Page 51 of Miles. Alton & The 9:04
“Absolutely lovely,” she told him.“I hope you're hungry.My basil was looking a little droopy, so I made chicken and basil with rice and tomatoes.I found some peas in the freezer as well.I may need to go grocery shop tomorrow.”
“Do I need to leave you any cash or my card?”
“Thom, I have a few bucks,” she said, winking at him.“Go wash up while I prepare the table.”
When he returned from the bathroom, soft music was playing, and she waited at the table for him to join her for the meal.She was still smiling when he blessed the food and tasted the chicken.
“It's good, isn't it?”
“Yeah, it is,” he said, looking at her.She was still smiling.“Mae, are you okay?”
“Yes, I am.I'm very good, Thom,” she said, smiling at him.
“Okay, the smiling thing is throwing me off.Help me understand what is happening in that beautiful head of yours,” he said softly.“You're not chasing fairies, are you?”
She pointed at a plant near the window.“That is my lemon tree.I grew it from a lemon I purchased at the store a last year.Most of those plants are vegetables,” she told him.
“I knew some were herbs, but I never looked closely at the others,” he said.
“I've always wanted to live in the country and have a big garden,” she said to him.“Life, however, pushed me in a different direction.”
“How so?”
“My folks wanted all their kids to go to college,” she began explaining.Mae spoke of her brother starting college but not finishing, dropping out to support his now wife.She told him of her sister who hated to read and despised books and married an equally ignorant man who got his news from social media.“The family success all hinged on me.I had to go to college to uphold my parent’s dream.I majored in engineering.”
“Your undergrad?”
“Yes,” she said.“My Dad talked a great deal about Edwina Justice.Ah, by the look on your face you know who she is, the first black woman locomotive engineer for Union Pacific.I wanted to follow in her footsteps and make my own history.I trained, tested and became a locomotive engineer, but the sounds of the engines were messing with my hearing, so I went to grad school to get my MBA.”
“You went to Northwestern, right?”
“Yep, the Kellogg School of Business, top of my class, and it's where I met Kylie Stanhope,” she said.
“Of those Stanhopes?”
“One and the same,” Mae replied.“We got stuck on a project together for class.She liked my energy and pulled me into a philanthropy project her mother was working on.What they paid me to help took care of my tuition for the next two semesters, and that's how it began.She dragged me to lunch at “The Club” and introduced me to Clyde Walker, the CFO of the company.And suddenly, I had a job I didn't ask for.”
“Did you like the job, I mean, until everything started going sour?”
“Thom, can you imagine showing up to work every day and you're the only white guy?”she asked to his surprised face.“Yeah, that was me.I was the only black person, outside of the housekeeper on the 11th floor.You can't even begin to imagine the things said to me or the men on other floors who assumed I was doing something sexual to keep the job.I built my team with one Black male and one Asian male, a Hispanic woman, and my assistant Rosemary, and a redhead and a blond.”
“Very specific,” he said.
“Intentionally,” she told him.“Imagine every single day having to move with so much intention.Meetings, reporting, board meetings to justify my job or my spending, and sometimes having to qualify or quantify my blackness not being a detriment to me doing the job.Every mutherfucking day.As smart as I am, as much as I had accomplished, I was having to justify myself to some guy named Chad whose uncle got him the job.I hated it.”
“Okay, I was worried that maybe you were compensating with the cooking and stuff,” he said, feeling stupid for the words coming out of his mouth.“Just no shellfish, please.”
“I get it, but I want you to know, I love cooking,” she said.“My folks think a fried pork chop with greens simmered in pork fat in healthy eating.No one wanted to eat my cooking and now I get to make the stuff I like, and you like it, and I get to have my garden.I get to live in a house close to the country with a big ass garden.”
Mae was smiling at him again.The twinkle in her eye made Thom bite his bottom lip.The last time she had looked at him like that, he’d nearly thrown his back out.She was in a good head space and it all felt...right.
“I want to go in that garage thing and look at the tractor,” she told him.“I want to start tilling the ground and planting.I have no idea how to can or pickle or ferment, but dammit, I'm going to learn.”
“The tractor is pretty big, Mary,” he told her.“It has attachments to mow down those big fields as well as a tiller.Let me work on the garden this weekend, and we will get it started.”
In the other room, her phone beeped.He'd noticed that at spaced intervals the beeping happened.He wondered if they were time stamps.“What is the beeping on your phone?”
“Voice messages, emails, job offers,” she told him.
