Date With Destiny Read online

  Rashida immediately thought of Destiny. She was between jobs and, based on the entries she had circled in the want ads, she was looking for something blue-collar. Rashida had never dated anyone so far outside her professional milieu, but she couldn’t deny the attraction she had felt to Destiny during their brief encounter.

  “If I followed your example,” Jackie continued, “I never would have taken a chance on James. When I met him, he was working two jobs to pay his way through school. Neither position was much to brag about, but I could tell he was going places and I wanted to be with him when he reached his final destination.”

  Jackie spoke with the fervor of a Baptist preacher. Rashida was tempted to raise her hands to the sky and bear witness. Her mind wandered to Destiny again, but she pushed the pleasant diversion from her mind. She had a limited amount of time to reach the goals she wanted to achieve in her career, which meant she needed a partner who was personally and financially secure, not one whose life was in flux.

  “I’ll remember what you said the next time I hit the McDonald’s drive-thru and the cashier gives me the eye.”

  Jackie picked up her pen and resumed the inventory. “As long as you make sure she has benefits and a retirement plan before you let her get her hands on your Happy Meal.”

  Rashida laughed for the first time in hours. “Do me a favor.” She reached across the conference table and grabbed Jackie’s hand. “Don’t ever change.”

  Jackie placed her other hand on top of Rashida’s. “You can count on me.”

  *

  Friday, March 3

  4:15 p.m.

  Richmond Hill, Georgia

  Rashida settled into a plush leather chair in her boss’s office. Ted Hollis was a good old boy in every sense of the phrase, from the bottoms of his cowboy-booted feet to the top of his crew cut head. His molasses-thick Southern drawl could lull an insomniac to sleep, but he was more on the ball than his pronounced accent led you to believe, and he was an even bigger tech geek than the head of the IT department.

  Dozens of gadgets lined the edge of his L-shaped desk, making his office look more like the display window of an electronics store than a work space. Country music from a free Internet radio station blasted out of the speakers of his souped up computer. He tapped his fingers against his wireless mouse in time to the beat.

  Ted stared at the double monitors on his desk while he searched through his e-mail. “Will Jackie be joining us today?” he asked as steel guitars twanged in the background.

  “No, she was called back to HQ. There was some kind of incident with the security guard.”

  “Something happened to Mr. Frank?”

  “I don’t have any details yet. All I know is he was involved in an altercation. I don’t know with whom or what was the outcome. She said Seaton was quite upset when he called, and he reported some of the tellers were in tears.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Frank Redmond—Mr. Frank to one and all—had been a security guard at Low Country Savings for as long as Rashida could remember. When she was a little girl, he used to give her a lollipop each time her grandmother came in to tidy up after hours. Even though he was off the clock, he would watch over them until her grandmother had cleaned the branch from the top to the bottom. While she waited for her grandmother to finish vacuuming the floors and dusting the common areas, Rashida would read a book in the lobby or sit in the CEO’s chair pretending she was the one calling the shots. Over the years, their positions of power had gotten reversed. Instead of literally looking up to him, he figuratively looked up to her. In many ways, she preferred their old dynamic to their current one. She’d rather call him sir than hear him call her ma’am.

  Mr. Frank was as much of an institution in Savannah as the Waving Girl, River Street, and moss-laden oak trees. The downtown branch had never been robbed, knock wood, primarily because not even the most hardened criminal had the heart to tangle with the gentle man guarding the front door.

  Rashida checked her phone to see if she had any new e-mails or text messages. For once, her phone was ominously quiet. A few seconds later, it vibrated in her hand. “That’s Jackie now.”

  “You’d better take it.” Ted finally located the e-mail he’d been trying to find for the past five minutes. “When you’re done, I have a project for you,” he said, hitting the print button. He grinned as he spun around to face her. “I’ll tell you right off the bat. You’re not going to like it.”

  “Thanks for the warning.” She pressed her phone to her ear. “What’s up, Jackie?”

