The Way It Works Read online

  So I tell Mr. Jefferson everything. Including the fact that I’m homeless.

  To my surprise, he listens. And nods. And when I’m done, he does something I wasn’t expecting. He smiles.

  “Thank you for being honest,” he says.

  “Mr. Jefferson, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was hurt your daughter,” I say. “But I just couldn’t stand the shame. I guess I’m a coward.”

  “No, you’re not,” he says. “Do you think you can be as honest with Yolanda as you just were with me?”

  “Do you think she would listen?” I say.

  “Well,” says Mr. Jefferson, “there’s only one way to find out.”

  “You mean I should go talk to her right now?”

  “That’s just what I mean. If you’re serious about her, that is. If not, then don’t bother.”

  “I just thought that after what happened yesterday—”

  “Yesterday you told her half the truth,” Mr. Jefferson interrupts. “What you need to do is tell her the whole truth.”

  I nod.

  “You’re right,” I say.

  “Well?”

  “Is Yolanda at work right now?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “You want to walk with me?” I ask him.

  “Sure, Walter, I’ll come along,” he says. “I’m dying to see how this turns out.”

  “So are we!” says one of my new employees. I’d forgotten about them. I turn and face them.

  “Sorry, folks, this is some personal business,” I say. “Meet me back here tomorrow morning to collect the rest of your pay. And I’ll have more work for those interested.”

  “Good luck, Walter!” says a big guy with red hair. “Hope you work it out with her!”

  “Yeah, good luck!” says everyone else. “Let us know what happens!”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Then Parnell and I head for the postal center. It’s time to make things right for real.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mr. Jefferson says he’ll wait outside while I go in. He doesn’t want to interfere. So I head into the postal center by myself.

  Yolanda is standing behind the counter. She’s got a pile of rubber bands in front of her. She’s sorting them according to color. There’s nobody in line. It’s just me and her. When she sees me, she stiffens up. A look comes over her face that tells me this is not going to be easy. Well, I didn’t think it would be.

  I walk up to the counter. She says nothing. She doesn’t even look up. She just keeps sorting rubber bands.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Was there something I could help you with, sir?” she says.

  “So it’s like that?” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s like that,” she says. “If there’s nothing you need, I’m very busy right now.”

  “Yolanda, there’s something else I have to tell you. I didn’t give you the whole story yesterday.”

  She stops sorting the rubber bands and looks up at me.

  “Oh, so you were lying?”

  “No, I wasn’t lying. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “How do I know that? You stood me up with no trouble. Maybe you can lie just as easily.”

  Oh, boy. This is not going well. I can’t believe how nervous I am. My palms are sweaty. I wipe them on my blue jumpsuit.

  “Well?” she says. “What’s this big thing you have to tell me? I don’t have all day. These rubber bands are not going to organize themselves.”

  “Yolanda, the truth is, I’m homeless,” I say. “And it’s really embarrassing. So I didn’t want you to know. I was afraid you wouldn’t want to see me again. I stood you up because my life got turned upside down. Just when I thought I’d lost everything, I lost even more. When my car got towed, it meant I had to go back to the homeless shelter. I had no money. No job. No hope either. And I didn’t want you to know how bad things were with me. I guess I was afraid. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the whole story. But now you know.”

  “I already knew you were homeless, Walter,” says Yolanda.

  I can’t believe what I just heard. I stare at her, my jaw hanging open.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Oh, come on. Give a sister some credit. The signs were all there.”

  “What signs?” I say. “I thought I was doing a good job of hiding it!”

  “First of all, you wore the same suit every day,” says Yolanda. “That was kind of a clue. Second of all, why would you come in here if you had a place of your own? You needed a mailbox because you needed an address to put on your résumé. Am I right?”

  “You should have been a detective,” I say.

  “And another thing. You checked your email here all the time. Most likely, if you had a place of your own, you would have a computer too. But instead you used this one. So that was another clue.”

  “You should have been a senior detective,” I say. “Anything else, Sherlock Holmes?”

  “You did let a couple of hints drop,” Yolanda says. “Like when we were out to dinner, you said you had a small place downtown. A really small place. You may not know this, but you looked out the window at your car when you said that.”

  “I did?”

  “Yup. Body language is a dead giveaway.”

  “You’re scaring me,” I say. “So…you knew I was homeless, and you agreed to go out with me anyway?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why?”

  Yolanda rolls her eyes.

  “Do I really have to answer that one?” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Walter, first of all, I knew enough about you to know that you’re no bum. I could see how hard you were working to find a job. I know sometimes people just catch a bunch of bad breaks. That’s not your fault. I knew you were the kind of guy who wouldn’t rest until you’d gotten what you wanted out of life. And that made me respect you.”

  “Wow,” I say. “I wish I had known that.”

  “Walter, what is wrong with you?” she says. “The fact that I went out with you wasn’t enough to tell you how I felt? You think I just go out with any old guy who asks me? I’m very picky. Ask my parents. You’re the first guy I’ve ever brought home to meet them.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I say.

  “No, I’m not kidding,” she says. “That’s why it hurt me so bad when you didn’t show up. I was beside myself, Walter. All I could think of was that you were hurt and couldn’t get help.”

