“That doesn’t make it right,” he said. Then he walked into the bedroom and slammed the door behind him.
I couldn’t believe Michael was giving me a hard time when he should have been thanking me. Running bad checks took a lot of planning and coordination. Every week I needed to get my hands on a fresh set of stolen checks, which I bought from a girl I knew who worked at the post office. She would intercept boxes of checkbooks that the bank had mailed to its customers then sell them to me for two-hundred-dollar Macy gift cards. I also needed fake picture IDs to match the name on the checks. I got the ID from a brother who made them in the back of his poster store in a janky-ass strip mall out in Decatur. Then I had to look the part, dressing in dark slacks, a conservative blouse, and leather flats, strolling the mall with confidence like I really did have a bank account full of money.
Every time I made a purchase and paid for it with a fake check, I felt invincible, like I could do anything. I especially loved spending my fake money at stores where the salespeople used to follow me around and give me the side eye when I came in dressed in Jordans and jeans. It was a real eye-opener. I didn’t realize how prejudiced the salesladies at Macy’s were against drug-dealer money until I started doing white-collar crime.
I put a lot of work into my operation, but Michael didn’t seem to appreciate any of it. “It’s not right,” he kept telling me. “You’re stealing from folks.”
I tried to win him over with footwear. I bought him Timberland boots, some Grant Hill high tops, a pair of black Charles Barkley Air Max with a red Nike swoosh, and a luxurious pair of blue snakeskin cowboy boots. I came home from the mall and laid them all out on the coffee table in front of him. All he said was “What I’m gonna do with all this? I only got two feet.”
“What I don’t understand is why you aren’t even trying to get real job,” he said a few nights later when we were lying in bed having another version of the same conversation we’d been having for months. “You’re a people person. You could do all kinds of things. Like, I could see you working at a car dealership. With your personality, you could sell the heck out of a car. Isn’t there anything you want to do besides collecting a welfare check and running schemes?”
I was quiet for a long time. “I don’t know what else I can do,” I said, finally. “What if hustling is the only thing I’m good at?” But Michael was already sound asleep.
It felt like hours that I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Maybe Michael was right. Maybe I wasn’t trying to do better. Michael wanted me to turn my life around—not just for myself, but for him and the kids, too—and I was busy chasing the rush I got every time I flashed some fake ID and walked out of a store with hundreds of dollars’ worth of merchandise. I was getting high off the thrill. As much as I blamed Sweetie for choosing drugs over her babies, I wasn’t any better. The only difference was that when they were with her the kids had ringworm, with me they were covered in stolen clothes.
I didn’t tell Michael I decided to stop hustling. I just started going to the mall less and less often. Then one day, I threw my stolen checks away.
Later that evening, Michael found them in the kitchen trash. He pulled out the checkbook and brushed off a strand of spaghetti. “What’s this?” he asked.
“Those are mine. I’m not doing that shit no more.”
He peered at the check in his hand, then up at me. “This is who you’ve been pretending to be?”
“Yeah.”
He let out a long whistle. “You are damn lucky you didn’t get caught.”
“What you mean?”
“Pat, you’re a lot of things. But I can tell you one thing for sure, you definitely don’t look like no ‘Mrs. Bella Bernstein.’”
Chapter 24
Job Readiness
Stocking shelves at Target during the overnight shift was the first job I got fired from. But it wasn’t my fault. My shift started at midnight and during my lunch break I went to sit in my car. Of course I fell asleep. It could have happened to anybody, twice.
After that I got a job as a cashier at a Texaco station. The manager fired me when he caught me on video surveillance using my kids to help stock the cooler with soft drinks. That wasn’t my fault either. How was I supposed to know there’s a company rule that says only actual “employees” are allowed to do the work? Then I got a gig as a cashier at Walmart. My supervisor asked me to stay late and cover for another employee who’d called in sick. I thought she had a lot of nerve, so I told her to kiss my ass. She let me go, too.
That’s when it really began to sink in that there aren’t a lot of job opportunities available to a twenty-three-year-old never-went-to-high-school former drug dealer. I was running out of options, so one afternoon I drove to the next town over, where nobody I knew would see me, and applied for a job at what had to be the slowest McDonald’s in all of Georgia. The manager hired me on the spot.
Except for the before-work morning rush and the high school kids who came by after school, we hardly ever had any customers. The only thing that kept me from dying of boredom was Cindi, the little white girl who worked the counter beside me. Cindi had more problems with her love life then the entire cast of The Young and the Restless put together.
One afternoon a few weeks after I got hired, Cindi was deep into one of her stories—“So I told Travis, ‘Go ahead and take your skanky ex to prom.’ He’s such a dumb-ass he don’t even know they don’t make maternity prom dresses . . .”—when I glanced up and noticed a white man dressed in a crisp dark suit had stepped inside. He looked around the dining area, peered into the restroom, then leaned forward and talked into a little microphone pinned to his lapel: “All clear!” Two more white men walked in behind him. One hung back by the door, the other stepped to my register. He looked familiar.
“What can I get for you?” I asked.
“I’ll have a cheeseburger, a cup of water, and a side salad.”
He was an older dude with gray hair and a friendly smile. He looked a little like Bob Barker from The Price Is Right. I was sure I’d seen him on TV. I thought maybe he was on one of those white shows Michael was always watching, like Seinfeld or 60 Minutes.
I couldn’t place his face, but I was pretty sure the man waiting for his burger was some kind of famous. The curiosity was killing me, so I pointed my finger at his chest: “Nigga, where do I know you from?”
Beside me I heard Cindi gasp. “Pat!” she whispered, loud enough for everybody to hear. “Girl, that ain’t no nigga. That’s Jimmy Carter. He used to be the president!”