The Littlest Boss

Malik rubbed his hands together. “No, hard pass on that. I’ll take the BMW. Huh. Get a little comparison shopping in for when I’m a rich doctor.”

He closed his eyes, spread his arms wide and tilted his head up toward the sky. “What’s that you say, Mr. Car Dealer Man? Do I want this full custom package in Smoked Topaz or Silverstone? How about one of each, two sets of 444 horses side by side...”

“Uh-huh,” DeShawn said. “Didn’t you say you wanted to be a family practice doctor in an underserved area?”

Malik shook his head, still in his daydream. “You know, at this exact moment in time, I do not recall making that statement.”

“Ha!” DeShawn said. “You’ll see.”

A white BMW pulled into the parking lot and came to a quick stop beside them. The window powered down and Lena Reyes looked at them over the rims of her sunglasses. “Get in. Don’t track dirt.”

“Hi, Lena. Nice to see you again,” DeShawn said with a laugh.

“Get in, it’s cold.”

The window powered back up. DeShawn climbed into the front passenger seat, grinning. Lena liked to play tough but she was a softy when it came to kids. Mention poor kids and she opened her wallet and her heart.

She glanced at Malik as he got in the back seat. “Hi, Malik. Good to see you. How’s school going?”

“Great. Thanks.”

“So, DeShawn,” Lena said as she turned the car back onto Savannah Highway, heading south. “What is your goal, your vision for this project?”

The question startled him. “Uh,” he stammered. When he started thinking about it, he realized that he hadn’t really thought it all the way through. “I thought we could talk to the kids about our experiences. Show them that it can be done. Help them find resources.”

She nodded. “That’s a good start, but I think you’ve got something here that you can turn into a long-term project.”

“How?”

She grinned at him. “That’s for you to figure out. This is your idea, DeShawn. You want to help these kids? They need more than a parade of people lecturing them.”

That’s when the first wave of doubt soaked him. He tried to keep it off of his face, but inside, his mind was checking off all the boxes he hadn’t even noticed were on the list. Lena was right. She had that way of laying truth out flat in front of you. This was going to have to be more. Much more. The idea seemed so good when he was talking with Sadie. Inspire the kids. Point them in the right direction. But Momma G hadn’t just pointed off toward some picturesque horizon and made a nice speech. She’d been there, day after day, doing the hard work. Being a consistent model of goodness in his early, troubled life.

These kids were real people with real problems and real day to day needs. And having hope in the first place was to start hoping and then have it snatched away. To believe that this time, someone was going to actually keep a promise. He’d been there, done that too many times with his own parents. He began to consider the true depth of the waters he was diving into.

This wasn’t a weekend project. This was a commitment.

Malik reached over the seat to clap his hand against DeShawn’s shoulder. “It’ll be fine,” Malik said. “He’s an engineer. Solving problems is what he does.” He looked at DeShawn. “You got this.”

The doubt dialed down a few clicks. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a plan at all. He simply had insufficient data to make a comprehensive one. “We’ll talk to Henry,” he said. “Find out what the needs are and go from there.”

“That’s good,” Lena agreed. “Build the program around the kids. That’s how it should be.”

Charleston stretched out a while longer as they motored down 17 South. There was a long patch of green space, especially around the USDA lab, but really it kept that west of the Ashley vibe all the way up to the intersection of 17 and Main Road, where you could take a left and go high up in the sky on the new bridge over the Stono and get a breathtaking view of Johns Island. That’s usually how DeShawn saw it in the ever shifting map of the greater Charleston area he kept in his head. But they weren’t going to Johns Island today. No Stono Market or Tomato Shed Cafe, sad to say. Nope. Today was all a steady straight drive past the tractor supply places and you-pick berry farms that meant you were easing through Ravenel.

Lena put the pedal down as the road opened up and there was nothing but trees whizzing by on both sides, the car riding as smooth as silk. It was peaceful. He even let himself close his eyes for a while, just breathe the clean air and feel...good.

Don’t overthink it, he thought. Just go with it. Like she said. Build the program. Let it go the way it wants to go. What the kids need.

After some time of just watching the trees, he heard Malik muttering, “Gonna change to surgery. Get me one of these.”

DeShawn laughed, then cautioned Lena as they crossed the Edisto River that it was wise to tap the brakes a few times before entering historic Jacksonboro. That was a stretch of road where the constabulary liked to keep an eye and Radar out for southbound motorists in a little too much of a hurry to get to Beaufort or Savannah.

“Hm,” she said, slowing down. She looked around. “We’re good on gas. Do either of you need to stop for anything? Last civilization for a few miles at least.” She nodded toward the gas station at the fork where you could either cut north up into Walterboro or keep south along the ACE Basin Parkway.

“I’m good,” DeShawn said.

“Good,” Malik said.

They kept south.

“Do you know where this place is?” DeShawn asked. Once you were in the ACE Basin, the world just opened up, bursting with blue skies above, lush green all around, vast tea-brown waters snaking beneath the bridges. It was beautiful. An almost pristine estuary, one of the largest on the Eastern seaboard, pretty much undeveloped save for the highway they were traveling down.

“Nope,” Lena said with a wave of her hand. “Following GPS.”

About a dozen miles from I-95, DeShawn pointed up ahead to a dark, dragonesque shape in the marsh grass. “Is that a gator?” he asked.

“In February?” Lena said. “I don’t think so.”

“South Carolina Lizard Man, more likely,” Malik said.

“What?” DeShawn and Lena asked in unison.

It turned out to be a long curl of thrown-off truck tire, twisted up like a burnt cruller.

“You two hush up with your horror movie stuff,” Lena said. “I’m driving here.”

DeShawn looked back. “That’s a really big tire, though. That can’t have been good, when that thing blew.”

“Lizard Man’s a real thing,” Malik said. Lena’s eyes caught him in the rearview mirror. He shrugged. “Seriously. He lurks around in the swamps and tidal creeks, occasionally stumbles upon family picnics and hilarity ensues. What? You guys never saw that TV ad?”

Lena smirked. “Lurks,” she said, tasting the word. “Sounds like one of the charmers my family tried to hook me up with last year.”

DeShawn looked out the window and whistled. Lena laughed. “Relax,” she said. “It’s not far now.”

And she was right. They kept motoring down the big roads for a while longer, then took an exit to a smaller road, then turned off again. Farm houses with single grain silos, sun-faded barns. Another turn, this time onto a bumpy winding road where they drove past small houses ringed by clusters of mobile homes. Finally, they found themselves on a small-town main street. It was almost as if it was secreted away in the green, one of those Southern towns that had once been part of something—farming, textiles, trade—but were left behind and forgotten about in the wake of the great global industrial machine. Lena pulled into a small lot next to a neat red brick building, with only the words County School above the door.

“This is where Henry arranged for the meeting,” Lena said as they got out of the car. The lawn was brown and patchy beneath their feet in the relative cold of the South Carolina winter. DeShawn noticed that the paint was peeling and cracked. As they made their way inside, he had a strange feeling of déjà vu. The floor was clean but old. The ceiling tiles were sagging in places. The desks in the classrooms they passed looked like they were left over from the sixties.

He shook his head. “Damn.”

“I know, right?” Malik said. “You’d think they’d have fixed this by now.”

“Reminds me of my elementary school,” Lena said.

“Me too,” DeShawn echoed.

Lena stopped in the doorway to the library. She looked in and he saw her shoulders slump. “When I got to high school,” she said slowly, “we were in a better school district. It was such a shock. They had computers and books in the library. I mean, you know that schools aren’t going to be exactly equal, but...until you see it, until you really see it, you don’t understand. You don’t get how wide that gap really is.”