  “Yolanda,” I say, “will you ever forgive me for being such an idiot?”

  She gives me yet another long look. But this time, there’s a tiny smile playing around her lips.

  “Walter,” she says, “go check your email.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I sent you something.”

  “You sent me an email? How did you even know my address?”

  Yolanda reaches under the counter and holds up a piece of paper. My résumé. It has my email address on it.

  “When you came in to make copies of this, I made myself an extra one.”

  I’m amazed. “You did? But why?”

  “I was curious to know more about you. Now, go check your email.”

  I go over to the computer and log in to my email account. I haven’t checked it in a long time. There are a lot of messages. Some of them are from places I asked for a job, but I don’t care about those anymore. I keep looking through my inbox until I find a message from Yolanda. I click on it to open it up.

  It reads:

  Wherever you are, and whatever happened, it’s okay. Just come back.

  That’s all it says. I check the message header to see when she sent it. The date is over two weeks old.

  I get up and go back to the counter.

  “You sent that before I even came back to apologize,” I say.

  “Believe me, there were times I wished I hadn’t sent it. But now I’m glad I did.”

  “So am I,” I say. “Thank you so
much.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says.

  “I…I don’t know what to say.”

  “How about you tell me about this big business idea of yours, Mr. Urban Courier?”

  “What? How did you know about that too?”

  “It’s on your name tag, genius,” says Yolanda.

  “Oh, right,” I say. “I forgot. Listen… how about I tell you all about it over dinner tonight? If you’ll give me another chance, that is.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Long story short…she gave me another chance. And this time, I didn’t screw it up.

  It’s a year later. Yolanda and I are in the same Chinese restaurant we went to on our first date. But we’re not eating. We’re dancing. Lots of my old friends from the shelter are there. So are some of my best customers. All her family members are there too. Everyone is watching us dance. There’s a DJ playing a Roberta Flack tune: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

  Yolanda is wearing a white gown.

  I’m in a tuxedo.

  We just got married.

  A lot’s happened in a year. My business has grown. It’s too big for me to run on my own anymore. I have twenty employees now. Most of them are people who used to be homeless and unemployed. Now they all have jobs. They can afford places of their own. They’re off the street and supporting themselves. They’re productive members of society. You can see the difference in the way they carry themselves. They feel alive again.

  I have a new business partner too. She’s the woman in my arms right now. Yolanda runs the administrative side of things. She takes care of the office. She’s even got her own secretary to help her. Without her help, I’d be lost. She’s smart and capable. She’s my partner in every sense of the word.

  I spend a lot of my time dealing with clients now. I still go around drumming up new business. But it’s on a whole new level. Instead of knocking on doors, I sit in fancy boardrooms with executives of large corporations. I like it. It feels natural. Like it’s what I was meant to be doing all along.

  Scooby is still with me too. He’s in charge of the employees now. He doesn’t call himself Scooby anymore. Now he’s back to calling himself Samuel. That was his name before he lost everything. He told me just the other day that he hasn’t felt so good about himself in years. And he thanked me for giving him a chance. I told him he didn’t have to thank me. He was helping me by doing such good work.

  It makes me feel so good to look around the room at all these people. Parnell performed our wedding ceremony. I could see by the look on his face how proud he was that we were getting married. He’s still protective of his little girl, of course. But it helps that he thinks a lot of his new son-in-law.

  Mrs. Jefferson is standing next to him. If she smiled any harder, her face might fall off. She’s been teaching me a lot of Mandarin. We can have a whole conversation now. She says I’m a natural. If we have kids, Yolanda and I want them to speak both languages.

  And Yolanda wants kids. A lot of them.

  I look down into Yolanda’s eyes and smile.

  “How you doing?” I ask.

  “I’m great,” she says. “How you doing?”

  “Sorry I’m such a lousy dancer.”

  “That’s okay. You’re good at other things.”

  “Did I mention this is the happiest day of my life?”

  “About a thousand times.”

  “Well, I’m going to say it again. In case you forget.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  The song ends. Everybody claps. Then the DJ puts on some livelier music, and the floor fills up with people. Chinese, blacks, whites, Hispanics. It looks like the lobby of the United Nations. It’s the oddest collection of people you’ll ever see. And one of the happiest too.

  Everybody starts to boogie like dancing is going out of style. The DJ switches back and forth, from soul and rap tunes to Chinese pop music to blues and rock and roll. Everyone is having such a good time that no one cares what they dance to. They just want to get down with their funky selves.

  “By the way,” says Yolanda. “I want to give you this.”

  She presses something into my hand.

  “What is it?” I say.

  “Just look at it,” she tells me.

  I open up my hand. It’s a tiny piece of paper, all folded up. I unfold it. I can’t believe my eyes.

  “Is this what I think it is?” I ask her.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You saved it all this time?”

  “I sure did. Read it.”

  It’s the fortune from a fortune cookie.

  It’s the one Yolanda got on our first date, in this very restaurant. The one she wouldn’t show me that night.

  The fortune says:

  You will marry the man of your dreams.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in these things,” I say.

