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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Randolph Walker, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  Picture used courtesy of Pixabay.com

  Excerpt from “Daykeeper” words and music by Phonte L. Coleman and Matthijs Rook. © 2008. All rights reserved. Used by permission of The Foreign Exchange Music.

  * * *

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Daykeeper

  Ran Walker

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Also by Ran Walker

  About the Author

  Running from the daylight

  To where she keeps me...

  * * *

  — The Foreign Exchange

  Chapter One

  Nothing smells worse than the scent of impending death. It’s like the sour before the rot. The perfume doesn’t cover it, but I smile as if it does.

  As my wife sleeps, I stare at her, taking in her appearance, remembering when her body was full and beautiful, her hair long and wavy, her eyes full of wonder. Now cancer has stripped her of her glow, leaving her body gaunt, her eyes distant, and what is left of her hair wrapped beneath a faded scarf. And I have never loved her more than I do right now.

  I trace my index finger around her thin hands and smile at their warmth.

  Her doctor gave her a month to live. We are now in month three.

  That’s my Charlotte, my wife of fifteen years, my better half. I was finishing my master’s degree and preparing for my PhD in African-American studies when I wandered into a jazz club on a Friday night and fell in love with the woman singing lead. Her voice enveloped me like the sensual hug of a woman capable of only the most powerful love, and my eyes were immediately drawn to her. She moved like no one I had ever seen, and she had me with every word, every nod of her head, every wave of her hand. She made me her fan within minutes—and I didn’t even know her name. Thankfully, she accepted my offer to buy her a drink, or I probably wouldn’t be sitting next to her now, watching her sleep, not wanting her to suffer, but not wanting her to leave me.

  “Hey, let’s take a walk,” my brother, Marcus, offers. He places his hand on my shoulder, as if to suggest that it’s OK for me to leave my wife’s side for a moment.

  I follow him through the house, passing my wife’s parents and her two sisters. They don’t care much for me, and my apathy towards their dislike hasn’t made matters any better. But today we are united through Charlotte, and as long as we are united through our fear of losing her, we have an unspoken truce.

  Marcus walks out into the driveway and immediately pulls a cigarette from the box in his shirt pocket. He’s been itching for a smoke, I can tell. He puffs a few times before he speaks.

  “It’s good to stretch your legs, you know?”

  I nod. The sky is clear and beautiful, but the air feels thin, empty.

  He offers me a cigarette. I stare longingly at the pack. I haven’t smoked since I first started dating Charlotte, nearly seventeen years ago. Charlotte viewed smoking as a professional hazard because of her voice. Staring at the pack, I contemplate taking one—just to take some of the edge off of the day, but I shake my head and look away.

  Marcus doesn’t say anything. We just stand in the driveway staring off into the distance. There’s not much to say. The fact that he has flown across the country to support his little brother is enough.

  With the sun setting behind us, Marcus and I walk back into the house to find the living room and den empty. My heart drops, and I immediately fear the worse. Pushing past Marcus to reach the master bedroom, I see Charlotte’s parents and sisters standing beside the bed. I stop breathing and slowly look toward my Charlotte. Her scarf has been replaced with one of her performance wigs and her face has been made up. She looks almost like she did the first moment I saw her. She smiles at me, and I feel my heart melt.

  Taking a seat on the bed next to her, I lean over and kiss her repeatedly. “I love you so much,” I say, blinking away the tears filling my eyes.

  “I love you too, Ed.” Her voice is soft, frail.

  “We can fight this, baby,” I say, kissing each of her hands in turn. “We’re gonna make it.”

  She smiles at me, tears in her eyes. She has only seen me cry once, when our son, Edward, Jr., was stillborn.

  A fear descends over me. I am not ready to lose my best friend.

  “Eddie,” she whispers.

  “Yes, baby,” I answer, leaning in closely. She has never called me Eddie before, and it sounds strange coming from her lips.

  “Eddie.” Her voice is now faint.

  “Yes, baby.”

  “Eddie,” she says softly, looking past me. “Mommy’s coming.”

  Chapter Two

  I do not hear the pastor delivering the eulogy. I do not even notice the flowers laid atop the closed casket. The only thing I notice, between my trembling hands, is a beautiful photograph of my wife on delicate linen stock. Beneath her face are the dates 1975-2013. Thirty-eight years. I had been married to her fifteen of those years.

