while the Mooch slept.”
“Kee Kee is smart, Mama. You can’t be acting like a raving lunatic around her. That stuff makes her nervous. That’s why she stayed out of school. She was afraid to leave you with Marcus.”
Gloria waved that comment off. “She’s heard me talk to these slumlords a thousand times. She ain’t never missed no school because of it before.”
She wasn’t trying to disrespect her mother, but Marquita’s eyes did that thing they do whenever she heard ignorance.
“Roll your eyes at me again, Marquita Ann Lewis, and I’ll knock them in the back of your head.”
“I’m going home.” Marquita walked out of her mother’s bedroom, packed up Marcus’s diaper bag, and then took her baby out of Kee Kee’s arm. “Don’t miss school to sit with my kid no more. You are better than that.”
Gloria came out of her room. “If you don’t like the way we keep Marcus, then why don’t you go find his daddy and tell him to watch his own kid. But then again, you won’t even tell us who the daddy is.”
“I’ll watch my baby myself, so Kee Kee can go to school. I can’t have her falling behind in school on my conscience.”
Marquita put the diaper bag on her shoulder and walked out of the apartment with her baby on her hip. Her mother followed her and started screaming, “Go find that baby’s daddy!” for all the neighbors to hear as she made her way down the stairs.
“Go back in the house,” Marquita shot back at her.
“Why don’t you want Moochie to know who his daddy is? Maybe he can take care of that baby, because you sure can’t.”
“I take care of Marcus better than you ever took care of us. That’s for sure.”
“We’ll see about that.” Gloria went back into her apartment and slammed the door.
Marquita opened the back car door and strapped Marcus into his car seat. She got in the car and sat behind the steering wheel. Taking several deep breaths didn’t help her calm down. She screamed. Marcus started crying. Then Marquita hit the steering wheel and screamed again, as if screams could change the world.
The baby cried louder.
“I’m sorry, Moochie. Stop crying.” She turned and rubbed his belly to soothe him. “And I’m sorry about your daddy. I’d like to take you to meet him, but I just don’t see what good it would do. Anyway, he’s got his own problems. Don’t see how telling him about you is going to change anything.”
Pulling herself out of bed, Trish Robinson stretched to get the kink out of her neck and glanced over at her husband’s snoring form. He used to give good massages, good hugs, good everything, but that was before everything went left. Rolling her neck from side to side, she looped her fingers together to give her arms and back a stretch, then took a long, deep, do-I-have-to-start-this-day-already sigh.
“I will sing a fruitful song in a barren land.” Every morning since the day her precious son was told he might never walk again, Trish sang those words to encourage herself to keep on fighting, keep getting out of bed every morning so she could see how God would turn her midnight into sweet, sunshiny days.
“Mama!”
“I’m coming, Jon-Jon.” They lived in a ranch-style home with nine-foot-high ceilings, so sound traveled. Even though their master bedroom was on the opposite side of the house from Jon-Jon’s room, she heard him holler her name.
Jon-Jon rarely hollered for her first thing in the morning, but when he did, Trish knew what that meant. She rushed into the bathroom and grabbed a washcloth, towel, wet wipes, and a Depend for her precious twenty-year-old. Long, deep sigh. “I will sing a fruitful song . . .”
Before stepping out of her bedroom, Trish made sure to plaster that same generic smile on her face that she hoped said to her son, “All is right with the world,” even though it wasn’t. Picking up her smartphone, she pulled up YouTube and put on some praise music. She danced to “You Deserve My Praise” by Tamela Mann as she entered Jon-Jon’s room.
“Hey, handsome.” He was a younger version of his father, with skin the color of a russet potato. He and his father both sported goatees, but Jon-Jon hadn’t brushed his hair in a month. So, where his dad had a low-cut fade, Jon-Jon had a matted, coming-to-America-straight-out-of-Africa untamed afro sitting on top of his head.
“Turn it off, Mama. I’m not in the mood for that this morning.”
“Boy, you better give God some praise.” She continued dancing, trying to change his mood. The room smelled foul, like soiled diapers mixed with sweat, but she resisted the urge to cover her nose.
“For what?” Jon-Jon flung the covers off his bed, revealing soiled sheets. “Who in their right mind would praise God for this?”
Trish’s heart went out to her son. Her only son. A son she had expected to be in his second year of college and on his way to the NFL the following year. At least that’s what the scout had told them.
She had expected to attend her son’s wedding and welcome grandchildren into her home one day. But life had dealt them such a low and sneaky blow that it was hard to get back up. Trish refused to give up, refused to stop believing that God could change their circumstances.
Trish placed her phone on the dresser and let the music fill the room as she rolled her son to the left so she could unhook the sheets from his mattress. Then she rolled him to the right and unhooked the other side. “What happened to you isn’t fair, son. But you woke up this morning and every morning since that horrible accident. That’s something to thank the good Lord for, isn’t it?”
“You’re changing the boy’s diaper, Trish. At least let him be angry at God while you’re cleaning his behind.” Dwayne wiped the sleep from his eyes as he stood in the doorway.
