Young Wives Read Online Free PDF Page B

her children. Then, when she’d been made a loan officer, and later head of the whole loan department, she’d been as astonished as any of them. Mr. Feeney, the branch manager, had liked her—they got on real well and up to his retirement, she’d been his assistant branch manager. When he’d retired, well, she’d hadn’t been surprised at anything except her reluctance to tell Clinton the good news.
    Only one woman, Mr. Feeney’s old secretary, Anne, seemed to resent her. Now she was branch manager, with two dozen people, including Anne and Michelle, reporting to her! She coped with Anne and depended on Michelle. Thank God it hadn’t changed their friendship: Michelle wasn’t the least bit jealous. Michelle liked being a loan officer and didn’t want to put in any hours after three o’clock Not, of course, that Jada wanted to—she just had to. The bank was paying her about half what they had paid Mr. Feeney, but they still wanted blood. Two months ago they’d sent some management consultants through to see if there was some way they could “reduce overhead through more efficient paperwork flow-through and staff utilization.” What it really meant was finding a way to fire a couple more people, though Jada’s branch had larger deposits and transactions than any other branch of its size in the county.
    Of course, everyone had been shaken up. They all needed their paychecks—except for maybe Michelle—as bad as Jada did. Sometimes Jada had to shake her head at the way men managed things. They gave lip service to the idea that human resources (never “people”) would perform better if their morale was high, but then the sons-of-bitches were always doing things that lowered morale.
    The report had come back two weeks ago and—thank the Lord—the branch had been given what television movie critics might have called a big thumbs up. But Jada had been left with frightened, resentful employees. To combat that she instituted a weekly meeting to get and implement the staff’s suggestions for improvements. The problem was, there were very few real ways to improve, while everybody wanted to use the meeting to showboat. Well, at least the men did. They all had to repeat old ideas over and over as if they were new and their own. The women had to talk every single damn thing to death.
    This evening’s meeting had been so stupid, a waste of time. Why was it that a person alone could make a decision in ten minutes, but an organization of ten people could take two hours to come to no decisions at all?
    Jada sighed as she turned the Volvo into the driveway. She could see the unweeded dahlia bed by the streetlight. Her mother, a great gardener, would be ashamed. At the very last minute she saw Kevon’s bike lying on the blacktop near the garage door. She swerved and braked. God-double-damn it! Goddamn, Goddamn, Goddamn! So much for not taking the Lord’s name in vain. Jada stormed out of the car into the cold, jerked the bike up, and leaned it against the side of the garage. She opened the door ( Why hadn’t Clinton fixed the automatic door opener? The man was useless as handles on a glove! ) and then put the bike away, pulled the car into the garage, got out, closed the garage door, and stamped across the lawn.
    It was bedlam inside. Clinton was lying on the great room sofa. He gave her a look that said “I do help around the house,” when all he’d managed to do in the last week was put a towel in the hamper once. Now he was talking on the phone while Shavonne was eating cookies and watching TV. Both were forbidden to her preteen daughter before homework and a chapter of reading. Meanwhile Kevon, Jada realized with a shock, wasn’t anywhere to be found. At least the baby was sleeping, unless Clinton had left her lying in the driveway, too.
    “Where’s your brother?” she asked Shavonne.
    “I don’t know,” Shavonne murmured, without taking her eyes off the screen. “Are we going to eat soon?”
    “You