Providence: Once Upon a Second Chance

by Chris Coppernoll

  ~ Seven ~

  Do you ever dream of me

  Do you ever see the letters that I write?

  —Elton John

  “Nikita”

  One appointment remained on my work calendar—a lunch date I’d refused to cancel with my friend Raymond Mac. Raymond has lived in Norwood most of his adult life. Back when the majority of Norwood’s residents weren’t sure they could trust us, dismissing our efforts, Raymond took our commitment seriously, championing our cause.

  Raymond stands five feet seven inches, though he swears he was over six feet tall in his prime. He has silver hair on the sides of his head and, since he stopped driving, walks with his cane wherever he wants in Norwood, when the weather allows. We celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday together a couple of years into our friendship and his seventy-fifth in July this year.

  Marvin’s is a rib joint on the edge between two worlds—Norwood and the rest of Providence. Raymond, like a lot of the people who live in Norwood, doesn’t venture outside the neighborhood much. I never met Ray’s wife, Ella. She died of cancer a few years before I arrived. They had one son, Roger, a Marine Corps sergeant killed in action in 1991 while serving our country. Ours is a mutually beneficial relationship: Ray tells me what he remembers about his life, and I bring him things he likes to eat. Beef jerky, fried chicken, chocolate-covered raisins, Little Debbie snack cakes. Raymond doesn’t worry too much about cholesterol or heart disease, but then again, neither do I.

  “Boy, you look like dirt. Don’t you have sense enough to go to bed at night?”

  “I don’t have sense, Ray. They’ve got me writing another book. It keeps me from doing the things I like, such as sleep.”

  Raymond and I sat at one of ten white plastic tables. This place isn’t the Ritz. Marvin’s doesn’t only serve food; it serves gasoline to thirsty cars. The gas-station shelves are empty except for a case of pork and beans, enormous bags of road salt, and odds and ends like children’s balloons and decks of playing cards. They sell lotto tickets, cigarettes, beer, and … the best pork barbecue this side of Memphis.

  “Oh, I see. They made you write it. They own you now.” Raymond focused his attention on the plastic fork he was using to eat his coleslaw.

  “It’s a long story. Anyhow, I’m writing again, so I don’t sleep much. That reminds me, I’m not working for the ministry anymore, for the time being, that is. So if you need anything, call me at home. I won’t be at the office.”

  Raymond looked up at me as if I were certifiable. “What? You done quit everything now? Who’s going to take care of people out here when they need help?”

  “Peter Brenner. And the college will be out here again the second week of January.” I slid a rib out of a red and white paper basket and bit into it. The taste of molasses and honey was instantly familiar and instantly incredible.

  “I don’t trust him,” Raymond said.

  “Why wouldn’t you trust Peter?”

  “He talks on that phone too much.”

  “Peter’s a good guy and you know it.”

  “If he’s such a good guy, how come he never takes me to Marvin’s?”

  “Are you saying I’m a good guy, Raymond?”

  Ray lowered his ice tea, refreshed to continue. “Yeah, you brought me here, and I need to talk to you. How come you never get married? Don’t you know what God can give a man in a godly woman?”

  He removed the lid from his Styrofoam cup and poured back a mouthful of sweet tea while I thought of how to answer a question that comes up at lunch with Raymond as predictably as dandelions pop up in my front lawn each spring.

  “I’m ready when He is,” I said.

  “Ready when He is! You need to be more than ready. You need to be ready, willing, and able.” Raymond let out a belch. “Ready, maybe. Able, I don’t know. Willing, I doubt it.”

  Ray never minces words; such is the case with old people and children, they say. That’s one of the things I like best about Raymond.

  I tried nudging our conversation to something more amiable. “Is that how you met Ella?”

  “Don’t you change the subject on me. Boy, your problem is that you’re hiding all the time. Hiding at work, hiding out in your house. Hiding out in some fancy book you’re all about writing. When you gonna come out and be a man? That’s what I want to know. When you gonna come out and be a man?”

