Free DANIEL'S GIRL: ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN by Katherine Cachitorie, Mallory Monroe Page A

thought.   She pushed her reading
glasses up on her face.   “Anywho,” she
said.   “You said you’re headed to
Kentucky?”
    “That’s where they got my black ass
going now, can you believe it?   They
called me while I was still at the airport about to catch a cab here to
Hector’s and told me to get to Kentucky as soon as possible.   So I rented a car instead of catching a cab,
and after I leave you, I’m headed to Kentucky.   To the bluegrass state.   To a
coalminer’s strike.   My black ass.”
    Nikki laughed.   Val could always make her laugh.   “But a coalminer’s strike?” she asked. “I
don’t get it.   With all the problems
going on in Detroit, why would a Detroit newspaper care about a coalminer’s
strike in Kentucky?”
    “Because our publisher’s brother runs
one of the unions down there, and he figures our newspaper can help get the
plight of the workers into the national consciousness.   Not to mention help get his ambitious
brother’s name in that consciousness too.   But of course that’s not the official reason.   The official reason is that it’ll make a
great human interest story.”
    Nikki laughed.
    Val shook his head.   “It ain’t easy being me, Nikki.   I declare it’s not.   If I see another toothless yahoo complaining
about this country and the job they readily signed on to do, I think I’m gonna
holler.   But these are the assignments
they’re giving me nowadays.   The ones
nobody else wants.   I’m young, yes, I’m
young, but they act like I’ll never be in their so-called league.   I don’t get any respect.”
    Nikki smiled warily.   She knew what he meant.   Two years working for the Gazette herself and
they still treated her like a rookie.   Not because she wasn’t good.   She
was, if they would ever admit it, the best reporter on staff.   She was the one who hustled and got that big
interview with the governor when he came to town.   She was the one who worked the phones and
pounded the pavement until she was granted the much sought-after interview with
the parents of a murdered high school student.   She was the one whose story on the increasing rate of drug addiction in
rural Indiana got the paper its only Pulitzer Prize nomination last year.
    But because her boyfriend was Daniel
Crane, she never got the credit for her efforts.   The governor talked to her, her fellow
reporters insisted, because Daniel Crane’s office had arranged it. The parents
of that murdered boy allowed her to interview them, her fellow reporters
declared, because the unemployed father was promised a job at Dreeson.   And the only reason she was nominated for the
Pulitzer last year, let her fellow reporters tell it, was because Daniel Crane
knew members of the nominating committee and called in favors on her
behalf.  
    It wasn’t true, none of it, but truth
was always beside the point with her colleagues at the Gazette.   It also didn’t help that Nikki was the
youngest reporter on staff.   By something
like two decades.   And many of the old
guard couldn’t handle the fact that a youngster like her produced far more
results than any of them.
    “No matter how hard we work,” she said
to her friend, “they still won’t respect us.”
    “I know,” Val agreed.
    “And we were so idealistic in
college,” Nikki said fondly.   “Remember
when we dreamed of being globetrotting journalists together?   And how we were going to set the world on
fire?”
    “I remember it well,” Val said with a
wary smile of his own.   “But then you met
Daniel and I met Reality.   Daniel told
you that you were staying right here with him.   Reality told me that there were just so many reporters who got to trot
the globe, and a black gay guy like me wasn’t going to be one of them.”  
    Nikki looked at her best friend.   He’d had his share of disappointments in this
life, and sometimes she was amazed at how good he weathered every storm.
      “It’s the