Hatty was about my age, maybe a year older, but very much a teenager. The 7-11 where we worked was in Baltimore County, but it was just over the city line on Edmondson Avenue. Thus, it was quite accessible by public bus, which was how Hatty got there for her shifts.
She was the first person from a vastly different racial and socio-economic background with whom I’d had to interact regularly, but we actually hit it off quite well. She was fun to talk to and laughed at my jokes. Sometimes we played little tricks on each other
When her pregnancy started to show, we talked about the child’s father. He was a few years older, but still in the picture. Her man wasn’t working at the moment, which was why Hatty carried her unborn child thirty minutes each way on the bus five days a week to a 7-11 out in the county. He was looking for work, though, and she was sure they would get married one day.
Hatty asked if I had a girlfriend, and I fabricated a long story about how I was dating a divorced forty-year old mother of two. I let it slip that my little lady was currently locked up at Jessup but confessed that we had great sex during the bi-weekly conjugal visits she was permitted. I had Hatty going until I tried to tell her that this woman was black. She scoffed and replied, “Pfft, you couldn’t get no black girl.”
Hatty left the store when she entered her third trimester, and I never saw her again.