Walter’s knees buckled and he fell backward in the mud and grass of the little girl’s—Beth’s—backyard. It sure as hell wasn’t the alley with all the broken glass and shame.
“Well, that wasn’t quite what I had in mind,” Peter said from somewhere behind Walter.
“No shit.”
Walter closed his eyes until the world stopped spinning. Until he stopped seeing the look on his brother’s face.
“It’s mind over matter, Walter, with the dizziness.”
Walter lifted his head and searched out the boy. He was sitting cross-legged on the porch beside Beth, watching her industriously braid a doll’s yellow yarn hair. He was in a sea of pink plastic and blond yarn.
“Well, maybe if I wasn’t being jerked in and out of these damn days, my mind could get used to it.”
“Maybe.” Behind his glasses, the boy’s eyebrows nearly skyrocketed off his head. “If you wouldn’t make a mockery out of the days that are supposed to be good memories, I wouldn’t have to jerk you around. Seriously, you were getting an award!”
“You sound like my old man.” Walter groaned and rolled to his side, the nausea gone, but the shame lingering like grease.
The boy muttered something about not blaming the old man, but Walter ignored him. The novelty of this little adventure had worn off. It wasn’t going to be all basketball games and MaryAnn Arneson’s breasts. Every day that boy had in his computer was going to be some day Walter had messed up.
The boy grabbed his pager and Walter sighed, resting his head in the mud, wondering who he needed to talk to, or pay, or beg to get out of this mess.
“I’m going to have to move you up a level.”
“Level?”
“You were considered an easy file. Statistically, men like you either go back and relive your war hero day or the day they married their soul mate.”
Walter closed his eyes, denying both days.
“I’ve got people piling up out in that hallway,” Peter groused. “I need more time.”
“I’m not stopping you!” Walter cried. “Let me go so you can get back to work!”
“I’m not going over this with you again, Walter.” If looks could kill, Walter would have been...well, more dead. Skewered to the ground perhaps. “There.” The kid tapped one more button, slid his fancy machine back into his pocket, and grinned like the smug little prick he was turning out to be. “You are now considered a special case.”
“Good for me,” Walter muttered, flopping back in the mud. The sky was the bluest thing he’d ever seen. “What do I get?”
“Me.”
Walter sat up. Shaken.
It couldn’t be.
He turned toward the swing set, searching out the new, terribly familiar voice.
“Over here, Walter.”
Walter whirled toward the house and there, standing next to Peter, was his cousin Dan.
“Hello, Walt,” Dan said, older and paunchy in a yellow golf shirt and tweed jacket. He pushed open a door to a dark room filled with pink spotlights and a thumping bass line. “Let’s go have a drink.”
Walt followed Dan to a black bar lit up with purple and blue neon.
Topless women danced slowly on top of it.
Walter tried not to stare. Nudie bars were not his kind of place, hadn’t been even when he was on the road all those years. Not even when Rosie died. The straightforward commerce of it had just always been too much for him.
“What are we doing here?”
“Not everything is about you, Walt,” Dan said. “Hey there, Patty,” Dan called to a topless redhead behind the bar. “Two beers and two chasers.” He sucked in his gut so he could slide sideways onto his stool. “Have a seat, cuz.”
The smoky pink lights picked up the silver in Dan’s sideburns, the red spider veins across his nose.
His cousin, forgotten all these years, had gotten old. When Dan turned eighteen he’d hitchhiked to Milwaukee and the family never heard from him again.
And once he was gone, no one even uttered his name.
He’d been a ghost, banished to the attic in old scrapbooks kept by Grandma, only coming out in the warnings the adults gave kids on July Fourth. “You could hurt yourself,” he’d told Jennifer. “I knew a guy who blew off his whole hand.”
“How...ah...how have you been?” Walter asked, sitting on the stool next to him.
“Dead mostly.” Dan laughed. He stuck out the belly that strained against his yellow golf shirt and stroked it like a lover. “The good life caught up with me,” Dan said.
Patty behind the bar set them up with cocktail napkins.
“Watch this,” Dan whispered, the devil in his grin. He put his prosthetic hand on the bar, frozen in a plastic C-grip with a black leather glove slid over top.
“She hates this,” Dan whispered.
“Here you go,” Patty said, setting the beers and shot glasses down on the bar.
“Be a sweetheart, would you?” Dan asked, lifting his hand just slightly off the black plastic bar. Patty looked at him, expressionless except for the pop and chew of her gum.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Dan shook his head, playing at contrite. “Sorry, doll.”
