Present Day

 

“Ma!  Hurry up!”

Jordan Grant stood at the front door of their small, suburban home with his bookbag on his back and his cell phone in his hand.  “Ma!”

He was a small, bespectacled African-American young man who looked more like he was eleven rather than his true age of fourteen, but he was a stickler for time.  “Ma!” he called again.  “Come on!  I’ll be late!”

Kari Grant, in jeans and a light-brown blazer, finally hurried up their narrow hallway stuffing her cell phone into her purse.  “Did you finish your breakfast?” she asked her son as she approached him.

“I finished it.”

“Don’t lie to me, Jordan.”

“I finished it.  I promise!  And I washed and put the bowl away.”

Kari gave him a side-eye look.  She knew her son.

“I’ll wash it when I get home from school,” Jordan said.

Kari popped him upside his head.  “I told you about that lying, boy.  Your ass think I’m playing about that?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then stop it!  You didn’t have to go there.”

“I just didn’t want you to make me wash it now.  But you’re right.  I was wrong.”

Kari knew Jordan was a good kid overall, but she still had to stay on him.  And she did.  “Just watch yourself, boy,” she said as she headed out of the front door.  “The ends don’t always justify the means.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jordan said as he followed his mother out of the house, locked the door, and then they both hurried to Kari’s car: a Toyota Tercel.  She cranked up, backed up, and they were off.

“Let’s drive by it again,” Jordan said to his mother as soon as she drove out of their neighborhood.

Kari was surprised.  “I thought you said you were late.”

“I said I was going to be late if you didn’t come on.  You came.”  Jordan smiled his big white smile.  “So we’re early now!”

Kari shook her head.  The clock in her car wasn’t working, so she grabbed the cell phone out of her son’s hand and looked at the time.  He was right.  They were early.

“We can’t keep doing this every morning, Jordan,” she said as she handed him back his phone.  Then she turned the corner necessary to take them toward the construction site.

“I don’t wanna do it every morning,” Jordan said, “but I wanna see how much progress they’ve made.”

“Since yesterday?  None.  They’re just setting up equipment.  And probably not even doing that since today is the groundbreaking ceremony.”

“Why are they having a ceremony to break ground that’s already been broken?” Jordan asked.

“It’s just a way to publicly proclaim that the project is underway.  It’s all for show.  It’s politics.”

“Alex doesn’t seem like a political man to me.”

“He’s not,” Kari agreed.  “But he’ll do what he has to do to get what he wants.”

Jordan pushed his glasses up on his face and looked his big, brown eyes at his mother.  When she stopped at a red light, she looked at him.  He used to look more nerdy than handsome, but now the reverse was coming true.  And the girls, she also knew, were beginning to take notice.  “What is it?” she asked him, when he continued to stare at her.

“It’s just these guys at school,” Jordan said.

Guys?  She thought he was going to say girls at school.  “What about the guys?” she asked him.

“They keep asking me the same stupid questions.”

“Questions like what?”

“Like why you,” Jordan said.

Kari didn’t understand.  “Why me what?” she asked him.

“Why did Mr. Drakos choose you of all the women he could have chosen,” Jordan said.

Kari’s heart sank.  It was a question, she knew, that many people in their town were asking.  She kept driving as the light turned green.  “You tell them they will have to ask Mr. Drakos why he chose me,” she said as she drove.  “Or do like I do and tell them to mind their own business.”

“I tell them he chose you because you’re special and smart and funny, and because you know how to handle your business,” Jordan said.

Kari smiled.  “Thanks, J.”  She was proud of her son.

“But then they say, ‘but she’s not beautiful,’ like it’s a fact.  They say you’re cute, but you aren’t beautiful.”  Jordan said this and looked at his mother again.  “But it’s not a fact.  You are beautiful, Ma.  To me.  And to Mr. Drakos, too, right?”

Although Kari maintained her smile, her heart felt faint.  Not because of what some silly school kids were saying, but because of what their saying implied.  “I’m no beauty queen, Jordan,” she said honestly.  “And I doubt if Alex sees me that way.”

“But then why is he with you if he doesn’t think you’re beautiful?”

“It depends on what type of beauty you’re looking for, son.  Some men want a beautiful face.  Some men want a beautiful body.  Some men want a beautiful mind.  Some men want it all.  Some men just want a beautiful heart.”

“You definitely have a beautiful body,” Jordan said.  “The guys are always talking about how nicely shaped you are.”

Kari rolled her eyes.  Boys!

“And I can attest to you having a bombshell of a mind and a bombshell of a heart,” Jordan continued.  “And even the guys say you’re cute.  But they think if you don’t have an exceptional, bombshell of a face, then you don’t deserve a great looking rich guy like Mr. Drakos.  They even claim that they read somewhere how Mr. Drakos has a beautiful woman in every town in America, and in every country in the world.  If that’s true, why would he want you, they ask me?  I don’t know what to say to that.”

“It’s not for you to say anything, Jordan. It’s not your job to go around defending my looks.  I’m quite pleased with how I look and I don’t need a defender.  You just do your work, get it done, and ignore the questions.  Can you do that?”

