When I handed my ID to the officer, I mentally prepared myself for what I was about to receive: a piece of paper detailing my charge of “Possession with Intent to Distribute.” I didn’t want to see it, but I knew I had to face the facts.
I almost passed out from shock when instead of a single sheet of paper, the officer handed me a report almost twenty pages long. “Hang on,” he said, passing me the stack. “I gotta go put some more paper in the machine.”
I took the report out to my car and read it over, my heart sinking lower with each turn of the page. There were charges from incidents I barely remembered, like “Abandonment of Certain Dangerous Drugs” in 1991, and, three years later, in 1994, a charge for “Financial Transaction Card Theft” for the time I went on a shopping spree with a stolen credit card DeMarcus had traded me for a ten-dollar rock. The most recent charge was only a year old: a 1996 misdemeanor for “Depositing Bad Checks.” The charge sounded a lot worse that it was. I imagined myself telling Miss Shelly: I can explain that one! Michael’s paycheck wasn’t gonna come till Friday. But it was Wednesday and the kids were hungry, so I wrote a check at the grocery store for twenty-seven dollars and thirteen cents on my empty bank account. But I paid it all back!
But who was I kidding? Even if I could explain why I wrote one bad check, it wouldn’t make a difference. I had twenty pages saying I wasn’t to be trusted. And in case Miss Shelly wasn’t sure, right there on the first page of my Criminal History Report were the worst words of all: “Convicted Felon.”
I felt like I’d been blindsided. Nobody at medical assistant school asked me if I was a convicted felon before they took my money. None of the instructors at Job Readiness ever brought this up. Maybe if I’d heard, even one time, “criminal background check,” I would have known this was coming instead of getting my hopes up, like a fool.
I sat in the car for almost an hour staring at the pages until they began to blur. All that work, all that studying, all that time and effort and student loan money. Why did I even bother? Miss Shelly would never hire somebody like me. Nobody would. I felt stupid for even trying.
I went home and told Michael the position had already been filled.
When I told Miss Campbell what happened, sitting in her office later that week, she took my hands in hers. “I’m so sorry,” she said, leaning forward. “That must have been very difficult.”
“I was so embarrassed,” I said. “I almost threw my jacket over my head and ran out of that police station. But I just got my hair fixed, so you know I wasn’t trying to mess up my weave.”
She let out a little chuckle. “Of course.”
“It’s not like I don’t know I’ve done wrong in my life,” I continued. “But I swear, I never even seen some of those charges before.”
“Really?” Miss Campbell sat up in her chair, looking concerned. “If there’s been some kind of computer error on your records, we should look into it and have it corrected.”
“Yeah!” I said, getting excited by the thought. If we could erase some of these charges, I’d have a chance! I pulled the papers out of my purse and scanned the first page. “Well, like this one here for assault . . .”
“Yes?” Miss Campbell leaned forward. I could tell she wanted my criminal background to be a mistake as much as I did.
I carefully reread the charge. “Actually,” I said, looking up from the page and biting my lip, “come to think of it, I do remember this. It’s from the time I hit one of my customers with my car. . . Yeah, okay, maybe I did do that.” I turned the page. “Okay, so this one right here! It says ‘Insulting or Abusing Public School Teachers, Administrators, or School Bus Drivers’ . . .” I paused, remembering an incident that had happened shortly after Michael and I moved to Riverdale. I’d gotten onto a school bus and cussed out the driver for driving off the day before without my kids because they weren’t at the stop on time. All I did was very carefully explain to the driver, “Do that again, bitch, and I will knock your gotdamn block off.”
I looked up at Miss Campbell. “Okay, never mind that one. I just didn’t know it was gonna be on my permanent record . . .”
I turned the page again. “Okay, this I didn’t do!” I tapped the paper with my finger. “. . . Oh wait. Maybe I did do that.”
I glanced at Miss Campbell. She looked stunned. I cleared my throat and started neatly folding the papers and putting them back in my purse. “You know, now that I’m giving this a closer look . . .” I shook my head and laughed. “I guess I wouldn’t hire me either. I mean, damn. I look like a career criminal!”
Miss Campbell’s mouth was beginning to curl up in a smile. She shook her head quickly, like she was trying to shake herself serious. But it didn’t work; she started to laugh, too.
Ever since I first met Miss Campbell I noticed she wasn’t like any other caseworker I ever had. Those other ladies would listen to stories of my childhood, clutch their hearts, and tell me how sorry they were for all my troubles. When I told Miss Campbell how Mama taught me to pickpocket before I learned to read, or how Derrick had more baby mamas than most men had teeth, she cracked up. Sometimes she got to laughing so loud she had to close her office door because the other caseworkers were complaining about the noise. The more she laughed, the more I wanted to make her laugh.
“Twenty pages!” I howled. “It was thicker than a phone book. When that officer handed me my Criminal History, I thought he was gonna arrest me on the spot for using up all his ink.” The next thing I knew, the two of us were cracking up so hard we could barely catch our breath.
“Oh, Patricia,” Miss Campbell said, wiping tears from her eyes. “Honey, you’re out there trying to be a medical assistant, but I think you missed your calling. The way you turn a sad story around, you should be a comedian! You’re the funniest person I know.”
Chapter 25
Eight Minus Four
Sweetie hardly ever came to see her girls. By the time they’d been with us for almost ten years, she’d only visited a handful of times. She’d show up, swear she was off drugs, and then months, even years would pass, before she’d come back. Every time she disappeared, I’d have to deal with the girls’ broken hearts. “Don’t worry about it,” I’d say, patting the back of whichever one of them was most upset. “You’ll see your mama when you see her.” But the girls weren’t stupid. They knew Sweetie was choosing drugs over taking care of them.