  Raymond’s words fired out between mouthfuls of pork barbecue and beans. This kind of exchange would have been insulting from anyone else, but not from Raymond.

  He studied the pile of rib bones stacked on his plate while I scrutinized the horizontal lines running across his forehead like black lightning. Was he right? Was I hiding? Something moved in me to tell Ray what I’d yet to confess even to myself.

  “Ray, I’m in love with a married woman. She lives with her husband in London, and I haven’t seen her in years.”

  Ray’s expression remained unchanged. I don’t know what I expected him to say, if anything.

  “Why do you love this woman?” Ray asked. His voice was composed and strong, not the trembling mutter of the tottery and aged, but the voice of a father.

  I leaned in closer and quieted my voice so only Ray could hear. “Because I’ve never met anyone before or since who so moved me, stirred me to the core, and made me feel blessed just to be in the same room with her.” The tension in my voice surprised me. I relaxed into my seat. “She was a great woman, Ray, and I miss her.”

  It was the first time I’d said it out loud. Even though Jenny and I hadn’t spoken to each other in nearly twenty years, hearing just how strong my feelings ran for her unnerved me. I’d dealt with losing her the only way I knew how, by putting everything about her out of my mind. What else could I do? She was in love with someone else, married to someone else.

  Ray nodded his head. I don’t remember Ray ever having accepted a statement from me without commenting. I can’t count how many times he’s told me how full of baloney I am (though he doesn’t say “baloney”). But not this time. This time Raymond was quiet, and when he spoke a moment later, it wasn’t about my shortcomings but about Ella, the woman he loved.

  “Ella was a great lady too. I met her in Memphis in 1961. She was working as a maid at the Century Hotel, and I was in the army.” Raymond chuckled. He gave me his Bill Cosby grin, laughing a contagious and irresistible chuckle I couldn’t help but join.

  “She was friends with Darrell Robertson’s wife, Dolores. Darrell, he was my best friend. We’d come down together on leave out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. It was April, and Darrell’s mother and Dolores threw a welcome-home party. That’s when I first saw her. I asked Darrell to introduce me to her after dinner, and he did.”

  Ray wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “We wrote each other for seven months before I saw her again, but the next chance I had, I rode the bus to Memphis and asked her to marry me … which she did.”

  “You were married for thirty-five years.”

  “I was in love with that woman for thirty-five years. I loved her, watched her raise my son, watched her make us a home. And I watched her get the cancer, taking her through all the radiation and the chemo. I watched her get frail, and I watched her pass away. But I had her life, because she gave it to me. Do you see that? She gave me the best part of her, and I gave her the best part of me. She gave me her secret heart, the one a woman only gives the man she loves.”

  Raymond closed his eyes and rolled his head back, swept away in the swell of memories that wash you down below the waterline. His face looked ragged and tired. His seventy-five years descending back upon him like a heavy, wet coat.

  “What do you have, Jack Clayton, other than your world of regrets?” he asked, opening me up like a can of beans.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Ray.” I said, but his eyes rolled long. They said, “We’re making progress here; don’t go back to being a jackass.”

  “There was no other woman for me,” Ray said. “Never could be. I nev
er broke her heart, and I never broke her trust. You may have the same love, but you don’t have the life. She gave that to her London man.”

  I opened up my hands and pasted a smile on my face. He was right, but I didn’t want to hear that truth.

  “So where does that leave me?” I asked, not really expecting an answer. Not really wanting one.

  “Alone, I’d say.”

  I dropped Raymond at his place after lunch. His energy had drained quickly. After our good-byes and his expression of gratitude for the meal, he set his wooden cane on the sidewalk and made his way to the front door, warmed by memories of his wife and his trademark red and black plaid coat.

  He unlocked the front door of his small white house with bold black shutters the students had painted last summer and vanished inside.

  I was tired too. The caffeine from my lunchtime tea got me home, but I crashed on the sofa in the den. Around three, I woke up feeling off-kilter. Midday darkness was extending its twigged fingers over the city skyline. Car lights arched their beams across the living-room walls, and I realized I didn’t want to be alone.

