5

Jason

A large Black woman stands outside Jason’s door. She’s wearing a dark dress, a wildly colorful scarf, and a skeptical expression. He’s grown used to this expression, has seen it many times over the last nine months. “This a lawyer’s office?” she asks.

He pushes his glasses up his nose and comes from behind his walnut desk, bought almost a decade ago for a different time and space. He holds out his hand. “I’m Jason Franklin, and you must be Ms. Bell. And yeah, you’re in the right place. May look strange, but I make it work.”

She takes him in, along with the bookshelves lined with legal tomes, and four ladder-back chairs circling a small table. “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” she finally says.

“The trade-offs you make to do the work you want.” Only partially true.

“You’re telling me you’d rather be here than in some big office tower downtown?”

“Crazy, huh?” He leads her inside and pulls out a chair at the table. “Take a load off, Ms. Bell. Want some coffee? Tea? Something cold?”

It’s clear she’s still not convinced, but she sits and asks for water, watches him closely as he retrieves two bottles from the dorm-room refrigerator, hands her one, and keeps the other for himself. “How do I know you’re a real lawyer?” she asks.

Jason points to the framed documents on the wall: undergraduate diploma from the University of Pennsylvania, law school diploma from Harvard, Massachusetts Bar admission certificate.

“You went to Harvard?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer, just grabs the handle embedded inside the ten-foot-wide door and pulls the massive piece of steel across the floor, closing them in. The door is heavy, but in the nine months since he moved here he’s learned how to brace his legs to make shutting it look easy. This is about as far as he could be from his Seaport office with its thirty-seventh-floor harbor view. But here he stands, inside a windowless yet well-appointed storage unit.

“Got to be one hell of a story.” Ms. Bell places her immense purse on the chair next to her and opens her water bottle. She waits a minute to see if he’s going to tell it, and when he doesn’t, she begins. “You helped my friend Alborz with her visa, and she says you’re smart and there’s nothing highfalutin about you. Realtor said I need a lawyer, and I figure a Black man would understand better.”

He gets a file folder and a legal pad from his desk, then sits down across from her at the table. He opens the file. “You said you’ve got issues with a developer wanting to buy your property. He strong-arming you?”

“W. G. Haines Companies.” Ms. Bell’s voice is thick with disdain. “Trying to buy up the whole block. Bought most of it already.”

Jason knows all about Haines Companies. Muscular and moneyed and looking to get even more so. “You’re not interested?”

Ms. Bell pulls a handful of papers from her purse. One is a map. “I live here.” She points to a red circle in the middle of a block in low-rent Roxbury, five blocks west of Boston’s fashionable South End, which has been pushing its fashionableness toward its neighbor for the past few years. “Was my grandmama’s house,” she explains. “Then my mama’s, and now it’s mine. Because of their hard work and some my own, I don’t owe a cent on it. We’re a family of hardworking and hard-saving teachers. We’re tough and always take care of ourselves.”

“Both my parents are teachers.” Jason already likes this woman, as well as the idea of helping her, of being able to help her. Not to mention screwing Haines Companies. David vs. Goliath perhaps, but David did win that one. “Also hardworking, hard-saving, tough, and proud of it.”

“That’s not how Haines sees it. To them, I’m a pain in the ass. Think just because I’m Black and living in Roxbury, they can push me around.”

“Then they’ve clearly got another think coming.”

“Except every one of my neighbors saw dollar signs and signed contracts. So maybe Haines’s thinking is better than we want to say. Even more messed up is those idiots were so hyped to get their hands on the money, they took what was offered and made my property worth less.”

“So you’re looking to sell? But it’s got to be at the right price?”

“A fair price,” she corrects. “My husband died a few years back, and I have three kids. One at UMass Boston and two at the Burke coming up. Got to give them options.”

“And Haines is lowballing?”