Patty sighed heavily and picked up the pint glass and wedged it, none-too-carefully in the prosthetic’s C-grip. It squeaked, and beer sloshed all over the bar and Dan’s sleeve.
“Jackass,” Patty muttered, just loud enough so Dan could hear and then walked away through the neon lights, turning at once blue then purple.
Dan laughed and lifted his hand with the beer. “Cheers, cuz,” he said, clumsily knocking the rim of his glass to Walt’s.
“I don’t drink.” Walt stared at the beaded pint glass.
“I hate to be the one to remind of you the unpleasant reality of your situation, but you are dead. One beer isn’t going to kill you.” Dan laughed into his pint glass and finished off the second half of his beer.
“What happened to you?”
“You mean when I hitchhiked the hell out of town or when I died?”
Walter shrugged. Either. Both.
“I lived in Mexico for seven years. And then I got a job driving rigs from Mexico City to South Bend, Indiana. Then I started my own company.” Dan sighed heavily and braced himself against the bar. “Heart attack at forty.” He wiggled his eyebrows at Walt. “I was doing the deed with the most beautiful woman in the world. I came and croaked.”
Walt figured his face was about as neon red as the signs behind the bar. He grabbed his beer and took a drink.
The bitter sweetness filled his mouth, gushed over his tongue, across the roof of his mouth and then it was gone.
Another tease.
“The news of my death didn’t make it back to the family, huh?” The pint glass squeaked against Dan’s prosthetic as he twisted it free. He set it on the bar and tossed back his shot. “Can’t say I’m shocked.”
Walt spun on his chair and looked out at the empty club filled with strippers but devoid of clients. “Where the hell are we?”
“Heaven.”
“You’re kidding me,” Walt gasped. Surely not. If this was truly heaven, Rosie would be destroyed with disappointment.
“Doesn’t fit your idea of heaven?” Dan asked. “You want the strippers to wear wings?”
“I don’t have any idea of heaven,” Walt said. “But my wife won’t be too pleased with this.”
“You have no concept of heaven?” Dan asked. “Not even a hope?”
“You’re telling me heaven is what you hoped for?” Walter asked, not believing it for a second. “I’m dead Dan, not an idiot.”
“Well, if this isn’t your idea of heaven, let me introduce you to the Velvet Touch.” Dan clapped Walt on the shoulder. “The finest gentleman’s club off the Indiana Toll Road.” He checked his watch, which was secured around the black-gloved prosthetic. “Sunny’s on in about ten minutes so we better make this quick.”
“Make what quick?”
“You have to pick a day.” Dan signaled Patty for more drinks. And Walter hung his head.
“Do I have to explain this to you, too?”
“No,” Dan said. “You don’t. You need to stop pretending like your shit was so much worse than anyone else’s shit and pick a damn day so Peter can keep doing his job and death can move on.”
Walter picked up his shot glass and drank fast in preparation for his second. The whiskey burned the back of his throat for a moment, an old, familiar friend.
“You always were a stubborn son of a bitch.” Dan laughed, his big belly heaving for just a second before he took another drink. “You want to know what day I relived?”
Walter nodded.
“The day I died.” Dan checked his watch. “I sat out here just like I am now, waiting for Sunny. And just like the day I died, Sunny’s gonna come out here in about ten minutes, take off all her clothes, and I am going to fall grossly in love, like I always did, and then I’m going to sneak back to her little dressing room and we’re gonna go at it like minks against the sink. But on March 4th, I died.” He sighed. “Damn. That was a good day.”
“Why that day?”
“Because I was forty years old. Sunny and me had just started dating after months of me trying to get in her pants. My trucking company was finally bringing in some money.” He shrugged. “It was all coming around for me. And then it was all taken away from me.”
“Weren’t you angry?” Walt asked, indignant on his cousin’s behalf.
“Pissed!” Dan barked. “Royally pissed.” He slammed his fist down for emphasis.
“Keep it quiet!” Patty shouted. “Or I’ll have you thrown out!”
Dan chuckled, his massive shoulders heaving like mountains on shifting plates. “You know what’s funny? I figured that of all the things I didn’t care about anymore by the time I died, the accident was top of the list.” He lifted the prosthetic. “It was so long ago I could hardly remember what it was like to have a hand. I barely even thought about it anymore.”
“That’s good,” Walter whispered, wishing he had another beer to wash down the lingering taste of guilt and doubt he had over his father’s role in that accident.
“But it was the first thing I made my guy take me to see...can you believe that?” Dan laughed.
“And?”
“And what?”
Walter took a deep breath and shrugged. “Was it an accident?”
