Page 22 of All Out of Love

“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”

But he also felt compelled, yes compelled, to answer her. “This is Grayson Carrington.”

He could tell she was shocked. What she didn’t know was that he had given her his private cellphone number by mistake. And she had no clue. “Oh! Mr. Carrington. I didn’t realize you would be the one to answer the phone. But I guess when we’re all gone you have to.”

What an absurd thing to say, he thought. “What is it, Jameesha?” he asked.

Jameesha? Dena looked at Grayson when he said that name. Not that ghetto witch again!

“Who in the world is Jameesha?” his father asked him. His mother and Charlotte were curious too.

But Grayson ignored them all as he listened to what Toya had to say. “I need your help, sir,” she said to him.

When Grayson said nothing, she kept on talking because she knew her time was limited. “I took my sister’s boyfriend to the gas station to get some beer. Not for me. They like to drink beer. I don’t drink it at all. But I went in to get me some lunch meat and a bag of chips because I planned on taking a lunch to work tomorrow. It’s supposed to be my first full day as a permanent employee. But when we went up to the counter to pay . . .”

Grayson could feel her tension through the phone.

“When we went to the counter to pay the clerk, Bam, that’s my sister’s boyfriend, he pulled out a gun, and then he and that store clerk fought for control of the gun. Then it went off.”

Grayson’s heart dropped. “Are you okay?” he suddenly blared out, which caught everybody in the car’s attention even more.

“He didn’t shoot me,” Toya said, “he shot the man behind the counter. I don’t know if he died or not, but it looked real bad. But then Bam turns the gun on me and made me drive him back to my mama’s house. The police chased us and we crashed. Or they crashed into us. I was so scared I don’t remember how it happened.”

Grayson couldn’t believe what he was hearing, or that she had the gall to tell him about it. What did any of this have to do with him? But mostly he was unusually concerned about her. Was she truly alright? And why was she incarcerated?

She explained. “They didn’t just arrest Bam when they caught us. They arrested me too. They said I aided and abetted him, but that’s not true, Mr. Carrington. That’s not true! I didn’t know nothing about him trying to rob that store. I knew nothing about it. And the only reason I drove away was because he was pointing that gun at me. He was gonna shoot me too if I didn’t do what he said. He told me that himself.”

Grayson could hardly believe what he was hearing. It sounded like something straight out of a movie.

“They locked me up,” Toya continued. “Like I was a criminal too, they locked me up.”

When she said it again, Grayson could hear her sniffles. She was crying.

“I don’t have money. I don’t have connections. I don’t have nobody else to call.”

“You have one minute,” a recorder said over the phone.

And he could hear the sudden panic in her voice. “Please help me get out on bail, sir, so I can fight this. The BPD always putting people behind bars who don’t suppose to be there. They do it all the time. If you help me I promise you I’ll pay you back every single dime even if it takes the rest of my life. I just need you to get out and fight for my life. But I can’t fight anything in jail. If you could just …”

And then the call went dead. Her minute was up.

Grayson removed his phone from his ear, but still held it in his hand as if he was in deep contemplation.

“What was that all about?” Charlotte asked him.

“Who’s this Jameesha person?” his father asked him.

“That’s what I want to know,” his mother said.

But Grayson said nothing. He was still thinking it through. For her to phone him with such desperation in her voice made him realize what he saw on her face that captivated him so. It wasn’t fear like he at first thought. It was desperation. A desperation that was ingrained within her. She’d been living that life of quiet desperation for a very long time. It was all over her face then, and in her voice now.

And now she needed his help. She needed him.

He made a decision and pressed the button.

His driver looked through the rearview mirror at Grayson as soon as he heard the buzz. “Sir?”

“Drop me off at the Baltimore Police Department, take my party to their destinations, and then double back to pick me up.”