What's Mine and Yours(5)

Ray told Ventura about the reporter.

“Then you should be thinking about a house. Start saving. Don’t you live on the east side?”

“My whole life,” Ray said.

Ventura shook his head. “You got to be thinking about schools. If your boy stays on the east side, his future will be over before it starts.”

Ray shrugged. School was the least of his worries for Gee. The boy was quick. He’d be fine anywhere, as long as he got what both Ray and Jade had been missing: two parents, a peaceful home. That’s why Ray was always working on Jade. More than once, in a rage, she’d told him she was too smart for her life. What haunted Ray wasn’t the meanness of it, but the truth.

“I’m telling you,” Ventura said. “If there’s something I’ve learned in this country, it’s that your address decides everything. You’ve got to get out.”

“Maybe,” Ray said. Ventura had made the long journey from the country where he was born to New York to North Carolina. Why shouldn’t he be able to get to the other side of town, if he set his mind to it?

Ventura drained his cup. “Life is funny. One day, you’re in the mountains picking coffee beans. Another day, you’re here, drinking coffee, with an American wife and a house.”

“I know what you mean,” Ray said. He didn’t own a home, but he knew how he felt. One day, you’re a boy, home alone, giving a stranger’s baby your finger to suck on, and the next, you’re a man, with a boy of your own, waiting for a reporter to come and put your picture in the paper.

“If we ever get a house, maybe we can have you all over,” Ray said. “For dinner or something.”

It surprised Ray to say it—he and Jade weren’t the entertaining type, but maybe they would be, if they lived in a house. Ventura picked up the idea quickly. He smiled and snuffed out his cigarette on the concrete, working his way up to whatever slick line he was planning to deliver to send Ray laughing and seal their fifteen minutes of smoking and standing together, before they both went back to work.

“All right, Ray,” he said. “But I want some real food. Don’t make us no sandwiches.”



By two thirty, the reporter hadn’t arrived, and Ray was getting listless. He had been working nearly ten hours, Michaela and Michelle had left to pick up their kids, and Linette called the paper but couldn’t get through.

“Maybe they got backed up,” she said.

The shop was empty, in the lull before the after-work crowd came by. Linette said one day this would be their busiest time: when people came in for afternoon coffee and lingered. Women who stayed home with their kids, people who got days off, the university students. They just didn’t know about Superfine yet, but they would. They’d be better than Starbucks, and there was no Starbucks opening in town anytime soon. If there was something Ray admired about Linette, it was that she wasn’t afraid to dream, once you showed her she wouldn’t be doing all the dreaming alone.

Ray called Jade from the phone in the back to ask about her test.

“I got a one hundred at least,” she said.

“That’s my girl. How’s that headache?”

“I helped Wilson put everything out in the yard—he’s selling all his furniture. I want to lie down, but I’m fixing to get Gee.”

“Let me get him. Nothing’s going on over here.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll bring you another doughnut. There’s a lot left over.”

Jade softened, as if she knew it hurt his feelings to say out loud that his doughnuts hadn’t sold like he hoped they would. “Bring me two,” she said, and hung up.

He was waiting for the engine to warm up when Linette came bounding out the back door.

“He’s coming!” she called. “A reporter and a photographer. They’ll be here in half an hour.”

“They starting with us?”

“I don’t know.”

Ray made to turn off the car, but then he thought of Jade and her headache. The truth was he didn’t need his picture in the paper, as long as the bakery made it in, some line about the goodness of everything he’d made. He told Linette that Jade and Gee were waiting on him.

“But I need you here.”

“I’ll be quick,” Ray said. Wilson’s house was no more than five minutes from Gee’s school, which was ten minutes from Superfine on the highway. Fewer, if he hustled. “I’ll be right back, Linette—you’ll see.”

Ray yanked out of the lot and sped toward the highway.

Gee was waiting in front of the school with his teacher. Ray signed the checkout clipboard and caught the boy up in his arms. He settled into the backseat, and Ray told him to buckle up, the reporter was coming, and they had to rush.

Wilson lived in a neighborhood of battered brick ranch houses with empty, overgrown lawns. At least where he and Jade lived had signs of life: bicycles underneath the porches, plastic slides in the yard. And, still, it was nothing like the west side, where the houses had deep porches, ivory-white pillars, flower gardens. The apartment Jade and Ray lived in was an old millhouse that had belonged to tobacco workers. He had been told the east side was once a nice place to live before the factories closed and the city hollowed out, only the west side left intact. Maybe Ventura had the right idea, buying a house along the edge of the county. Maybe a house would satisfy Jade more than a ruby ring, a trip to Florida.