Help Wanted

It was no secret that Delvina did not like work of any kind. She especially hated domestic labor, and the longer she waited at Grand Central Station, the more she convinced herself accepting this job was a mistake.

She had already missed the flight her prospective employer booked for her because her boyfriend, Leroy, said she was out of her mind if she thought she could leave him for three months without cooking him a real meal. Dutifully, after Delvina had put the lids on his containers of rice, peas, and stewed chicken, Leroy insisted on making a detour to his mechanic shop to see the progress on a truck they were repairing.

She had had to wait there in the car, thinking how Leroy should have married her by now, but it was becoming apparent that she was one of his many girls duped into leaving home, kept under his thumb with fickle promises of legal unions or threats of deportation. He still took care of her, though, and she stayed with him out of convenience.

When Leroy had dropped her off finally, and Delvina arrived at the gate just as the ticket counter agents closed the door to the jetway, relief instead of anger washed over her.

Yet, when Delvina called her employer, the woman had insisted on buying her a train ticket instead. "I really need someone, you see, I can't find anyone at such short notice," the Jamaican lady had said, and Delvina had scowled at the phone, noticing the woman's accent was not as pronounced as her own.

So now, as Delvina waited for the lady at Grand Central Station, she wondered if the job was worth the effort. Years before, her mother had given her money to fly out of Kingston, not knowing that her daughter would spend the last three years shacking up with a sometimes D.J. sometimes mechanic named Leroy Campbell in a messy Fort Lauderdale apartment.

It was not just that Delvina had fallen from grace or that she still felt the task of cleaning up other people's refuse or feeding their offspring beneath her. It was simply that she had decided at the age of fifteen, the year she buried her newborn child, that she would not work for the rest of her life.

Her mother, Maxine, had done it for years, this "non-work," of scamming foreigners out of their pensions with the promise of lotto millions. All the way in St. James, Jamaica, her mother never again lifted a broom in another woman's household. Yet at times, her mother's work did look hard, like when Maxine changed her voice with different victims, or paid strangers to collect incoming money at several Western Union locations. Or when she buried the money in a tin box inside the opening in her bed frame or under a loose tile in the kitchen so when the police raided her modest one-floor home, there was nothing to find.

Besides, the police would move on to mansions that seemed to spring up overnight. They believed Maxine was only a small fish caught up in the grand scheme and not its mastermind.

No. Delvina did not want to do what her mother did either, but here she was at her aunt's behest waiting on some bourgeoisie Jamaican lady to take her to her house in New Jersey to take care of her offspring.

A glance at her plastic digital watch revealed the woman was forty-five minutes late. She fidgeted with the duffle bag as a security officer passed through. It was dawning on her that running off to the United States without papers was more curse than cure. She always had to render herself invisible.

Delvina went to the payphone and slipped in two quarters. She uncurled the slip of paper with the woman's number and dialed.

"Hello?"

"Hello, ma'am?" Delvina began, "Is where you are, ma'am? I waiting for quite a while now."

"How is it you don't have a cellphone in this day and age? I have been at the station for...