  We lived within the dash between those dates, our marriage occupying the pages of her short life. I want so badly to hold her, if only to keep my insides from caving in on themselves. Instead, I must watch as the pallbearers carry her casket from the church to the hearse. I trail behind her, my brother helping to keep me on my feet, his strong arms lifting me.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the pastor whispers, sprinkling a handful of Georgia clay upon her casket.

  I stay to watch as the casket is lowered into the ground. It is only when my brother awakens me late in the evening that I realize I have fallen asleep next to the tombstone with an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label lying next to me.

  Day and night run into endless, painful hours. The curtains in the den seal out the light, while the air conditioner blasts air so cold that I curl myself beneath a comforter draped across the couch. I wake occasionally to eat a microwave dinner or can of soup or to use the bathroom.

  Sometimes in the darkness I pray that she will appear to me so that I can tell her how much I miss her. I am, however, only met with the stillness of this old house, the constant reminder that I am alone, no matter what I would want to believe to the contrary.

  I took a leave of absence from Ellison-Wright College during the spring semester of 2013, with plans to return in the fall, but losing my wife has proved to be harder than anything I have ever had to do. The future is unclear now, and I spend my day
s contemplating what it means to be alone after fifteen years of being married to such an amazing woman.

  Sometimes the guilt creeps over me as I remember Charlotte’s dreams and how I had hindered her from achieving them. She only wanted to sing. She bounced around the South with me as I went from teaching position to teaching position, always in search of something better. When we had finally made it here to Atlanta, she had had a year of open mics before the doctor diagnosed the lump in her breast as malignant. After that, she stopped performing and started giving voice lessons out of our home in Fairburn. Sometimes at night, when she didn’t know I was watching, she would curl up on the couch beneath an afghan she had made while we were dating and listen to Minnie Riperton’s “Inside My Love.” That was her favorite song, and the irony of my wife suffering from the same illness as Minnie was difficult to ignore. I would watch her lips tremble as she sang along quietly. As Minnie’s high-pitched voice blended into the lush keyboards of the breakdown, I would ease up next to Charlotte and wrap my arms around her. She would quickly wipe her eyes and turn to face me, singing with a voice that was beautifully rich and personal. It was the performance that she reserved for me, the part that she wanted me to remember most.

  Now, sitting here, cloaked in darkness, her melodic voice whispering inside my head, I know that she had ultimately sacrificed her dream for me. That awareness leaves an inconsolable pain.

  I lift the old afghan to my face, inhaling as much of her as I can, while trying to outrun the guilt I feel burrowing itself into my gut. I wish I could evaporate into this sadness and disappear.

  The phone rings, waking me. I feel for it in the blackness of the room. My fingers touch it, and I contemplate whether or not to answer.

  Marcus’s name flashes across the screen, so I answer.

  “Ed?”

  “Yeah,” I manage, fumbling to place the phone next to my face.

  “Ed, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get my calls, man?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve been leaving messages for you the past few days. Did you get any of them?”

  “Uh,” I say, trying to remember if I had heard the phone ring. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah, man. I’ve been calling you. I figured you just needed some time to yourself, you know?”

  “Um-hmm,” I say sitting up on the couch, more alert now.

  “How are you doing?”

  I stare around the room and realize that I can’t really make out anything. “I’m alive, I guess.”

  “You guess? Ed, you’ve gotta open up your curtains.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve gotta let some light in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Suddenly I hear the doorbell ringing. I stand up, dressed only in my boxers and a t-shirt. I walk cautiously toward the door.

  “Is that you?” I ask.

  “Yeah. Open the door.”

  I open it slowly, squinting at the sunlight coming through the crack. I can barely make out the silhouette of my brother in the doorway.

  “You came back all this way?” I ask.

  “I’ve been worried about you, and when you didn’t answer, I figured you might need a little help.” He peers through the door into the madness that has become my home. “And by the look of it, I’m not a second too soon.”

  Chapter Three

  The smell of coffee fills my three-bedroom house. I know it must be a Kenyan blend or something on the upper end, because Marcus doesn’t do Maxwell House. To me, they all smell the same. But then, I don’t drink coffee.

  That doesn’t stop him from placing a mug in front of me.

  “I put some cream and sugar in there, since I know how you are about coffee,” he says, sitting down across from me.

  I nod and take a sip, allowing the hot liquid to sting my tongue. I want to feel alive, so I hold it in my mouth before swallowing.

  “How long has it been since you left the house?” he asks.

  “Don’t know. Since I got back from the funeral.”

