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The girl’s nose was definitely bent but I wasn’t going to argue the point. Now that I’d consumed the tea and toast it was time for Paul to leave so I could get some more sleep before heading downtown to the Murrays’.
Once I’d been in the restaurant and watched as Rosa hung on Paul’s every word. Her eyes followed him around the restaurant with such naked admiration that he had started showing off—barking orders to the lone waitress so loudly that Helen Keller could have heard him and moving tables like a busboy to show off his muscles.
Unfortunately, Rosa had to quit when she lost the woman who babysat her two children, but Paul told me that she had pressed her number into his hand before leaving.
“It’s really nice to meet a woman who is working so hard to better herself. She wants to go to college and study the restaurant business.”
“Miss Rosa wants to study the Paul Dodson business so he can marry her and she won’t need college,” I corrected him. “I watched her. She was looking at you with gold in her eyes.”
“Baloney. I’m fine as hell and she wants me,” Paul said, pointing at his chest.
“Really? Boy, has she run a number on your head. Soon, you’ll be telling me there isn’t anything you won’t do for dear, dear Rosa.”
Paul stood and picked up my dirty dishes. “That won’t happen but there is nothing I won’t do for my dear, dear Jackie.” He paused on the way to the kitchen. “So, should I go out with her?”
“Sure, have fun.”
Paul had had a crush on me for the past three years and I had always pretended not to know it so I didn’t have to hurt his feelings. He wasn’t my type, and if the issue was ever pulled from beneath the surface of our friendship, I would have to tell him the truth. He would flee in pain and humiliation. I loved having him in my life too much to let that happen. We were on dangerous ground.
He looked disappointed. “Fine. Do you need anything else?”
“No, go on back to the restaurant and let me get some more sleep. I’m due at my boss’s house in two hours.”
At the door, Paul fished around in his pocket and came up with a slip of paper. “Here is Alyssa’s number.”
He left without another word.
I never did go back to sleep. After Paul left, I rehearsed three different speeches to recite when Victor answered his phone. Then I got scared. If he rejected me voice to voice, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. It seemed better to proposition him via computer.
Before I could lose my nerve, I composed an e-mail that said:
Hi, Handsome,
Sorry you missed the Black Pack meeting last night. I was looking forward to seeing you. Suppose we both skip next Friday’s gathering and get together alone at my place. I’ll wear something sheer and pour Dom Perignon into real crystal glasses while we . . . er . . . talk.
And then I clicked the SEND button.
3
ALL ABOUT MOMS
Hell’s Kitchen is a nickname for the area in Manhattan that stretches north from 34th Street to 59th Street and west from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. This is where I was born and raised. The funny thing is that I never heard the term “Hell’s Kitchen” until I was a grown woman sitting in a job interview. The interviewer noted my address and said, “Hmmm, a Hell’s Kitchen girl.”
We called our neighborhood “Clinton.”
It really doesn’t matter what your community is called if you’re poor. The people of Clinton were poor whites, poor Puerto Ricans, and a smattering of poor Blacks, which included me and Mama.
To be poor in an area where there is need and want spreading around you for miles in each direction is one thing, but to grow up poor in Clinton was another because we could see and smell the riches wafting over from Broadway, Sixth Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Park Avenue. Some of our neighbors would sit on the stoop and talk about moving east when their ship came in, but Mama didn’t. She never believed that a ship would come in for her and refused to waste time thinking about it.
Mama didn’t like her lot in life but she accepted it calmly. In fact, she still lived in the same apartment that I’d grown up in. Mama refused to come stay with me, preferring to stick to familiar ground where she was the woman in charge. It made my chest tighten up every time I entered the shabby building.
As for me, I decided early on that no ship was going to pull up in front of the Radio City Station post office across the street from our tenement, so I would have to swim out to sea and jump on the first vessel that came into view. It took a series of dead-end secretarial jobs following college for me to land in the right industry. But once I was bitten by the publishing bug, I worked very hard, changed companies twice for career advancement, and finally got the position I wanted.
How I went from book editor to accused murderer is the stuff TV miniseries are made of. I’ve had a lot of time over the past few months to ponder this journey and the media has used up a lot of ink trying to dissect it.
I was born Jacqueline Naomi Blue, only surviving child (the first one, a boy, was stillborn) of Quincy and Mozelle Blue, in St. Clare’s Hospital right down the street from the tenement. A year after my birth, Daddy ran off with Mama’s best friend and we never heard from him again.
Mama raised me to keep my legs closed