  “My blood pressure.”

  Rashida motioned for Ted to lower the volume on the music wafting out of his computer. Right now, she really didn’t care how sexy some chick thought Kenny Chesney’s tractor was. “Jackie, I’m going to put you on speaker. I’m sitting here with Ted. As team leader, he needs to hear this, too.” She pressed the speaker icon on her phone’s display panel. “Okay, Jackie. Tell us what happened.”

  “Someone held up the Bank of America on Bull Street. Mr. Frank saw the robber running down Congress, forgot he was seventy-two years old, and tried to play hero. The guy ran through him like an NFL running back taking on a peewee team. Mr. Frank slowed him down long enough for the dye pack to go off, but the guy dropped the bag and broke free. The cops have an APB out for a six-foot Caucasian male, twenty-five to thirty, wearing sunglasses, jeans, a Savannah Sand Gnats cap, and a hooded gray sweatshirt. He was last seen driving a late-model brown sedan toward MLK.”

  Ted shook his head. “I-16’s right off of MLK. The guy could be anywhere by now. More than likely, Chatham County’s finest will find the getaway car torched in a field somewhere. Unless they get an anonymous tip, chances are they aren’t going to find the driver. How’s Mr. Frank doing?”

  “Not well,” Jackie said. “I’m following the ambulance taking him to Candler Hospital. The paramedics say he has a broken collarbone, cracked ribs, a fractured kneecap, and perhaps a ruptured spleen, which means he’s going to be out of commission for a while. I’ve arranged for off-duty cops to stand guard the rest of the afternoon and the beginning of next week, but those guys can be expensive. We have to find a permanent solution.”

  “I can’t picture Mr. Frank coming back to work after he heals,” Rashida said. “There’s no way he’s going to be able to stand on his feet all day, and once word got around that he can’t defend himself, the branch would be fair game for anyone with a gun and a stick-up note.”

  “Everyone’s going to be on edge from now until closing,” Ted said. “I’ll draft an e-mail for all the branch managers advising them to be cautious and alert the rest of the afternoon. Good work, Jackie. Keep us posted.”

  “Will do.”

  Rashida ended the call.

  “I’ll talk to Catherine in HR and see if she wants to offer Mr. Frank a retirement package and go ahead and post his position,” Ted said.

  “Internally or externally?”

  “Both.”

  “Mr. Frank’s backup has made it clear he’s happy working only part-time. I doubt he’ll take the job.”

  “I’ll ask Catherine to offer it to him and see what he says. We need someone ASAP. Ideally, we’ll have a qualified person trained and in place before St. Patrick’s Day. The crowds can get crazy once the green beer starts flowing.”

  “True, but we can’t afford to rush the hiring process. After we place the ad, Jackie has to vet each of the applicants and make sure they have all the proper certifications before we can even consider them.”

  “We’ll keep the rent-a-cops in place until we find someone. Yes, they’re expensive, but we can’t skimp on security.” Ted smiled in an obvious attempt to lighten the mood. “Happy Friday, huh?”

  Rashida was beginning to think this Friday would never end.

  “Almost forgot.” Ted reached for the piece of paper on his printer and presented it to Rashida with a flourish. “Your project.” />
  Rashida read the e-mail with a rising sense of disbelief. “Please tell me this is a joke.”

  “I wish I could.”

  When Dennis Rawlings, the bank’s CEO, came on board three years ago, he had closed the mortgage office in Hilton Head, South Carolina, because he felt the location fell “outside of the company’s footprint.” Never mind that the housing market in the ritzy resort town had remained strong despite the recession and the mortgage originators there made money hand over fist. Never mind that the bank itself had taken its name from the region along South Carolina’s coast, a region that stretched from Beaufort to Charleston and included Hilton Head.

  According to the e-mail Dennis had sent Ted, he was reconsidering his decision and she was being tasked with heading up a committee to determine if buying back the mortgage office in the bank’s former territory would be an economic boost or a public relations disaster.

