Free Keeper of Keys by Bernice L. McFadden Page B

night, and the love they would develop for me would be unconditional and everlasting.

    If only that could have been the case with the men I'd been with before Journey.

    Chapter Two

    The days that followed are a blur and I would share that fact with him. I would explain how ashamed I'd felt later on when I realized that I had drank and cried for four days and how I'd even thought of killing myself before I even remembered that I had a child. She was spending the summer in Sandersville with her cousins. I was planning to use those six weeks she would be away to have the house renovated.

    "Selfish of me," I would inject between thoughts.

    "No, not selfish, distressed." He would say and rub the back of my hand. It had been a month by then, and I still didn't trust him. Well he had lied about the stairs. "It should take a few days," he said to me and there he was a month later and I was grateful.

    I think I was still drunk when I backed out of my driveway. I know I had tucked the list of names beneath the windshield wiper of the car, so that it could remain in my view as a reminder of why I was going to die.

    I had drawn large red X's behind the first names I could remember, and double red X's for entire names I couldn't.

    I parked my jeep on the tracks, turned off the engine and waited. There was a 12:56 heading for Manhattan due to come along in less than ten minutes. I told myself that I would be dead before 1PM, just as Meredith the housekeeper was putting her key in my door. The dogs would greet her; she would pat their heads and then call out to me.

    "Ms. Chandler?"

    My not answering would not alarm her. The jeep was gone, so that meant so was I. Meredith would head to the kitchen, to start on the dishes I'd left there and afterwards she would go to the refrigerator and see the note I left there for her.

    Meredith,

    I've been killed by the 12:56 to Manhattan.

    Kai

    She might laugh thinking it was joke but the phone call from the police, the noisy neighbor that just happened to be coming from little league with his six year old when the train ripped through my vehicle, the newscasters voice coming across the radio; anyone of them would make it true for her and the laughter would stop.
I turned on the wipers and watched as the names moved back and forth across my windshield and I found myself wishing for rain and then wishing for my mother. 
"Alice, is such a simple name," She would say on Saturday mornings as she pulled the hot comb through my thick mass of hair. "It doesn't make a statement and know one ever asks what it means or where it came from. Alice is plain. It's an old lady's name."

    It was an old lady's' name. She had inherited it from her great-grandmother. But my mother was far from old and even further away from plain. She was tall, shapely and colorful, like the strokes of paint she placed on the canvases that filled every room of the tiny apartment we shared.

    We lived in a basement apartment. She painted the water pipes that ran across our ceiling, blue and white, the colors of the sky. Grinning tigers and laughing bears played beneath the Banyan trees that covered our walls and a mural depicting the characters of the Wizard of Oz skipping down the yellow brick road took up one full wall of my bedroom.

    The neighborhood we lived in was crime and drug infested, the streets were always littered with garbage, gun shots and sirens punctuated the night and bright yellow police tape blocked the entrance to the playground five or six times out of every month.

    There was always music in my house, Jazz, Rocker's, Calypso, Soul. Always music and always dancing and laughing. We would dance and sing along to the records until we were soaked through with sweat.

    Eve, my mother's friend, worked in a record store and she would bring a new album to the house almost everyday. My mother's eyes would light up every time Eve pulled it from behind her back and yelled, "Surprise!"

    My mother always seemed to