The groundbreaking ceremony was a well-attended spectacle for a Monday morning, as townspeople stood around the construction site and hobnobbed with the Governor of Florida, with the mayor of Apple Valley, and with a who’s who of local dignitaries.  A live band was playing percussion-heavy Top 40 music as if it was a political rally, and the sun was beaming down as if it had given its stamp of approval too.

Although it all looked marvelously spontaneous, given the festiveness of the crowd, nothing about that ceremony was.  Everybody, including the local dignitaries, were under tight movement restrictions, and that included where they could stand.  And when word came from the motorcycle cops that the caravan of SUVs was a mere block away, everybody had to make haste to get to their assigned places.

For the politicians and other dignitaries, their assigned place was up top, on the makeshift platform.

For Kari Grant and her three closest friends who stood beside her, their assigned place was in the back of the crowd.

“Why do we have to be all the way back here?” asked Lucinda Mayes, the owner of a local diner, as she jerked her long, blonde hair back.  “Don’t they realize who you are, Kari?”

“Those jokers know exactly who she is,” said Faye Church, a real estate broker.  Standing alongside her husband Benny Church, an attorney, she was Kari’s best friend.  “But they couldn’t care less.  If they pretend she’s not the girlfriend, then maybe she’ll just go away.”

“Go away?” Lucinda frowned.  “What on earth are you talking about, Faye Church?  Why would they want her to go away?”

Faye placed one hand on her narrow hip and gave Lucinda a sidelong look.  Of the three lady friends, it was Faye who was the beauty.  “I know you aren’t asking me a question like that, Lou.”

“I know I am asking you a question like that, Faye,” Lucinda shot back, placing her hand on her hip too.

“Oh, so you want to play dumb now?” Faye asked her.  “Okay, play dumb.  I’m about to take you to school.”

Kari and Benny laughed.  “Here goes!” said Benny.

“For your information,” Faye said to Lucinda, using her hand as if she was utilizing sign language, “Alexander Drakos is, without question, the most prominent, the richest, the most powerful man Apple Valley has ever had in this town, let alone he’s building what would be the largest business in this town.  Apple Valley is 99.99 percent white and almost every one of y’all are interconnected to each other.  Kari Grant, like Benny and I, is 99.99 percent black and, other than her relationship with Alex, not connected at all.  These city leaders want one of their own to hook up with Alex and, by extension, hook Alex up with them so he can give financial backing to their power grabs and latest get-rich-quick schemes.  And you’re asking me why I think they want her to just go away?”

Lucinda couldn’t help but smile.  “Point taken,” she said.  “Although I’m sure it didn’t take all of that signing and drama queen going on the way you love to do.”

“I know Jordan hates missing the ceremony,” Benny said to Kari, to quickly change the subject before his wife and Lucinda became too animated.

“He does,” Kari responded.  “You know how excited he is.”

“You and Alex talked about it?” Benny asked her.

Kari found that question odd.  Jordan was Kari’s son.  Alex was not his father.  “There was nothing to talk about,” Kari said.  “He wasn’t missing school for this.”

Lucinda shook her head.  “You are so strict,” she said.

“When it comes to my son and his education?  Damn right I am!”

Before Lucinda could fire back, the mayor hurried over to the podium and made an announcement.  “Ladies and gentleman,” he said excitedly, “our guest of honor has arrived!”

Everybody looked toward the entrance gate as a convoy of SUVs drove on site.  Kari’s heart began to swell in happy anticipation as the doors to the SUVs swung open, and Alex stepped out of one of them.  She hadn’t seen him in a week, and she missed him terribly!

Applause broke out when Alex stepped out, and the band began playing Gonna Fly Now, the theme song from Rocky.  Kari smiled as Alex, a frown on his face, put on his suit coat and made his way toward the platform.  Kari was smiling because she knew just how passionately he hated that particular song!

Lucinda leaned toward Kari as they watched him. “That is one gorgeous man,” she said.  Lucinda, like Kari, was single too.  “If he wasn’t yours, or if he was yours and I didn’t know you like I know you, I’d be all over that fine line of meat!”