  “I fought to keep that office open,” she said.

  “I know you did.”

  “I said it was a horrible idea to shut it and scrap the plan to expand to Charleston, but I was shot down. A promotion I’d been promised for months was held up for years because I dared to voice my opinion.”

  “I know.” Ted raised one hand in a placating gesture. “At the time, the word from up high was we were getting too big for our britches and needed to downsize. As you can tell from that e-mail, that’s no longer the prevailing opinion. The bank has six hundred million dollars in assets. The goal is to get to a billion within five years. In this economy, that’s not going to be easy, but you’ve seen how motivated our corporate lenders are. You’ve seen how much the mortgage department has added to the bank’s bottom line. And I’m not the only one who has seen how valuable you are to this organization. Though he didn’t come out and say it, that e-mail is Dennis’s way of admitting you were probably right all along. If you prove that you were, I think it’s safe to say it won’t be long before you’ll be ordering a new set of business cards.”

  “Because I’ll be out the door.”

  “Because you’ll be one step closer to running this place.”

  Rashida had never been ruled by ambition, but she had to admit the idea of eventually becoming the chief executive officer of a bank where her grandmother once scrubbed the floors held great appeal. How many women, let alone African-American women, were heads of billion-dollar corporations? She could be one of a relative few.

  She referred to Dennis’s e-mail. She was being granted carte blanche to form a research committee, select the members, and hold meetings as she saw fit. She was even free to formulate her own timeline for sharing the results with executive management.

  “It’s a lot of work,” Ted said, “and your plate’s already full. Do you think you can do it?”

  “Yes,” Rashida said without hesitation.

  But my long days are about to get even longer.

  Chapter Three

  Saturday, March 4

  12:27 p.m.

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Rashida normally treated a long drive as an opportunity to clear her head. The drive to Atlanta, in contrast, gave her a chance to think. By the time she parked in front of Diana’s house in Roswell, an affluent suburb eighteen miles from the center of Georgia’s capital city, she had chosen the members of the exploratory committee she had been tapped to head and even planned their first meeting. She decided on an uneven number of members in order to prevent potential voting deadlocks.

  Sitting in her car in Diana’s driveway, she dashed off a quick e-mail to the leaders of the mortgage, corporate lending, consumer lending, and marketing departments. She provided a brief overview of the as-yet unformed committee’s goals, emphasized the confidential nature of their mission, and invited them to join her team.

  All four department heads were married to their smartphones, so she didn’t have to wait long for responses. Within minutes, all four had e-mailed their replies. All had just as much on their plates as she did, if not more, but each responded with an enthusiastic yes.

  Rashida clenched her fists in celebration. Her Saturday had gotten off to a better start than her Friday. Beginning with her run-in with Destiny, Friday had been one tribulation after another. She didn’t expect today to be any different.

  Like most people accustomed to success, she didn’t handle failure well. And she was about to come face-to-face with her greatest personal disappointment. Her relationship with Diana should have worked. All the ingredients for success were there, but her attempt to blend the components had resulted in a less than palatable outcome.

  When she and Diana had met, she had thought the sexy real estate agent would be the love of her life, her very own Princess Charming. But the fairy tale life she had dreamed about had left her feeling strangely unsatisfied. If perfection wasn’t enough, what was? She feared the fault lay with her.

  “Apparently, happily ever after isn’t in my skill set.”

  She glanced toward the sprawling house. Diana stood in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. She was wearing a cream-colored silk blouse, a matching mini-skirt that showed off her shapely legs, and a bemused smile. A wide black belt circled her narrow waist. Rashida turned off her phone, climbed out of her car, and prepared herself for what she hoped would be a gentle lecture. When Diana really got going, her withering words could peel paint.

  “Do you ever stop working?” Diana asked, opening her arms for a hug.

  “Do you?” Rashida gave her the requested hug and a peck on the cheek.

