Somehow, and no one was sure quite how Billy managed to stay busy. The reality was, to say he stayed busy was a gross understatement. It wasn’t the least bit uncommon to see him working from early morning well into the night, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays were no exception for him either. His little shop would often be the topic of discussion at local convenience stores where people would stand around the lottery station and play their hand at a chance never to have to work again. Rumors were always falling off the loose lips of those whose own lives were just a series of nonproductive hours strung together.
A handful of neighbors referred to Billy as, “The old man,” this description was based more on his demeanor than his actual age or appearance. Despite being in his mid-forties, people thought he acted like an old man. The truth was he was a very handsome man. He stood about five foot eight, weighed in around one hundred and seventy pounds and was built like a sailor. He had a barrel chest, and defined arms and his facial features were chiseled and strong. He had deep blue eyes and a cleft chin.
Regardless, the neighbors still referred to him in private as, the old man. This term always baffled Billy because he didn’t feel as though he acted old at all. He simply exhibited manners and conducted himself like a gentleman, but clearly, these were traits of a dying art. The baseless gossip was easier to find around there then a hardworking man. The local chatter went something like this:
“I bet it’s a front for a drug ring,”
“Naw, the old man is running numbers in there.”
The theories were as endless and mindless as the money being thrown away on scratch tickets. If any of them had any idea what was actually going on in there or an ounce of brains in their heads, they would have been a little more cautious about even letting Billy’s name pass their lips.
People were so convinced that the old man must be loaded that his shop had become the target of neighborhood thugs on several occasions. Billy wasn’t one to look for a fight, but he had learned how to protect himself through the years. There had even been a few times that he sent punks limping from his place rethinking their decision. He may not have had the reputation of a fighter, but he had learned how to swing a mean Louisville slugger.
The only thing that Billy looked forward to in those days was an occasional visit from Sherry. She was living in Derry, New Hampshire and worked as a computer analyst for a large company. She was as intelligent as she was beautiful. She stood about 5’6” and could stop a man in his tracks with her chestnut red hair that hung just past her shoulders and framed her oval face in a cascade of ringlets. Billy always loved her emerald green eyes and thought she was the epitome of an Irish girl; reddish curly hair, green eyes, light skin and a smile that could silence a room full of people mid-sentence. Although Sherry had a secret crush on Billy when they were kids, and even throughout junior high, she never acted on it. Billy never pushed the envelope either; he just felt blessed that she even noticed him.
After graduating from different colleges, they met a handful of times for coffee when Sherry traveled to New York for business, and they formed a deep respect for one another. She moved on to New Hampshire, and her visits were seldom, but Billy looked forward to them nonetheless. Sherry’s sister had moved back to Revere, and her mom was still in Chelsea, and Sherry would visit Lisa a few times a year, but she seldom visited her mom.
Her little sister Lisa was now a mother to three beautiful daughters, but she had unfortunately followed in her mother’s footsteps and married a bum. Sherry was deeply saddened to see Lisa living the sort life she had fought so hard to protect her from. She stayed in close contact with Lisa and was without question Auntie of the year, but she avoided getting drawn into the drama of Lisa’s life with her husband, Jimmy. She felt it was best that way; if Lisa decided to stay with him, Sherry would not be outcast, and if she decided to leave, Lisa would feel comfortable turning to Sherry for help.
Lisa and Sherry’s mother Diane had moved into a small studio apartment after the girls moved out and continued with her self-destructive lifestyle. Sherry sent Christmas cards and Birthday cards, but she hadn’t visited her mom for quite some time. She did, however, take on the responsibility of financially supporting her. Each month she religiously mailed out her mother’s rent and utility payments. She loved her mom and always wished things could have been different, but she wasn’t able to move past the fact that her mother never tried to intervene and protect her from her ex-husband.
Sherry was quite confident though that she was the only thing that stood between her mother’s ex-husband and her sister having to go through the same nightmare. That knowledge was all she needed. She felt as though she had done everything she could to give her sister a fair shot at life. If she chose to screw it up now with her choice of men, then Sherry had no control over that. Lisa was, however, a very good mother and her girls were the reasons that her heartbeat. Sherry was proud of her for that and always stayed involved with the kids. Sherry admittedly lived vicariously through Lisa when it came to raising children. Each of Lisa’s daughters at different points in their lives leaned very heavily on Sherry for emotional support and guidance. Without Lisa’s knowledge, Sherry also helped the girls with a lot of their educational expenses such as extra textbooks and spending money. They shared more than a few late-night phone calls to help mend broken hearts. Each of the girls experienced varying degrees of anxiety, and Sherry always did her best to help
them navigate through the college year.
No matter how busy Sherry was, she always made the
time to stop and say hi to Billy when she was in the area. She always brought him a cup of coffee and on the rare occasion that she could convince him to get his nose out of the computers she would drag him to Kelly’s Roast Beef for a clam plate. They would sit on the old bandstand and stare out at the ocean and talk about how much Revere had changed and how their childhoods had shaped their lives. Sherry was the only person that Billy felt comfortable talking to about the past. He knew that she had gone through so many of the same problems and he wasn’t embarrassed to open up to her.
