ANOTHER SUNNY DAY (29 page)

“Yeah, but I’m sure she’ll be okay with it.”

“Let me clean up first and leave my aunt a note.  If your mom says ‘no’, then at least I can use your phone.”

“Sure.  See you in a few.”  With one last, lingering look at the box with the radio repacked in it, Scott walked out of the garage.

“Hey, thanks,” Kelly called after him.  He answered with a jaunty wave.  Kelly gently replaced the letter and the note in the old envelope and took it with her.  She was about to push the buttons to lower the garage doors and go inside to wash years of dust and grime off of her when Scott turned and looked back at her.

“My mom’s always after me to make more friends.”  Scott grinned.  “And here you are.”

Life’s What Happens

A Mainstream Novel

By Bob Kat

Published December, 2012

Prologue

“Try
To Remember [The Kind Of September]” – The Sandpipers

Kent State University – September, 2012

It was an early September weekday afternoon as Don Williams drove his rented candy-apple red Ford Mustang convertible along the narrow, uneven streets of Kent State University.  He kept to the old sections of the campus along the north and west sides where evidence surely still existed of his having been there over four decades ago.  He could feel the warm sun on his balding head and the air turning cooler as it curved over the windshield and into the Mustang’s cockpit-like front seat.  Incredibly young-looking kids walked between the buildings or sat under the huge old trees.  He could remember being out there, his arms filled with books, his head full of dreams.  But God, had he ever looked that young?

He looked around with interest as he toured the campus streets and gradually worked his way toward his old fraternity house.  He hadn’t set eyes on it since May, 1970 when he and 20,000 others were rushed off campus under Martial Law because of the student killings.

He shook his head to clear those thoughts away and double checked the dashboard clock to be sure he wasn’t going to be late for a meeting for which he had no clue why he had even been invited.  Jennifer Kist, the attorney he had been emailing back and forth with, was neither detailed in her explanation nor very responsive to any of his questions.

The Mustang handled smoothly.  It had always been the car of choice back in the day when he had driven these streets.  Not that he had had a Mustang or any other car back then.  He was glad he had splurged when he picked it up from the rental agency.  After all, what better car could carry him into his meeting with the past?

Like almost every small town kid who went away to college, Don’s time at Kent was very different than his early years in Canton, Ohio, even if his hometown was only a few miles away.  It was where he had learned about life, love and brotherhood.

Today, he thought as he drove along, the girls walking the campus were probably glancing his way only because they admired the Mustang.  They were looking at him with age-filtered lenses, not even seeing the middle-aged man at the wheel.  But he had had his day.

A quick check of the Mustang’s dash clock and he realized that his appointment, set for 2 p.m. at his old Phi Psi Kappa house on West Main Street, was but a few minutes away.  He left campus and headed through the middle of the small city of Kent.  Along the way, he mourned the loss of so many of the places from his past.  Gone was the Robin Hood, or the Hood as everyone had known it, The Black Squirrel Grill and many of the old fraternity houses.  The old Kent Hotel still resided on the South side of Main Street and had been notorious because the lounge had provided adult entertainment complete with go-go girls and a more sophisticated crowd if you were twenty-one.  Less than a block west at Franklin Avenue, just before the railroad tracks still stood The Loft bar.  No go-go girls.  No hard stuff.  Not even a band.  The 3.2 beer had been the only beverage on hand.

A left turn south on South Water Street had always gotten him a complimentary 3.2 beer from the Fifth Quarter’s owner when he was with his fraternity brother Cliff who had taken some amazing photos of the campus, but more importantly, art shots of hundreds of willing female students.  He had even earned the nickname
Hef for his ability to make even the most ordinary young woman look beautiful.  The Fifth Quarter had been large enough to hold hundreds on a weekend night and had been an ideal place to display Cliff’s photography.  His photos of now-famous bands had built his portfolio, including Joe Walsh, who had played lead guitar with the Measles, a Kent State student band, before he moved on to the James Gang and finally to the Eagles.  And Cliff was more than happy to include his brothers in his photo events.  He always needed someone to carry his equipment, and free beer, hot chicks and a good band were powerful incentives.

Sadly, as student tastes changed, the Fifth Quarter had become a dive named Filthy
McNasty’s, and then a Honda motorcycle dealer.  Even that was now gone, replaced by non-descript storefronts with neither interesting names nor pasts.

Don shook his head as he wondered how many times he had walked the two and one-half miles back and forth between the house and the campus.  As he approached the tracks, he remembered, as if it were yesterday, how the train would stop around 10 p.m. each night for a crew change-out which would hold him up for an additional fifteen minutes.  Of course, that had only happened in really cold or wet weather.  He smiled, remembering that in that part of Ohio, that had been every night.  That was typical Kent, where forty days and forty nights of continual rain in his sophomore year had created floods of Biblical proportions and contributed to supporting a several-hundred student three-day mud fight.  That war of the dorms and sexes had caused the complete drainage of the campus water tower and the elimination of shitting, showering and shaving on campus for four whole days.

As if on cue, the flashing railroad lights and the sound of the bell scared him back to reality and he hit the brakes, stopping just inches from the lowered arm.  The freight train rolled past and gradually picked up speed, heading south and eventually clearing the crossing.  The gates rose and the lights turned off and the bells were silenced.  He passed over the railroad tracks and the bridge that crossed over a river whose name he had never known.  He was struck by how small the hill leading from town to the fraternity house really was.  Back then, powered by his feet and fueled by an ample supply of 3.2 beer, it had seemed much larger.

