Free Five Night Stand: A Novel by Richard J. Alley

pick up the papers or some magazines from a stand at the West 116th Street subway stop, he’s too tired to straighten up. He reads, naps, and saves the piles of paper, full ashtrays, and dirty teacups for another time. But the sitting room is a comfortable place and he moves around it with the same ease he moves around in his clothes or inside his own mind. He should be packing up all of these lamps and candy dishes and ashtrays, he thinks, or throwing much of it out. He should have begun that weeks ago. He’s meant to, just as he means to now, but instead he ends up looking in awe at the shelves full of books that Francesca amassed over the years. It’s daunting to look up at so many stories unread by him. He always said he would read them to know what Francesca saw in them, to know the same characters like friends, as she had. But he hasn’t. One more thing he hasn’t done in a long life of familial regrets whitewashed with professional success and acclaim.
    With its random gaps, the bookcase looks like a child’s mouth grinning for the camera; volumes are missing, loosened teeth in the canon of Francesca’s literature. Charlene took crates of books out of the house when her mother died, the very day she died, if Oliver remembers correctly. “She wants something of her mother close to her,” he’d told himself as he tried to sleep on the sofa that first night. He’d tossed and turned, the missing books enforcing his sense of loss. Charlene must have known they’d go unread, he’d told himself. He wouldn’t have minded her taking them all in due time, and he’d suggested it to her, happy to know that they’d have a home and be enjoyed as much as Francesca had enjoyed them. But she’d been selective and now he has to contend with those left behind. He’ll have to ask her if she wants them now, or he’ll have them boxed up and carted off. Maybe the school where Francesca taught for so many years will want them, or Oliver can find the old bookstore she used to shop in and see if they’ll take them off his hands.
    A giveaway calendar from the American Federation of Musicians hangs on a nail beside the bookcase among plaques and framed photos. The calendar is still turned to July 31, 1952, the day his oldest daughter was due. She would arrive two days later.
    Where have the years gone? Oliver wonders for not the first time today.
    It is the time away from Francesca that he wishes he could get back. Maybe he’d do things differently, he thinks. Maybe not—he really can’t know. He was trying to make a career then, support himself and Francesca and, eventually, three children. But it wasn’t all about sending money back home. It was also about the road and the records and the audiences as much as it was any family responsibility. It was about playing a little bit better than he did the night before and a whole lot better than anybody else out there trying to make a dollar doing the same thing. There was the fear of the future and the unknown—the kid in his mama’s pantry right then, or onstage at a school talent show down south who, though he didn’t even know it yet, was after Oliver’s job. These were the reasons Oliver took to the road, sometimes ten or eleven months out of the year: fear, a fear for his very life. These are the reasons he couldn’t explain in letters home, written on quiet nights in a train car moving through California or from a dingy hotel room in Berlin.
    He sent money so Francesca could buy this apartment she’d chosen without him and a wall of books to read during nights alone on this furniture she chose. He sent gifts to his family, too, and took more pleasure from that—the latest Paris fashions, hand-carved dolls from Italy for his daughter, pocket trumpets found in a pawnshop in New Orleans for his boys. He was the doting father from a thousand miles away. And once home, he lavished souvenirs on Francesca and the kids, and woke early to cook eggs and flapjacks, flipping