“I just wish they would stop asking the questions.”

“Since that’s not going to happen,” Kari said, “you have to stop worrying about it.  Boys will be boys.”

It’s not just the boys, Jordan wanted to say, but didn’t have the heart to say it.  Girls were questioning him too.  They figured a man of Alex’s stature deserved better.  Or, as their questions implied in the super-white private school he attended, he deserved whiter.  Like them.  But Jordan kept it to himself.

But as they continued on their way, both of them were concerned for different reasons.  After a few moments, Jordan voiced his concern. “I just think it’s stupid,” he said.  “They don’t know you or anything about the kind of good person you are.”

“Don’t judge them too harshly, J,” Kari said.  “When you first see a girl, what do you automatically determine about her?  If she’s smart, has a good heart, or if she’s pretty?”

Jordan thought about it.  “Pretty,” he had to admit.

“Right,” Kari said.  “That’s just how the world works.”

Jordan looked at his mother.  “It doesn’t bother you?”

“No,” Kari admitted.  “And you know why?”

“Because you have to live in this world?  Because you didn’t make the rules, but you have to live by them?”

“Hell no,” Kari said, and Jordan laughed.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Kari continued, “because I know who I am.  And if a man doesn’t want to get to know me, and what I’m about, then to hell with him.  I don’t want that man anyway.”

“Did Vito get to know you?” Jordan asked.

Vito was Kari’s now-deceased ex-boyfriend, a man who also happened to be a made man for the mob.  “Vito was a body man.  If you had a smoking body, and a sassy mouth, he was interested.  I had both when I was young and dumb.”

“You’re still young, Ma.  I mean, compared to Mr. Drakos anyway.”

Kari laughed.  “Yes, compared to him!”

“Twenty-nine isn’t old,” Jordan added.

But as Kari stopped on the side of the road and they both stared at the massive, fenced-in construction site that would one day become Alex’s hotel and casino, she felt old.  Because Kari owned a small maid service in town, Alex wanted her to spearhead the entire housekeeping operation for both his hotel and casino once they were built.  One local newspaper reporter wrote that it was like asking a kid with a lemonade stand to head up one of the most important departments in a Fortune 500 company.  The reporter, in other words, doubted if she could handle it.

Although she knew she could do it once she figured out how she was going to do it, it still felt daunting.  Sometimes it felt like such a herculean task that she questioned if she was really up to the job, and if that reporter might have a point.  Especially since Alex hadn’t taken the time to sit her down and put any plans in place, or to hear her ideas for how she was going to manage such a task.  But she knew, in time, he’d give her some of his valuable time.

Kari put her car in gear to drive away.  But Jordan wanted to stay longer.  “Ma, don’t leave yet!”

“Alex is coming back in town in a few hours for the groundbreaking ceremony,” Kari said.  “Maybe after school he’ll take you onsite to see everything.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jordan said.  “Or maybe he’ll just leave town again.”

Kari knew what her son meant.  Alex was out of town more than he was in town.  “He runs a major corporation, Jordan, that’s headquartered in New York.  His primary residence is in New York.  He’s never going to be in Apple Valley all the time.”

“I know.  And I understand that.  But I just don’t want him neglecting you.”

Kari smiled.  And ruffled his soft, low-cut afro. “Don’t worry, son.  I won’t let him.  How about that?”

Jordan smiled too.  Then he immediately perked back up.  “Are you as excited as I am, Ma?” he asked as they looked at the backhoes and tractors and other major equipment on site.

“I’m excited for Alex.  This will be the first time he invested in a hotel I think.  And I’m happy for Apple Valley, too,” she added. “It’s going to be, by far, the biggest job producer in town.  Yes.  I’m very excited.”

“Imagine the man who owns all of that,” Jordan said, still looking at the construction site, “is the man who loves us.  That’s something right there!”

Kari smiled, although she felt a little alarmed too.  Jordan was as invested in Alex as she was.  He loved them, Jordan the romantic was saying, although Kari could never be certain of another man’s heart.  Or even if he felt as deeply about them as they felt about him.  She wanted to put up a caution light for her son.  She could take a heart break.  She’d been there before, and she knew, deep down, she could take it.  But she didn’t want her son to take it.

And as Kari drove away from the site to get him to school on time, Jordan sensed it too.  He looked at his mother.  “It’s not true.  Is it, Ma?”

“What’s not true?”

“What those guys at school said.”

“They said a lot, Jordan.  Tell me which one of their sayings you’re talking about.”

“About Mr. Drakos having a woman in every town and country.”

Kari exhaled.  That!  “I can safely say that it’s not true,” she said.  “Alex doesn’t have a woman in every town and country.”

Jordan smiled.  “I already knew that.  I knew he wouldn’t hurt us like that.  I already knew it!”

But what Jordan didn’t know, Kari thought as she turned the corner, was that Alex didn’t have to have a woman in every town or country.  Kari knew that it would only take one woman, in one town or in one country, to break their hearts.