He felt a rush of excitement, knowing that just over the horizon was his old fraternity house.  The building was over a hundred years old and had been a funeral home in its past life.  A very generous, successful and Don remembered, quirky benefactor, Brendan
Harrigan, former Phi Psi Kappa fraternity brother at Kent State had bought the building and turned it into a fraternity house.  Brendan had been in his early thirties when he would drop by the house every quarter with his hand out, seeking to get paid his mortgage payment.  Of course, since he hadn’t been wealthy when he was in college, he had to know that it was unlikely that the mortgage payment would ever be made on time or in full.  But that never stopped Brendan from showing up on a regular, if not always timely basis which had led to several frantic money-raising events by the brothers.

Don laughed out loud as he thought about how, in spite of his wealth, Brendan had always worn a crumpled, but clean pharmacist’s smock and drove a partially rusted powder-blue fifteen year old Ford station wagon.  There were better looking beggars on the street.  For a licensed pharmacist, it also seemed pretty odd that Brendan had never been without a mostly smoked but
never lit cigar.  The color of the dried out wrapper of the cigar had blended into the color of the sides of his index and middle fingers of his left hand, stained by a long history of togetherness.

Which brought him back to why he had returned to Kent today.
  Apparently, Brendan had died recently and had named several of the fraternity brothers in his will.  No one could have been more surprised than Don.  He couldn’t imagine why the old man would have even remembered him, much less left him something.  His dealings with Brendan had been minimal and unremarkable.  Maybe it was some kind of joke after all those late checks and the residual damage to the building the school year always left behind.  Jennifer hadn’t offered any answers in her emails but after he had agreed to come, he had received airfare and ample expense money to attend the reading of Brother Brendan’s last will and testament.

Don squirmed in his bucket seat and peered out over the hump in the hood that housed the oversized Mustang motor, as the house came into view on the right.  He noticed that the grass still needed cut, tree branches still needed cleared, and the house still needed a fresh coat of white paint.

By force of habit, he took the single-lane driveway as fast as possible.  As his car hit the gravel at the end of the drive the Mustang skidded slightly right and around the corner at the rear of the house, then slid to a stop in front of the coach house next to the large maple tree.  There were already a couple cars in the lot, and he didn’t know if they belonged to the new brothers or the older ones.  He unbuckled his seat belt, opened the door and stepped from the car.

It had always been part of its colorful history that the coach house started life as a garage for the two horse-drawn hearses on the right side and four stalls on the left for the horses.  Tradition held in the fraternity that the two most senior actives parked their cars inside the garage side for protection from the elements.  The implementation of this tradition had a few rough spots depending on the most senior brothers’ cars because the width of a fancy hearse from the early part of the twentieth century was about the same as an MG or VW bug in the 1960s.  Any larger cars presented a problem, as well as larger actives because his waist size was almost as important as his car size as he would have to be able to slip between the frame of the coach house and the car in the narrow confines.

Don took a moment to look at the old house.  It was easy to imagine pallbearers and caskets, followed by grieving friends and relatives leaving through the double front doors of the funeral home as those had been the guests of the day. The front door when he had lived there was still reserved for live guests to come and go as need be. But it was the rear door where the brothers and their girlfriends had entered and exited.  Both entrances had covered porches.  About 15’ x 40’, the front porch was large enough for ten large wicker rockers.  The two large oak doors with beveled glass windows led to the foyer that not only opened wide enough for caskets but on occasion for small cars, practical jokes being the specialty of all fraternities since time began.  Don was still amazed at how few young men it took to carry an entire VW bug into the house or to carry an occupied wood-framed bed outside to the lawn.

The main floor rooms were large enough for either multiple viewings on a busy night eighty years before Don’s time or they worked well for parties or studying alone or with dates.  The back porch was about half the size of the front porch.  Its door opened directly into the commercially retrofitted kitchen.  Don knew this route well as he had never missed a meal.  There had been an ever-changing cast of cooks who, no doubt, hadn’t been appreciated or paid enough for their trouble.

No one had wanted to think about what had gone on in the basement in the far past, but when Don lived there, it had been a place for more intimate parties and storage.

As Don walked around the back of his car and headed toward the rear porch, a very muscular man, head shaved and in his early twenties bounded down the steps heading directly
toward Don.  He looked like he had jumped off the cover of a romance novel.  He extended his right hand and said to Don as he glanced at the Mustang, “Hey, nice ride, dude!  Can I help you?”

Don attempted to return the handshake but soon realized the student was either not a modern Phi Psi Kappa fraternity brother who knew the same secret handshake Don knew or the student was not expecting Don to be one.  Fumbling briefly as he withdrew his right hand, Don answered. “Yes you can.  I’m Don Williams.  I have a meeting with Jennifer Kist here today. Your name is?”

“Josh, Josh Miller.  Jennifer Kist?  I don’t think I know her.  Does she date one of my brothers?”

Don realized his added knowledge would not make Josh any better informed as Jennifer had specifically instructed him to not go into details about Brendan, his will or any plans, not that he knew anything anyway. “No, I doubt it.  She’s an attorney.  She asked me to meet her here at 2 p.m. today.”

Josh studied Don from head to foot and glanced again at the Mustang in an effort to unravel the mystery a little.  Finally, he commented.  “Attorney?  Interesting.  Is anyone else coming?”

Don smiled and shrugged.  “I don’t know.”

They both turned to look as a black Mercedes E350 sedan flowed around the corner of the house and headed toward the backyard parking lot. The raven-haired driver carefully maneuvered the car around the pot holes and away from other cars and shut it off.  The driver’s door opened and two long shapely legs exited and planted their expensive 4” heels on the ground.  A tall thirty-something woman stood.  Her clothes and the confidence she exuded perfectly matched the current model year $60,000 car.  She turned and walked directly toward Don.  With a smile, she extended her hand to him, “Mr. Williams, I’m Jennifer Kist.  Sorry I’m a few minutes late.”