“The real estate guy said that if my house were on a different block, one Haines hasn’t gotten its chops into, I could get at least fifty grand more.” She jabs at the map. “Getting over a thousand dollars a square foot in the South End, he says. Around seven hundred in the block next to Mass Ave. And Haines thinks I’m going to jump for joy at a measly three hundred because we’re three blocks further in.”

“That’s the offer?”

“They went up to three fifty but say that’s all they’re going.” She juts out her chin. “So I want to sue them. Or have you pretend to sue them. Scare them into doing what’s right.”

“Seems workable.”

“And there’s more going on, but I don’t know if you can help me with that part.”

Jason tilts his head and waits.

“It’s the neighbors. Some of them at least. Haines’s deal is no one gets their money till the entire block’s bought in.”

“You the last holdout?”

“First, wet toilet paper on the bushes. Then, they egged my car. Last week, a bag of dog poop on the front stoop.”

“Nasty,” he says. “You sure it’s the neighbors?”

Her eyes widen. “You saying it could be Haines?”

“Not saying it is or it isn’t. Just thinking out loud.” He doubts it is Haines. The moves are too unsophisticated. But you never know. That could be the point.

Jason looks at the map. Ms. Bell’s property is in the middle of a line of attached row houses, which Haines probably wants to turn into expensive condominiums. It seems that with a little persuasion, the company could be convinced to add another fifty grand to the pot, maybe more. They have an urban gold mine here, and no company looking to develop in Boston wants to be sued for intimidating minority homeowners. “I’m going to check this out and see what Haines is up to, Ms. Bell. But I’m thinking we can make them do a hell of a lot better than that.”

She stands, smiles, and holds out her hand. “Kimberlyn.”

He shakes it and returns the smile. “Jason.”

Jason has come to dread Friday evenings. It’s the night he’s expected for dinner at his parents’ house, along with his two sisters, their husbands, and the three nieces he’s nuts for. In his old life, he’d looked forward to Fridays all week, a break from the demands of his job into the warmth and laughter of the house in Jamaica Plain where he was raised. Those days, he often had difficulty getting out of work early enough to join them. Now that’s the lie he tells them to stay away.

In his old life, he was an immigration attorney at Spencer Uccello, a rising star in one of the top firms in the city, where no one doubted he was headed toward partnership. He provided strategic advice to large American companies looking to hire foreign nationals and to large foreign companies looking to launch in the US. He brought in a lot of money, and even better than that, he was filling their diversity quota, his photo looking good on their website.

He loved growing up in JP, a section of Boston known for its compatible mingling of race, ethnicity, and wealth, and he’d always imagined raising a family there. Though his family was middle class, he’d been around the one percent a lot, first at Boston Latin, then Penn, then Harvard, and most recently at his fancy-ass white firm. He’s a natural at code switching.

But he got carried away by the headiness of his new status, just like Sabrina, his ex-wife, had warned. The first in his family to command a high-six-figure salary. The first in his family to live in a doorman building. Money to burn after all those years of careful budgeting, his student loans disappeared in two years.

Then, The Case happened, and his ass got hauled out of capitalist heaven and dumped into a self-storage unit. It’s well past time to tell his family the truth, but he can’t face their disappointment. He, the bullied fat boy who made good, proving to his tormentors that his glasses and studiousness didn’t make him a loser. They made him a winner.

The family would be devastated, especially Tawney, his oldest niece, who idolizes him and is studying hard to become a big-time lawyer just like her uncle. His sister is thrilled, as not many fifteen-year-old girls in Tawney’s set are willing to give up their parties because they want to go to law school.

He checks his phone. Five thirty, and his mother likes them all there by six. He hasn’t been to JP in three weeks. It’s not as if he’s got all that much work to do, and he misses them. He thinks about the suit he’ll have to run to his apartment and put on, the cheery lies he’ll have to tell, the pride in his father’s eyes, the adoration in Tawney’s. He punches in the number. “So sorry, Mom,” he says. “It’s another working weekend.”