Royce(64)
“Now wait a damned minute. You said she couldn’t tell her side of the story. You said that you were going to make this go better for me. I don’t think Sally here is going to tell you anything different now than she’d been about to tell you.”
“Her name isn’t Shelia or Sally, you moronic idiot. Her name is Kasey. Kasey Marie York Hunter, the woman who is going to put you away for a very long time.” Curtis tried to continue speaking over White, but he just wouldn’t shut up. The judge finally had the bailiff draw his gun and point it at the man.
“You have got to be the dumbest man I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. What on earth made you think that I was going to do anything but try you and then sentence you?” When White started to speak again, the judge grinned. “I’d do what that man tells you. He retires in a few weeks and he’s just itching to take out someone before he goes.”
Kasey laughed. She couldn’t help it. It was wonderful to see White get what he deserved. She looked at the judge. “Can I talk now?” He nodded at her. “I started working for the Hunter Corporation right out of high school. I was working my way through college at the time and it was a good paying job. Not a great job, but it paid well.”
She looked over at Royce when he stepped through the door with their baby in his arms. He winked at her and sat right behind the table where Curtis had been sitting. She smiled then, the tension of telling this story going right out of her. She simply told it to him.
“I learned the job quickly and when things started to look like an opening would come up, I would apply. Every time I did, Mr. White would shoot me down. It was one thing or another, but ultimately, it came down to him telling me if I slept with him, he’d promote me without any problems.”
“Did you?” Curtis asked from his position near the desk. “Did you sleep with Mr. White?”
She looked over at the man who had terrorized her for years. Who’d kept her from her mother sometimes and who on more than one occasion had hit her. She shook her head before answering. “No. He wasn’t worth it. And I have much too much pride in myself to ever think that he’d be worthy enough to give me what he’d promised.”
“There were other women. Others like you that he’d lied to. Did you know that he’d hurt them? That he’d made the same promises that he’d made you?”
She looked away from Royce, knowing that she’d made a mistake in not encouraging them to go to someone above White’s head. “Yes. I’d had a few conversations with them. Not all of them, but a few. I…I, like them, believed that there wasn’t anyone to help us. That we’d be lucky if we didn’t lose our jobs or, worse yet, be black balled out of the kind of work we were good at.” Kasey looked at the four women who had been there every time she’d been in the court room. “We were good at our jobs. Very good. What he did was…what White did to all of us was wrong. Not just because he’d raped and hit, but that we’d allowed it to happen to us. We should have been braver. Smarter even. I’m so sorry.”
Gurt stood up and a hush came over the room when she did. “You saved me. He could have killed me that day, but I knew that I’d be letting you down if I died. You told me to kick his balls the next time he did anything to me. I tried. I lived because you told me that I was stronger than him.”
May stood too and nodded. Then Shawna Parks. Kasey didn’t know much about her other than she’d had a child before working there and had almost lost custody of her when White had told someone at the welfare office that she was a whore. Of course there was no evidence to say it, but her reputation had been blackened and she’d left town. She’d only been found when Kasey had remembered her father lived here still.
At the end of the day White was taken away and the jury was sent to deliberate all that they’d been told. Kasey went to her husband and new baby and cried all the way home. She wanted something from the Hunter Corporation and she wasn’t sure how to get it. She called the only other person she knew who would understand her.
Bobbie met her at the office the next morning and the two of them started to work. By the third day of meeting, first there then at her home, the two women had a proposal to give to the board.
~~~
Annamarie knew when she saw Kasey that the woman was going to blow them out of the water. She had an air about her that said “fuck off.” Annamarie thought maybe she’d put her new daughter-in-law on the next committee she had to form. The woman looked like she could hold her own.