Isabelle laughed. “Or something.”
“So do you want to come up for some tea, or would you like to go check out your new studio?”
“They had room at Job Coeur?”
Jilly nodded. “Third floor, with a huge bay window overlooking the river.”
“Who’d you have to kill to get that?”
“Nothing so drastic. The renovating of the top floor was only just finished this week, so they hadn’t even started renting space yet. The ad’s not going into the paper until tomorrow.”
Knowing that she at least had a place of her own, a weight lifted inside Isabelle. She’d been nervous the whole drive in, not sure quite what was waiting for her in the city. She’d never been very good at depending on the kindness of others for a place to stay. But now, with a studio found, and buoyed by Jilly’s infectious enthusiasm, her own excitement finally began to grow.
“Let’s go see it,” Isabelle said. “We can always have tea in one of those cafes on the ground floor.”
Jilly grinned. “I thought you’d say that,” she said, “so I already locked up before I came down.” She picked up Rubens’s carrier and slipped into the seat, perching the case on her knee. “Ready when you are.”
Isabelle shook her head in amusement. She always forgot how spontaneous Jilly was. The small artist was a witch’s brew of energy and wide-ranging interests, bubbling away in a cauldron and constantly spilling over to splatter anyone standing in the nearby vicinity. When Jilly had you in tow, everything took on new meaning. The ordinary was transformed into the extraordinary, the odd or unusual became positively exotic.
“Do they have parking?” she asked as she slipped behind the wheel on the driver’s side.
“‘Fraid not. You’ll have to park on the street. But you can get a permit if you’ve got the patience to wade through an afternoon or so of City Hall bureaucracy.”
“What? You’re not on a first-name basis with whoever’s in charge?”
“Well,” Jilly said. “Now that you mention it, Sue’s got an office on the second floor. Maybe she could help us.”
“I was kidding,” Isabelle told her.
Jilly smiled. “I knew that. But you should still give Sue a call. Do you know how to get there?” she added as Isabelle pulled away from the curb. “It hasn’t been that long.”
Jilly shrugged and settled back into her seat to fuss with Rubens through the mesh of his carrying case while Isabelle maneuvered them through the thickening afternoon traffic.
“You’re going to love the big city, old fella,” Jilly told Rubens. “There must be hundreds of lady cats just waiting for a handsome tom like you to come courting.”
“Oh please.”
Jilly shot Isabelle a quick grin. “Well he’s got to have something to make up for being uprooted from house and home the way he has.”
“It’s only for a few months.”
“People months,” Jilly corrected. “But how long is that in cat months?”
“This is true,” Isabelle said.
V
The offices of the Newford Children’s Foundation were situated in a building not nearly so prepossessing as one might imagine from its name, taking up only the ground floor of an old Edwardian-style house in Lower Crowsea. The outside of the house bore little resemblance to the blueprint from which it had been constructed. The original architectural lines were blurred with the addition of various porches and skylights, a sunroom along one side wall, the wall on the other side half-covered in ivy. Inside, it was changed as well. The front foyer led into a waiting room that had once been a parlor, while the remaining rooms on the ground floor had been converted into offices. Only the original kitchen at the rear remained as it had been, still overlooking a postage stamp of a backyard.
Because she lived in one of the two apartments upstairs, Rolanda Hamilton could often be found in the Foundation’s offices during off-hours, catching up on her paperwork. She was an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, broadnosed and full-lipped with short corkscrew hair the color of chestnuts. Alone in the office, she’d dressed for comfort rather than style. Her white sweatshirt made her coffee-colored skin seem darker than usual while her long legs were comfortably ensconced in a pair of baggy jeans. Her Reeboks were a dark magenta—the same color as the large plastic hoop earrings she was wearing.
She’d discovered not long after beginning work here that, since the salary for an office support person wasn’t in their budget, she, like the other four counselors that the Foundation employed, had to do double duty: counseling the children they worked with during the day, and then trying to find time to bring files up to date, send out the donation mailings, balance the budget and whatever else needed to be done that they hadn’t been able to get to during the course of their working day. It was an endless task, but Rolanda had yet to bum out on the job as had so many others before her.
There was a reason why she was so dedicated to the furtherance of Kathy Mully’s ideals. Rolanda had grown up in the projects, where her mother had instilled in her a respect for hard work and doing what was right. Her younger brother had been shotgunned when his gang got into a turf war with another crew. He died en route to the hospital and never saw his twelfth birthday. Her older brother was in jail, serving seven to ten for armed robbery. Two of her cousins were also in jail. The boy next door that she’d played with before she entered her teens was serving a life sentence for murder one.
These were statistics that her mother liked to recite whenever Rolanda got into trouble herself, like the time she got sent home from fifth grade for beating up a white girl during recess.
“But Mama,” she’d wailed as her mother gave her a slap across the back of her head as soon as they returned home from the school. “She called me a stupid nigger.”
“You are a stupid nigger if you can’t do better at school than listen to some white trash mouth off”
“It’s not fair. She started it.”
“And you finished it.”
“But—”
“You listen to me, girl. There’s nothing fair about having to try twice as hard to do well and then still have ’em spit in your face, but I’ll be damned if I won’t have one child of mine do well. You hear me?
Are you going to make your mama proud, girl, or do I have to be shamed by you as well?”
The projects ground you down, and Rolanda had never understood how her mother had resisted the oppressive heartbreak of its weight upon her frail shoulders. Five-foot-one and barely a hundred pounds, Janet Hamilton was tougher and more resilient than men twice her size. She had raised three children on her own when her husband abandoned her. She’d worked two jobs and still managed to keep their house clean and regular meals on the table. She’d always had time for her children, and even when she’d lost two of them to the projects, her spirit refused to bow under the loss.
“Why you always got to try so hard?” one of Rolanda’s classmates asked her when they got their tests back one day and Rolanda’s was the only one sporting that red “A” at the top of the paper. “You that afraid of the back of your mama’s hand?”
Rolanda had shaken her head in response. No, she’d thought. I’m afraid Mama won’t be proud of me anymore. But the words remained unspoken. Rolanda had long since learned how to make do in a world where her peers reviled her either for being black or for acting white, depending on the color of their own skin. She simply kept to herself and did the best she could. She didn’t fight with the other kids anymore. She didn’t run with the gangs. Her mother had taught her respect for the rules, both legal and societal, and Rolanda made a point of staying within their parameters, even when all she wanted to do was strike back at the unfairness that surrounded her every day of her life, even after the injustice of her mother’s death, in a drive-by shooting. She fought for change, but she fought from within what she wanted to change, rather than chipping away at it from the outside.