  “Come on, Ed. We’ve gotta get you some air. You can suffocate in here like this.”

  “I’ve got air conditioning.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about—and you know it.”

  I take another sip and stare at the mug to avoid making eye contact.

  “You’ve been in this house for ten days straight?” he asks in disbelief, as if the math has finally dawned on him. “Get a shower. We’re going out. Now!”

  I don’t feel like moving, but I know he’s right. “Where are we going?”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’re gonna just get some fresh air, little brother. Trust me. It’ll be cool.”

  I stand slowly, feeling unsteady, my legs still a little weak from lying down for so long. “OK.”

  I walk back to the bathroom I have not showered in since the morning of the funeral. Turning the knobs and adjusting the showerhead, I undress and step into the hot water. It blasts me between my shoulder blades, welcoming me back into the present.

  The feeling is surreal, this loneliness. I allow the water to run between my fingers, across my face, and through my unkempt hair. Charlotte would not like me now: not taking care of myself. She would tell me that her man had to measure up to Denzel, or preferably exceed him, a comment that would always make me smile.

  “Damn, baby, I miss you so much,” I mutter, my eyes closed as the water runs down my face.

  I stand beneath the water until it begins to run cold and my fingertips draw up like raisins. I know I will step out of the shower and grab my towel and that everything will be different, but for the moment I stand still, remembering what it was.

  The first stop on my brother’s planned excursion is a trip to the barbershop down the street from my house, where, upon entry, he immediately yells out to no one in particular, “Emergency! We need someone right now to shave the mane off Beast Man here!” Everyone laughs, and the old man in the corner looks at me curiously, nodding his agreement.

  A kid probably half my age beckons me to his chair, and my brother, again speaking for me, gives a simple instruction: “Cut all that shit off! All of it!”

  The kid leans down and looks at me. “Sir, you want me to take it all off?”

  I try to muster a smile and be a good sport. I couldn’t care less either way. I nod my head. “Sure.”

  The clippers are on my head before I can close my mouth.

  The last time I wore a bald head was when I was pledging my college fraternity. I didn’t particularly like it at the time, although I was told that I had a head for it—unlike my Tail, who had these curious brain-like grooves all across his scalp. Charlotte had never seen my hair any shorter than a low Caesar cut. She loved to run her fingers through my waves.

  Driving toward Buckhead, Marcus comments on my appearance.

  “You’re looking good, Ed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m telling you. That haircut has you looking ten years younger.”

  “Well, I feel ten years older.”

  He looks away, pretending to concentrate on his driving.

  I’m glad that Marcus is here, but he doesn’t understand what it means to lose your better half. He has never been married and professes to enjoy the single life so much that he could never think of settling down. I appreciate what he’s trying to do, but I’d rather be at home under the covers, alone with my thoughts.

  “We’re going out to eat tonight. OK?” he says.

  I nod.

  “I have to get back tomorrow morning for a meeting, and I promised to take out this hot little flight attendant who hooked me up with the plane tickets to get back here.”

  I smile. That sounds just like my brother: dating a woman to use her flight passes. But he’s here for me, and for the first time I wonder what I will do when he leaves again.

  Dinner is at Jean-Louis, a Cajun spot off of Old Na
tional Highway. Marcus likes to eat here whenever he’s in town. Apparently they don’t have restaurants like this in his area of San Jose. We get a seat outside on the patio beneath a large forest green umbrella. The view is nice and the warmth of the May air is pleasant, but I’m not very hungry.

  Marcus ends up ordering for both of us, and while I don’t know if my stomach is ready for jambalaya, the spiciness might be the very thing I need to snap out of this daze.

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what you must feel right now,” he starts.

  I don’t want him to finish, but I am too tired to interject.

  He continues, “I loved my sister-in-law, and you know this. And you and I both know she wouldn’t want to see you moping around sad all the time.”

  “She just died!” I almost yell out, before catching myself and softening the words.

  “I know, Ed. I know. But she would want to know that you could still smile, that you could still enjoy life.”

  It had been a little over two weeks since Marcus and I had stood outside my house, while my wife’s sisters had prepared her to see me that last time. It feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago at the same time. I am suddenly confused. I don’t know how I should feel. I only know that I hurt.

  The meal is delicious, and I find myself relaxing a little, enjoying the sound of my brother’s voice, as he talks about the different projects his tech consulting company is working on. As I take a sip of the my iced sweet tea, I see his eyes move beyond me.