  “I never said that,” she tells me. “I just said they weren’t really a Chinese invention.”

  “How come you didn’t show this to me before?”

  “Because I didn’t want to jinx it. I wanted it to come true,” she says. “And it did.”

  I grab my wife close and hold her tight.

  We’re not rich. But we don’t care about being rich. We just care about being happy. We don’t have the money to go on a honeymoon right now. We don’t care about that either. We’ll spend tonight in a luxury hotel suite. We thought we would treat ourselves that much. Then it’s back to our regular lives. That’s okay. We love our lives just the way they are.

  When we check out of the hotel, we’ll go back to our new apartment. We just bought it a month ago. It’s not a fancy place, and it’s not very big.

  But it’s home.

  The Way It Works is William Kowalski’s second title in the Rapid Reads series. The Barrio Kings was published in Spring 2010. Kowalski is the award-winning author of four previous novels, including the international bestseller Eddie’s Bastard. He lives on the South Shore of Nova Scotia with his wife and children.

  The following is an excerpt from

  another exciting Rapid Reads novel,

  The Barrio Kings by William Kowalski.

  978-1-55469-244-6 $9.95 pb

  “Look, man, real life is not always pretty. Sometimes you gotta do hard things. You have to protect what’s yours in this life. No one else will do that for you.”

  Rosario Gomez gave up gang life after his brother was killed in a street fight. Now all he wants to do is finish night school, be a good father and work hard enough at his job at the supermarket to get promoted. But when an old friend from the barrio shows up, Rosario realizes he was fooling himself if he thought he could ignore his violent past.

  CHAPTER ONE

  My name is Rosario Gomez. I’m twenty-three years old. I stock shelves at the supermarket downtown. I wear a tie to work every day, even though I don’t have to. I wear a long-sleeved shirt to cover my tattoos. But I can’t hide all of them. There’s one on my right hand that says BK in small black letters. That one I can’t hide. So I try to keep my right hand in my pocket when my boss is around.

  My boss is Mr. Enwright. He’s a fat, bald white guy who gets mad easy. But he’s okay. Some of the other workers here call him Mr. Enwrong. I do not do that. Not to his face, and not behind his back. I need this job too bad. Enwright told me that once I get my ged he will promote me to assistant manager. That would be the most important job anyone in my family has ever had.

  I was not always this straight. I came up rough. My neighborhood was on the news almost every night, and the news was never good. It was the kind of barrio nice people don’t visit. There was nothing there for them. There was nothing there for me either. There was only survival, and I had to fight for that.

  I dropped out of school to run with a gang called the Barrio Kings. I did some things I’m not proud of now. Like I said, I had to survive. I used to be the best street fighter around. I didn’t like fighting. But I had no choice. I prete
nded to like it though. I used to smile. That scared people even more. And when you’re scared, you lose. Most fights are won before they start. You win them in your head, before you even throw a single punch.

  I was just lucky that I was good at fighting, the way some people are just good at music or art. Sometimes I wonder if I should have been a boxer. But I always used to get this sick feeling in my stomach after I hit someone. It stayed with me. I don’t miss that feeling. It’s been a long time since I was in a fight. I hope I’m never in another one.

  Things are different now. I’ve had this job for three years. I’ve stayed out of trouble. I don’t go back to the old barrio anymore. I don’t even miss it. Now I work from nine to five. After work, three days a week, I take the crosstown bus to the community college. That’s where I take my night courses. I’m almost done with them. In just three weeks, I’m going to finish my high-school studies. Then I’ll be the first person in my family to have a diploma too.

  After class, I take another bus home. I live with my girlfriend, Connie. She’s twenty. We’ve been together for two years. We’re going to have a baby in a month. We already know it’s a boy. We’re going to name him Emilio. We have a crib all set up for him. We have a bunch of toys and clothes too. Connie’s Aunt Carlita gave them to us. She has eight kids, so she has a lot of extra stuff.

  By the time I get home after class, I’m wiped. But Connie has not been feeling too good lately, so usually I make dinner. I can’t believe how big she is. Her feet hurt all the time. So do her hips and knees. I feel bad for her, but there’s nothing I can do. And Emilio is almost here. I can’t believe I’m going to be a dad.

  Mr. Enwright told me that when I get that promotion, I will have to work longer hours, but I’ll make more money. I can’t wait. I have a plan. I’m going to save up money, and I’m going back to school. College this time. I’ll take some business courses. I figure by the time Emilio is five, I can be a manager, and I will make even more money. That would put me on the same level as Mr. Enwright. I think Emilio will be proud to know his dad is a boss.

  But I’m not stopping there. I want a business of my own. I don’t know what kind yet. All I know is, I can see it in my head. Just like I used to see myself winning street fights. I can see myself in a three-piece suit. I’m not sitting in an office though. Who wants to sit still all day? Not me. I like to move around, talk to people, shake hands, make deals. I see myself in an airplane. I’m speaking different languages with people in other countries. Maybe I’ll be selling things. Maybe I’ll be setting up deals. Whatever it is, I’ll be good at it. And I will make a lot of money.