  I drove to CMO and parked out back. The lot was empty and white, the yellow lines already erased by snow. As the mercury descended, the rain that had fallen at lunch became snow, turning Providence into a frozen ice village.

  I climbed the slick metal stairs and entered the building through the kitchenette. I had planned to spend a couple hours answering phone messages, something that would give me an excuse to hang around and catch up with Peter and Aaron. But the building was empty, the only light coming from the gold table lamp Mrs. Burman left on in the downstairs lobby.

  I climbed the ornamental wooden staircase to the second floor and switched on my desk light. Everything was just as I’d left it on Monday. No new phone messages, faxes, or memos. The room felt less like an office and more like a storage space for a large desk and my reading sofa. I reached for my Bible and lay down. Most mornings I’d go through a similar routine, spending time on the sofa reading and praying. Sometimes I’d take ten minutes, but more often that time would stretch to forty-five when I would hear the doors open downstairs and a second CMO staffer arrive.

  The Word of God is my sanctuary. It’s where I turn to unscramble the world. When I’m reading and praying, the Lord had my complete attention. It’s a lecture hall, a private counseling session, a daily check-up with the All Knowing Physician. I hoped He would show me what He expected me to do with this book, which too often felt like a heavy weight pulling me asunder. I didn’t blame God for difficult situations, and I wouldn’t complain, but I needed His strength. He had a plan, and my job was to find out what He was doing, let His power work it out through me, and work it out in lives of others around me.

  The slow-motion snow was stealing color from the world. And my home was threatening to steal what was left of me with its unopened boxes full of tangled memory wires, each of them in desperate need of untwisting. I craved an experience with the Word.

  After prayer I found a sticky note from Peter on my computer screen. It read: “To: Jack Clayton, From: Peter Brenner—If you are reading this message, GO HOME! Love, Peter.”

  The phone rang, and I saw my direct line light up. After hours I always let the machine pick up. But I wondered if it was Peter calling and clicked on the speaker phone.

  “Campus Mission’s Office.”

  “Hi, is this Jack Clayton?”

  “Um … yes,” I didn’t recognize the voice.

  “Hello sir! My name is Bud Abbott, and I’m with the Chicago Tribune. How are you doing today?”

  I couldn’t believe on the one day I decide to answer an after-hours phone call, I found myself talking to one of the people I’m so famous for avoiding. Before I could answer his benign question, he rolled ahead with a few that promised to be less benign.

  “I’m working on a story about you for our Sunday edition and I just wanted to know if I could ask you a few questions?”

  I wondered how he’d gotten the number for my direct line. “Bud, it’s rare that you got through to me. Usually my secretary answers the phone. But I’ll just say what she would have told you: I don’t give interviews.” I wasn’t trying to be rude. He certainly knew this before he called.

  “Yeah, I’d heard that. But I wanted to know if you’d make an exception?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Well, Mr. Clayton, I’ve run across hospital records from New Mexico that say you were admitted with gunshot wounds in 1988. So … what do you think? Would you like to answer a few questions …?”

  ~ EIGHT ~

  If I go there will be trouble

  An’ if I stay it will be double.

  —The Clash

  “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

  I locked the back door of CMO and walked into the cold winter. The pavement was frosty white and crunching beneath the weight of my footsteps. The temperature had taken a severe midwestern nosedive, and I wished I’d remembered my gloves. This was the gloomy onset of real winter. Not the fickle cold of November, which could still surprise with warm days awaiting their turn in the queue, but the deep-freeze winter cold, which isn’t afraid to drop a few feet of snow and doesn’t care if you’ve remembered your gloves.

  I drove out of the CMO parking lot not knowing when I would be back. Massey became Second Avenue, and I hit a red light at Broadway. I was quickly learning to dread being alone inside my house, listening to a louder silence and pouring over the storage spaces in my mind. This writing assignment was like beginning a long trip with only a quarter tank of gas. Here it was, just days later, and the warning lights on my dashboard were starting to blink. The last thing I needed was one more unexpected surprise to throw this uneasy rider into a ditch.