“Tell her to turn the music off, Dad. I’m not in the mood.”
Why couldn’t Dwayne have just stayed asleep? Why’d he have to come in here, getting Jon-Jon worked up with all his foolish talk about being mad at God? She waved him into the room. “Come help me lift Jon-Jon’s waist so I can pull this Depend off.”
“It’s a diaper,” Dwayne snarled.
That deep baritone voice of Dwayne’s used to give her that come hither feeling, with fluttering all up in her stomach. Now she just wanted to stuff a rag in his mouth so he would shut up. “Just help me, or get out of here and leave us alone. I’m not doing this with you this morning, Dwayne.”
He came into the room, went straight to the dresser where her phone was, and stopped the music from playing. He then put his shirt over his nose as he lifted Jon-Jon’s waist.
Snatching the shirt from his nose, Trish wanted to scream at her husband. How dare he treat his own son this way? She side-eyed him, daring him to put that shirt back over his nose as she cleaned Jon-Jon. She then pulled the new Depend up to cover her son.
Dwayne helped her take the sheets off the bed, holding Jon-Jon to one side and then rolling Jon-Jon to the other side while she moved the sheets.
She took a laundry bag out of Jon-Jon’s closet, put the soiled sheets in it, and tried to hand it to Dwayne. “Can you take this to the laundry room?”
“Have you lost your mind?” Turning his nose up, Dwayne scurried out of the room like he smelled smoke and needed to put out the fire. Although he had no problem lifting Jon-Jon out of the bed or helping with his physical therapy, he rarely helped her clean Jon-Jon. He said he didn’t have the stomach for it. Trish just wished he wasn’t so mean about it.
Turning back to Jon-Jon, she playfully nudged his shoulder. “All better. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
She took the dirty linens to the laundry, then came back to Jon-Jon’s room and vacuumed the floor. She wiped off his table and then held out a hand to Jon-Jon. “Now let me get you out of that bed.”
He shook his head. “Not today, Mom. Just leave me alone. I just want to be left alone.”
She started to object. The doctor said it wasn’t good for Jon-Jon to lie in bed all day. He didn’t want his muscles to atrophy. But as he turned his head away from her, she saw the tear roll down his cheek. “I’ll fix you some pancakes.”
No response.
Trish went to her master bathroom, brushed her teeth, took the headwrap off, and let her hair fall on her honey-toned shoulders. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror brought on a sigh. Trish’s eyes were so puffy that it looked as if she had gone five rounds with Floyd Mayweather and floated like a feather with every jab and uppercut to her face. Exhaustion hung on her shoulders like an old friend. If Jon-Jon didn’t need her, she would climb back in bed and sleep as if sleep was money and she was trying to get paid. But sleep was a luxury she couldn’t afford, so she made her way to the kitchen to take care of breakfast.
Pancakes were her son’s favorite breakfast, guaranteed to put a smile on his face. When he was younger he’d told her that he didn’t want his dad’s pancakes because, as he put it, “Nobody fixes pancakes like you, Mama.” Ever since then, Trish made sure to sprinkle a little extra cinnamon in the pancake mix.
As the cinnamon mixed into the pancake batter, the color change was just a shade darker than her walls. These days, a lot of interior walls were being painted gray, but Trish liked warmer colors. She had picked a color called golden rod, which was a mix between yellow and brown, for her interior color. Because of the high ceilings and the open floor plan, the color worked and didn’t darken the house much at all.
Mixing her batter, she added vanilla extract and melted butter, but the cinnamon she had already added was the key to great pancakes. That, and the extra butter she slathered on the cakes while they cooked in her special pancake-making skillet, like every good Southern mother worth her cooking apron would.
“Make me a few of them cakes.” Dwayne sat down at the kitchen counter.
Lip curled, displaying her disgust, she responded, “I know you didn’t just ask me to fix you nothing after the way you treated my son this morning.”
“He’s my son, too, Trish. And if he would put forth a little effort during physical therapy, he’d be able to get himself out of that bed and into his wheelchair. Then he could get to the bathroom on his own.”
“He’s trying, Dwayne. You just don’t care what any of us are going through.” She was married to a man who didn’t open his eyes to see anybody’s needs but his own. He hadn’t always been like this though. Jon-Jon’s accident had changed him, turned him into someone she barely recognized.
“I’m hungry, Trish. I don’t have time to argue with you this morning.”
She turned to give him a preview of the cold shoulder he’d be receiving all day long, but that’s when she realized he had his work shirt on. He’d just gotten off work at eleven last night and was now going in for another shift.
He’d been working extra shifts as a forklift driver ever since he found this job about three months ago, after being fired from a job he’d held for fifteen years. The company had a no-tolerance policy when it came to attendance and didn’t care if Dwayne was at the hospital as his son fought for his life.
While Dwayne was losing one job and searching for another, Trish had taken family medical leave from her fourth grade teaching position. ...
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