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ountant, part-time cook, and sometimes waitress. She’d make a brilliant manager… if part of her responsibilities was to not be here most of the damn time.
I snatch the receiver off the base and punch the line-one button, then pinch the bridge of my nose, eyes shut so tight they hurt. “I’m telling you, Mahogany, if you don’t get your ass to work this afternoon, you’re going to be counting and searing steaks in the unemployment line.”
She sighs into the line, more annoyed with the weight of the world on her shoulders than I am with her right now. “Mr. Tommy, how is that even damn possible?”
She has every reason to be irritated with everything that is life, considering her current predicament: single motherhood with a tragic twist. Things will probably only get better for her and her two-year-old baby girl, Majestic, if God himself intervenes. Or maybe when Mahogany confesses to Majestic’s father that he’s, well, a father. I understand why she won’t though, so I let her rudeness slide. Besides, she knows my bark is much worse than my bite, something all my employees take advantage of often.
I’m too damn lenient with them. They know to look over me when I’m selling wolf tickets about firing them. I pay the price for that every single time someone calls out at the last minute, but my employees are all good people who desperately need their jobs. They only miss work when it’s a must. It’s the only kind of people I’ll work with, or in this case not work with, since she’s calling out.
Had Mahogany been a regular slacker for no reason, her ass would’ve bit the dust the very week I hired her three years ago. However, I know my team’s histories and present dilemmas… no, I should say fucked up situations. We’re all human, so we all have them. That’s what makes it impossible for me to be impartial and coldblooded when it comes to my underlings not showing up for work. Poor Mahogany Jefferson has one hell of a history and a dilemma.
She’s a twenty-three-year old orphan, who was abandoned at birth in front of a fire department in the inner city, crime-infested Spindle that’s two cities over. My divorced sister, Chrysalis, owns a well-paying bounty hunter business in that city and employs my unmarried twin sisters, Jen and Barbie. I wouldn’t abandon a child molester in Spindle, let alone a baby. Then again, maybe I would leave a pedophile stranded there, just so my sisters can hoist his ass up for being a stain on society and carry him off to jail unwillingly. The best part is they’ll put him down hard first.
As if Mahogany didn’t have it bad enough right after being born, she was adopted out to shitty foster parents that weren’t bad enough to lose custody of her until she aged out of the system. No sooner than she left Colorado for college in Utah on a free ride paid for by the state, she met what she thought was the man of her dreams. He turned out to be just a baby daddy, albeit a rich, white, and some say a good-looking one. Well, I say he’s an asshat for wanting to sleep with anybody, even worse a twenty-year-old who’s more prone to think with their crotch, when he didn’t want what resulted from the act of sex: kids.
Majestic found her way around the condoms and birth control pills meant to prevent her birth. Mahogany didn’t give Chance Middleton the chance to holler abortion. She quit school, came back to Colorado, and settled down in Arrow to get out of sight, out of mind of her baby daddy. Or maybe she wanted him out of her sight and out of her mind. Not the way she tells it though, but I wonder sometimes.
When she applied for any job position I had unfilled, she was in desperate straits and had no problem telling me why. The rest of her background, I had Chrysalis dig up. I’m a bleeding heart for sure, but I ain’t stupid enough to let just anybody up in here.
While Chrysalis checked Mahogany out, I, too, was in desperate straits for a waitress, cook, and trustworthy accountant who could actually count and be savvy with a computer. Mahogany was that, plus freshly pregnant and a college dropout with restaurant experience. She had high marks in all her classes, but was running from a bad situation. I wasn’t immune to her plight, so I hired her to sit at my desk and keep inventory and my bills on point until she gave birth. Now, she’s Majestic’s mother, a former college dropout, and single parent whose toddler has leukemia.
The cancer has been eating away at Majestic’s little body for the last three months, so she’s admitted in the hospital more than she’s at home and doesn’t have anyone but her mother. I blame Majestic’s father for that.
If I had a position for Mahogany to work from home, I’d give it to her. But I don’t. I run a damn restaurant that requires all hands on deck, which means everybody needs to be here where the customers place orders by mouth or phone and expect to get their money’s worth in a reasonable time frame. Or, I run the risk of losing my livelihood, and everybody that depends on Tommy’s Cuisine and Cookout gets to stand in the unemployment line… together! Including Majestic, who chews on everything in sight and her elderly babysitter seems to be woke only during the hours of Mahogany’s scheduled shift.