Dan looked at him, head-on, but Walter could only stare at his empty glass, watching his cousin from the corner of his eye. It was how the whole family had looked at Dan after the accident.
“Of course it was,” Dan said. “Your dad was a mean son of a bitch but he wasn’t sadistic. And he felt bad, which was why he treated me the way he did, because the asshole needed some serious counseling, but in the end...”
“You still blamed him?” Walter would have. Walter blamed his dad for dozens of things not nearly as traumatizing.
“Sure.” Dan nodded. “But seeing the accident, and the way your dad beat himself up about it, fixed some of that. You’ve got that chance now, Walt. You can stop blaming Rosie for leaving you and hating her for dying—”
“I don’t hate her!” Walt said.
Dan clapped him on the shoulder. “Sure you do, cuz.”
“None of this changes anything,” Walter said. “Unless your special power is forcing me to pick a day, I think everyone should just let me go.”
“That’s not my power,” Dan said.
“So let’s have another drink—”
“But I can let you go back and fix something.”
Walter could only blink.
“Something small,” Dan said. “But something important.”
Walter didn’t say anything, silent in the face of such a thing. He sat paralyzed on a bar stool, like he had for so much of his life.
“Patty!” Dan cried and the redhead turned their way. “You mind grabbing the can I gave you earlier?”
Patty popped her gum like her life depended on it and bent to retrieve something from under the counter. She slid a dented, rusted Folger’s coffee can across the bar toward them.
Walter felt all things hopeful surge in him, foolishly like a dog longing to chase after cars.
“This is what you get to fix,” Dan said. “You get to go back and make this right.”
Walter’s mouth went dry and he reached out to touch the jagged, rusted lip of the can.
“Why this?” he whispered.
“Because you always said if there was one thing you could do over, you’d make—”
Walter nodded, cutting Dan off. He had said that. A million times. And a million times Rosie had said she didn’t care. He’d tried to make up for it with necklaces and earrings, and even a diamond once, and she’d never worn them.
Dan hauled the can to a spot in front of an astonished Walter and gave it a shake. The coins rattled. “The bills are already in your pocket.”
Walter reached down and sure enough his empty pocket was now full of cash.
The coffee can was about a quarter filled with seventy-five dollars in pennies and nickels and quarters. Walter knew it down to the odd Canadian penny that had accidentally gotten mixed in.
And the wad in his pocket was a hundred dollars in singles.
He’d saved every one of them, for forty-six clean days.
Walt looked up at Dan, not believing that he was actually going to ask the question of the kid who rolled cigarettes one-handed. “Are you an angel?”
Dan shook his head, the miles of hard road back in his eyes. “I’m your reminder.”
Walt swallowed. “Of what?” he whispered.
“That the right thing to do is rarely easy.” Dan held out his prosthetic, the black glove picking up the pink lights. “I missed you after the accident.”
Humility and shame choked him. He grabbed Dan’s hand to shake it, to beg his forgiveness. But the hand under the glove was real, flesh and bone, and Dan squeezed his palm.
“I’m so sorry, Dan.”
Dan held up his hand and the lights dimmed.
“On center stage...” An unseen announcer’s voice echoed through the empty club. “Put your hands together for Sunny Day!”
The curtains parted and a tall blond with a little belly and high heels that lit up blue neon strutted onto the stage.
“There she is,” Dan sighed. “Ain’t she a beauty?”
“Yeah,” Walter agreed, looking at the coins in the can. They were the beginning of those years in the middle of his life that didn’t seem to belong to him. His fare for a better life. They were Rosie’s years.
He didn’t know what peace was, really, not without Rosie. And he was very sure that without her he was not capable of it. Maybe he was mad at her; maybe he did blame her for picking him up out of his miserable life only to drop him back into it so suddenly.
He certainly blamed himself for not being what she wanted him to be. Needed him to be.
“You ready?”
Walter looked up to see Peter behind the bar. Luckily, he had his shirt on.
“I really get to fix this?” he asked, cradling the can in his arms. “This isn’t some kind of joke? And this isn’t the day that I am supposed to relive?”
“Nope.”
“Okay,” he said to Peter. He stood. “I’m ready.”
Like those Fourth of July fireworks that explode, filling the sky with blue phosphorescence and then sizzle and fall like a glittering waterfall back to earth, the bar disintegrated.
Sizzles and pops and explosions of blue and purple neon slowly reoriented themselves into the beige carpet and softly lit glass cases of Meyers Family Jewelers on Main Street in Beaverton.
The last sizzle became classical music tinkling from a small speaker behind the plastic roses on the case.
“Can I help you?” Dale Meyers asked with a discreet half smile, just like he had a million years ago.