“But since he is hers,” Faye leaned over and interjected, “and since you do know her like that, your wishful thinking is of no consequence to anything at all!”

Lucinda rolled her eyes.  “You always have something to say, Faye Church.  I was talking to Kari.”

“And I was talking to you.”

“Cool it, ladies,” Benny said.  Faye and Lucinda’s legendary bickering were as much a part of their relationship as their closeness and sisterhood.  But it also annoyed the crap out of him.  “Let’s keep it dignified.”

“Please tell Lucinda that,” said Faye to Benny.

“Please tell Faye that,” said Lucinda to Benny.

“Please bow your heads,” said Mayor Lonnie Wilder from the podium to all in attendance, after Alex took his rightful place beside them, “for the opening prayer by Chaplain McCartney.”

 As the chaplain prayed, and as they all bowed their heads in prayer, Faye and Lucinda, standing on either side of Kari, held her hands.  They knew how important this moment was to her.  Alex lived and worked out of New York City.  This soon-to-be-built hotel and casino was his only connection to Apple Valley, Florida, and was the reason he came to their town to begin with.  She needed this to succeed, her friends felt, so that his connection to Apple Valley, and to Kari herself, wouldn’t be severed.

When the prayer was completed, the Governor gave remarks of encouragement that Alex knew, given the governor’s verbosity, would drag on.  Since Alex had already heard his rah-rah let’s get it done speech many times before, he wasn’t listening nor looking.  His eyes, instead, were looking for Kari.

It was so obvious that he was searching the faces in the crowd for a particular face in the crowd that Lucinda elbowed Kari.  “He’s looking for you, girl,” she said.

Faye, realizing it too, raised her hand from the back of the crowd and then, when Alex looked in that direction, pointed at the top of Kari’s head.

“Babe, quit!” Benny said when he saw what his wife was doing, but Faye smiled when it worked.  Alex, she could tell, finally saw Kari!  And he frowned when he realized where they had positioned her.

Without hesitation, Alex walked off of that platform right in the middle of the governor’s speech!

“He’s coming for you, Kare,” Faye said.  “He’s coming for you!”

Lucinda was shaking her head and smiling too.  “I don’t believe it,” she said.  “He left that stage to come get you!”

But Kari’s heart was hammering.  Not because of his bold move, but because of what that move meant to her.  She’d always had struggles in this life.  She was always considered the girl least likely to succeed and the one so many people in this world looked down upon.  Life for her, as the Langston Hughes poem Mother to Son proclaimed, ain’t been no crystal stair.  Life for her, as the poem continued, had been bare.

But for some crazy reason Alex Drakos chose her.  And just like Jordan’s friends said, he chose her out of all the women he could have chosen.  And it wasn’t a private choice either.  There was nothing undercover about their relationship!  Alex, even more so than Kari, had no problem whatsoever letting that same world that cast her aside know that she belonged to him.  And he let them know it every chance he could.

The surprised townspeople moved aside as Alex made his way to the back of the crowd.  Although the Governor continued to speak, he also continued to take harsh glances at the mayor for not controlling their guest of honor better.

But if he knew anything, he knew nobody was controlling Alex.  Especially when it came to Kari.

Alex reached out his hand to Kari when he was close enough to her, and Kari took his hand.  A chill ran up his spine when she touched him, and his heart warmed when their eyes met.  The idea that they would place her in the back of the crowd, when they knew she was his woman, angered him.

And as he escorted Kari from the back of the crowd all the way up onto the platform, still holding her hand as she took her rightful place beside him, he gave the mayor a look that made it clear just how he felt about that little slight.  The mayor hunched his shoulders and tried to smile it off so that the crowd wouldn’t notice the tension.  But Alex wasn’t playing along.

“Wow,” Faye said as they watched it all unfold.

Benny was equally impressed.  “That man has balls,” he said.

Lucinda agreed, in a different way.  “I’ll bet he does,” she said with a grin, as she stared, even from afar, at that thick package between Alex’s legs too massive for even clothes to conceal.

Benny, who didn’t mean that at all, looked at his wife.  And then both of them gave Lucinda a hard, give it a rest will you please look.