  “Touché.”

  Diana’s lopsided grin revealed the peach pit dimples that had attracted Rashida to her in the first place. Though the attraction remained, it had cooled from the all-consuming fire it had once been to a faintly glowing ember. Few people were immune to Diana’s charms. She was undeniably gorgeous—long, dark brown hair, similarly-hued eyes, skin the color of café au lait, and a gym-toned body that remained a perfect size six despite her lifelong love affair with medianoches, the pork sandwiches that came a close second to cigars in terms of prized Cuban exports.

  “If I stopped working, I wouldn’t have all this.” Diana indicated the twenty-room house and the fleet of luxury cars parked inside the hangar-sized garage. “If you stopped working, we might still be together.”

  Rashida grunted in disagreement. “I’m not cut out to be a trophy wife.”

  Diana was one of the most successful real estate agents in the Southeast. Her annual income had been impressive when she lived in Savannah. After she opened an office in Atlanta, the figure had become astronomical. It wasn’t long before she decided to leave her Savannah office in the capable hands of her most successful closer and move where the big money deals were. Rashida had opted not to follow, no matter how hard and how often Diana tried to convince her to change her mind. By then, she had already invested ten years in Low Country Savings and didn’t want to start over somewhere else. She had worked too long and too hard to pull up stakes and be forced to prove herself all over again. Like Diana, she wanted to reach the top of her profession, but their respective roads followed different paths.

  She and Diana had tried the long-distance thing for a year, talking on the phone every night and seeing each other on the weekends, but the time apart had made Rashida realize the gap in their relationship was more than geographical. They didn’t want the same things in life and, aside from successful careers and close relationships with their grandmothers, they didn’t have anything in common.

  Diana loved the finer things in life, splurging on cars, clothes, jewelry, and her twelve thousand square foot house. Rashida preferred to keep it simple. She had an apartment not a house, bought what she needed not what she wanted, drove a Prius instead of a Lexus, and contributed the maximum amount to her 401K, preferring to save most of her money for a rainy day. She made six figures a year and tucked away five. Thanks to aggressive saving, frugal spending, and a comfortable salary, her nest egg had grown so much she could retire
today, but she wasn’t ready to pull the plug on her work life. She had a few more career goals she wanted to accomplish first.

  She followed Diana into the house. The heels of Diana’s designer shoes clicked on the marble foyer, the Louboutins’ red soles flashing like moving caution lights. A line of suitcases led into the stately living room.

  “Going somewhere?” Rashida asked.

  “Nelly and I are flying to Miami for the weekend.”

  Diana and Nelly Camacho, a twenty-two-year-old model and wannabe actress, had been dating for a little over a year. Rashida had a subscription to Atlanta magazine and had seen pictures of them making the rounds of the social scene. She had once been the woman on Diana’s arm. Then she had regressed from being a full-time partner to what felt like a part-time tenant. She had gone from sharing a life to a house to a couple of dresser drawers. Now what was she? Nothing more than the owner of a box of tchotchkes she had left behind and could probably live without.

  “If you have a plane to catch, I’ll take my stuff and get out of your hair.” Rashida looked around but didn’t see anything that belonged to her.

  “You’re not getting off that easy. My flight doesn’t leave for hours yet. You and I have plenty of time.”

  Diana curled up on the microsuede sofa. Rashida sat in the matching armchair across from her.

  “How was your drive?”

  “Not too bad. I got an early start and ended up making good time. I-16 was relatively clear, but 85 was a parking lot as usual.”

  “How long were you hiding out in my driveway?”

  “I wasn’t hiding. I was…”

  Diana arched an eyebrow as Rashida’s voice trailed off. “Working?”

  “I was sending an e-mail.”

  “A work e-mail?”

  Rashida finally admitted defeat. “What other kind is there?”

  “I still don’t know why you keep sticking with that little community bank of yours. With my connections and your skills, you could find a job at a larger bank in Atlanta in no time.”