  Like a phone call from Bud Abbott.

  I hadn’t expected this day to end with a threatening phone call from Bud any more than I’d expected my week to start with an involuntary three-month sabbatical. My conversation with the reporter didn’t last long. I’m sure he didn’t expect it to. He just wanted to get my attention. Well, he got it. And my anger. What right did he have investigating my personal life? My medical records? And how did he get my unpublished phone number?

  He had the facts, but he lacked the story. They’re not the same thing. The facts only sketch the lines, like a sidewalk chalk drawing. Facts are two-dimensional. They can’t describe depth or intensity, or mystery; and that is, of course, where all the action is. Where the story lies. Life is what happens when the skies roll dark and the daylight burns away. It’s what happens when we mesh our lives with others’ until they are so intertwined they’re practically the same. That’s why ordinary folks don’t get their information from the facts but from the in-betweens. Sure, we listen to facts, but we watch the eyes of the fact teller. We realize intuitively that the facts are little more than mortal promises. Stick men in a flesh-and-blood world.

  Before the light turned from red to green, I decided I wasn’t going home. I’d begun feeling like Paul Newman’s character in Cool Hand Luke, a man repeatedly sent to solitary confinement because of his nonconformist attitude.

  “What we’ve got here is failure to com-mu-ni-cate.”

  Maybe that was my problem. I’d failed to communicate with the world around me. I’d burrowed my head in the sand, and now the French Foreign Legion—I mean the Chicago Tribune—was coming to help me with my com-mu-ni-ca-tion whether I wanted it or not. I could hear it in the frankness of Bud Abbott’s questions.

  “Mr. Clayton, you were hospitalized for two weeks in the Albuquerque Medical Center, recovering from gunshot wounds. I have the name of one doctor, Dr. Gerald DeWhitter, the names of a couple of nurses who treated you, hospital records. Wouldn’t you like to take this opportunity to set the record straight on the circumstances of your injuries?”

  “Opportunity? Thanks, but no comment.”

  “Mr. Clayton, if you won’t speak up and tell your story, someone’s going to tel
l it for you,” the reporter had said, trying to coerce my cooperation. He was right, but what he didn’t know was I’d already been beaten into a confession by my publisher, who was at this moment selling my life story to the highest bidders in New Jersey.

  The light turned green. Just before I pulled through the intersection, two students wrapped in dark coats darted across the street. Their faces were pink from the razor-edged wind. The sky gave birth to a billion snowflakes, swirling in downtown Providence like a ticker-tape parade. Directly in front of me, a light green minivan veered left on Wilson. I wondered what it would be like to pick a car at random and follow wherever it led. Perhaps my little green friend would take me to sunny Daytona Beach, where I could drive the Jeep onto the sand and sleep beneath the stars. Who would stop me? Certainly not the wife and kids. Bud Abbott would miss me, but I’d get over it.

  All along the streets giant candy canes hung from the lampposts. Christmas lights blinked in shop windows. The minivan turned left down Fulton, and I followed it. But what I was really following was a strange feeling. An impulse to break free from the pressures and uncertainties and loneliness. Another two blocks, and the Providence campus framed by my rearview mirror faded into the distance. Good-bye frozen students in wool hats and gloves.

  Past Fifth Avenue, the minivan turned down Carter, probably toward the I-74 feed, but I didn’t follow. I switched to a kind of instinctive driving, just going wherever seemed like the most fun. I found myself in a winter migration away from my snowy address on Sycamore, avoiding drive-time traffic trying to beat home the weather. I followed the nudge. The nudge didn’t want to go home. The nudge didn’t want to sit in traffic. The nudge wanted to escape. I turned down Ellison Parkway and found the destination I didn’t know I was looking for: the Hyatt Regency Hotel. I turned onto the horseshoe-shaped drive and stopped the Jeep at the revolving doors. A uniformed doorman opened my driver’s side door.