Page 36 of All Out of Love

Grayson at first looked at her confused. “What?” Then he realized she apparently thought they were listening to the masters of old. “Camden Stewart is the performer, but he’s also the composer. He’s a young black man, matter of fact. From England I believe. And it’s my understanding that he’s very much alive.”

“Oh!” Toya had to smile at herself. “It just sounded so yesteryear.”

“That’s the genius of his work. He’s quite good.”

But then Toya looked at Grayson. She had to go there. “Can I ask you something, Gracie?”

He inwardly smiled when she gave him that nickname without batting an eye. As if surely everybody called him that! But she appeared very serious, so he remained serious too. “You may ask me anything you like.”

Toya cleared her throat. But she needed to know. “Why did you believe me when I called and told you what happened at that gas station?”

Grayson hesitated, and then he took another sip of his wine. Then he exhaled. “You combed my hair in a bathroom.”

She was at first confused. Then she smiled. “What?”

“How could anybody be a liar who would comb a man’s hair, a man she didn’t know, and do so in a bathroom?”

Then it was his turn to show his sincerity. “You’re not ordinary, Latoya, in other words. I would say you’re rather inexplicably exemplary.”

Toya stared at him. What he said probably would have been no big deal to everybody else, but it was a huge deal to Toya. Because she understood what he meant. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.”

She and Grayson stared at each other. Because he couldn’t believe it. “What a sad thing to say,” he found himself saying to her.

She tried to smile it off, but he saw the pain in her eyes. She tried to explain. “It’s just that . . . If people are always treating you bad, that’s what you get used to. You get used to being treated bad. And then you start to doubt yourself. You start wondering if it’s you since everybody’s treating you that way. Since you’re the common denominator.”

She paused before continuing. Grayson was riveted by her. “On that day when I was supposed to get my promotion, Mrs. Lowe said that the only reason they were promoting me was because they needed a black face in a supervisory position and I was all they had. Although she was lying about me attacking her husband, that part did have a ring of truth to it to me. They didn’t like me there. Nobody in that office, except for maybe the other black girl Angie, didn’t like me at all.”

That was the part Grayson couldn’t work out. “But why?” he asked her.

“It was a number of reasons I think. The main one was all about men. Some of those ladies accused me of liking their men when I wasn’t thinking about those men. What I look like liking somebody that doesn’t belong to me? They were the ones who had everything. They were the ones married and with children and with big families. But I didn’t belong to anybody. Nobody wanted me. But they were always treating me like I was the problem. Like I was coming for their men. I didn’t understand it either.”

Grayson understood it. “It was jealousy,” he said.

But Toya was shaking her head. “I’m certain that’s not it, Gracie. They were women in high positions. They had way more going for themselves than I did.”

But Grayson was still stuck on the sudden nickname she called him and how it rolled so easily off her tongue. He’d never had a nickname in his life. He wasn’t sure how he felt about acquiring one at this late stage.

“And even the girls that worked with me in clerical were younger than me and a lot of them were prettier than me and even smarter than me. What did they have to be jealous about?”

“They weren’t you,” he said. “They were ordinary, Latoya. You’re anything but.”

She smiled. “To you maybe,” she said, “but not to the rest of the world.”

“Then the rest of the world be damned,” he said, lifted his glass in an air toast, and took another sip of his wine.

She laughed. She really liked this dude! As in she really liked him. But was he even available?

Then she caught herself. Why would it matter if he was? He was rich and highly educated and so far above her in terms of achievements that it was laughable for her to even think such a thing.

But she couldn’t help it. She thought such a thing. Just because she was poor and didn’t have all the advantages he had didn’t make her less than. “What about you?” she asked him.

He looked at her again. “What about me?”

“What are your attributes? Are you married? Do you have children? Or siblings?”

He smiled at the way she referred to marriage and children as attributes. He’d never heard it said that way before. “No ma’am, I am not married nor have I ever been. I have no children. I had a brother, an older brother, but he . . . passed away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”