Still, I would never hold Mahogany’s dilemma against her or her child. She’s doing her damndest to get her life together, slowly, by taking one online course at a time, once a week, to finish her computer programmer degree, while praying for a bone marrow donor for Majestic. The woman is going through enough shit to break a toilet. That doesn’t stop me from giving her hell though because that’s just who I am. If I have to suffer because she has to be at Majestic’s bedside more than at work, then by God, Mahogany will suffer my wrath. I tell my people off more so for venting purposes than to put fear in them—I get to not bottle up my frustration and die of a stroke or heart attack at thirty-nine, and these people are fucking unscareable. That makes me a shit excuse for a boss, I know.
I can raise professional hell at them though, and they take it on the chin like adults, so that’s what I do. “Mahogany, obviously you’re not old enough to know yet that if you’re hungry enough, you’ll find a way to cook food on top of a cop’s car in the summertime to eat… and get away with it. Now, please for Majestic’s sake and mine, come to work as soon as you can like in the next twenty minutes.”
“I would, Mr. Tommy, but Majestic is running a fever again,” she says pitifully.
And I know how dangerous that is for the adorable little girl who’s like another niece to me. Majestic reminds me of my great niece, Salon, Malisa’s daughter. Both children are biracial with tight-spiral curls and chubby limbs, although Majestic is slowly losing her hair and weight, and as close as I’ll get to having kids. My love life went in the same toilet that Mahogany’s was flushed down. Personally, I think life should’ve backed off and refused to submerge people in the bullshit ten years ago, when the woman of my dreams let a lying summa bitch, Edison Craft, convince her that I was cheating on her. Just so he could make a play for her. She fell for his okey-doke, furiously declining to believe that I hadn’t hurt her, with the emphasis of a potted plant thrown at my head. Then, she flung herself off the face of the earth. Or just out of Arrow, Colorado. No one in my family asks why I never searched for her or brings her name up… well, anymore that is, and that’s all I’m going to say about Katara Johnson now. Too sensitive of a topic for me. So sensitive, it even hurts to think about her.
So, back to my people, who are thoroughly trained but still human, and call in to beg off too damn much. At least, it’s always an emergency that they know they may be subject to providing proof of if I ask for it, at any time. No one who’s worked under me for the last four years even bothers with trying to pull one over on me anymore. Arrow isn’t a small town, but it’s not so big that I won’t eventually run into whoever’s missing from their duties. People are stupid enough to think that if they get away with it once, they’ll continue to be so lucky and won’t get caught. Yeah, well, they do.
I don’t cater to bullshitters and quickly weed them out from the genuine victims of ‘shit happens.’ That’s often if you’re breathing, and that’s how I end up in the kitchen or working the floor in others’ place instead of utilizing my time more efficiently. Like making sure my workers are working and customers are happily consuming my wares from behind the one-way glass in my second-floor office. Hell, I could be mingling like head chefs and business owners are supposed to do, even be learning this stupid program on my laptop. If I wanted to work all the positions myself, I wouldn’t have wasted my time with hiring anybody goddamnit!
The very same people that I’m not going to fire.
I groan at my own gullibleness into the phone. “Haven’t you found a long, lost relative who can help you take care of Majestic when Mrs. Kindleton isn’t sleeping like the dead? Or a low-life boyfriend who wouldn’t work in a pie factory tasting pies but adores babies?”
Mahogany, who’s currently snickering quietly at me, isn’t a bad looking woman. She’s probably sitting right beside a sleeping, or busily chewing on something, Majestic as we speak.
“If I had, Mr. Tommy, you know you would’ve been the first to know.”
“I know, and if I knew a nurse, I’d pay her or him to sit with Majestic myself, but I don’t. I only know a doctor who doesn’t work with pediatric cancer, just general pediatrics. You don’t have any other way to pay your bills, so you need to figure out something, Mahogany.”
“Mr. Tommy, you know you’re not going to fire me, especially since Majestic is sick, so quit tripping and let me make up my time by coming in after hours with Majestic like I’ve been doing all summer.”
See what I mean?
I bang my fist on the desk. “That isn’t any better, Mahogany! I just end up babysitting and feeding Majestic leftovers to keep her from chewing on me… for damn free at that! You two are not going to get over on me today, dammit!”
Mahogany huffs. “You won’t even let me hold Majestic when I’m there on my off day just to get something to eat, so are you through raising hell yet? I’m already at the hospital with Majestic to make sure it’s just an ear infection or something simple that’s causing the fever and not because her immune system is too weak to fight off a virus.”
“Which will probably kill her, if you didn’t get her seen in time, I know. And you should know I hate that Majestic has me wrapped around her finger. She reminds me so much of Salon. The poor thing had to come here with two boys just to be born. Or she wouldn’t have been.”
One pregnancy was enough for Malisa to seriously consider a hysterectomy. Lord knows I had much fun wisecracking on her while she was pregnant wit