Sherry always showed more empathy for other people then she did for herself. She felt Billy had a much harder time growing up then she did, and she carried a lot of guilt for not standing up to the bullies of their past and forming a friendship with him back when they were children. Sherry had never confided in Billy or anyone for that matter about what had gone on at home when she was a child. She never wanted him to look at her in that way. What “that way” meant wasn’t clear she just knew that it was a secret she would take to her grave.
Neither of them had ever married or had children, and she often wondered if that would have been different had she not been so afraid. She knew he was an introvert and would never initiate anything himself so she chose to accept that their friendship would be strong and honest but never anything more. The majority of their conversations revolved around the same two topics, the pain they endured as children and young adults and the boundless possibilities of technology.
During the last few conversations, Sherry sensed that there was something that he wanted to tell her, but he always fluffed it off like it was just her imagination. The truth was, he was burning to share with her what he was working on, but he felt it was best for her, that he resists the urge. She knew he was very busy and had taken on various companies and organizations as his clients but that was pretty much the extent of what he shared with her and she never pushed the issue. All she cared about was that he was secure and earned enough to support himself.
Billy had withheld the secret of his wealth from her. At times he felt guilty for not telling her how wealthy he was because he knew that although she had a secure job, there were times through the years due to layoffs and personal issues that she had struggled. There were several occasions when he took it upon himself to privately pay a utility bill or two for her. She was never certain where the relief came from, and she simply chalked it up to company errors
in her favor. She had a sneaking suspicion that he may have had a hand in her good fortune, but she never questioned him about it.
One of the topics that Sherry and Billy loved to discuss during their visits was how dependent people had become on technology. He used to joke that if all the computers and little gadgets we had become so dependent on suddenly stopped, the whole world would come to a screaming halt. They reminisced about how business in the past was conducted with pen and paper, and if people wanted to communicate with each other, they had to use a home or public telephone or write a letter. He yearned for the good old days, but Sherry always reminded him that they couldn't revisit the past.
5
DEATH GRIP OF OBSESSION
As the seasons flew past, it seemed that everything from the weather to the state of the nation was out of sorts; this was causing unrest in Billy as well. There were times when he would lay awake at night and wonder if the project he was working on was just too involved for him to pull off. He wanted it as badly as he wanted his next breath but had moments of self-doubt as to whether it would ever come to fruition. Staying true to his nature, Billy continued to persevere with unwavering determination. His days and nights were merging into one another. He worked feverishly tweaking and testing various aspects of his project. He began to turn away the walk-in clients that frequented his shop. He would tell them he wasn’t feeling well or that he had a huge deadline to meet for a business client.
Rumors began to spread again, but this time they were of a different sort. Neighbors began to assume that Billy must be ill and too proud to tell anyone. Several times over the next year Sherry came by to visit, and he also put her off saying, “I simply can’t get away from the shop right now.” She was concerned for him and worried that perhaps some of the rumors had a ring of truth to them. When Sherry pressed him for an answer, for the first time since they had met so many years ago, Billy snapped at her.
“I don’t have time to explain every little in and out of my business, and I’ll thank you to please remember that it is just that, MY BUSINESS.”
Sherry was quite taken back by his sudden outburst. She thought that this might have been the first time she heard him stand up to anyone. She thought it was odd though that he would choose to do it with her. There was very little she could do about it though and thought it was best that she give him some time, she was sure he would come around. She had worked on some big contract, and she knew firsthand how the pressure of deadlines could push even the gentlest person to the edge. She was sure one of two things was happening, he was either just under a great deal of stress, or he was seriously ill and trying to tie up any loose ends. Either way, she had no control over the outcome.
With local clients and Sherry out of the picture for the moment, Billy had for the most part taken up residence in the shop. He kept the closed sign on the door all day and had installed blinds in the display windows so passersby’s couldn’t see in the windows. Throughout his adult life, he had always packed a sensible lunch and taken brief breaks throughout the day. Now he began to order lunches from local restaurants and have them delivered to the shop. He ate his lunches in a hurried rush while he worked. He was becoming obsessed, the question was, “What was he obsessing about?”
He had reached a point where he was going days and weeks without shaving, and he would run home briefly to shower a few times a week and swap out the clothes and other items in his small travel bag which would afford him the opportunity to stay at his shop. He had always kept a small cot in the back room so he could enjoy occasional naps when things were slow but this was becoming his primary sleeping area now, and even with that, he seldom used it. It seemed with each passing day he became more absorbed in his determination to complete his project.
Along with his new-found obsession came the appearance to the outside world that Billy had just mentally slipped away. His regular clients and a few casual associates simply assumed that he was suffering from a mental break. They couldn’t have been more mistaken. Billy knew what he was doing, and he was doing it with the precision of a heart surgeon. He didn’t care what the rest of the world thought of him and why should he? They never really bothered to look at who he truly was anyway, so he wasn’t going to concern himself with their opinions at this late stage.
Walking into his shop was like stepping back in time. There were wooden counters, and a cash box on the desk rather than a cash register. The faded wallpaper was stained with tobacco residue, and the curtains were there from the previous tenant and were now nothing more than tattered remnants of the past. In the dusty corner sat an old AM radio which whispers classical music in the background. Despite how beautiful the music was, in this environment, it sounded rather eerie. The fact that the radio was never turned off or tuned to a different station was clear by the number of undisturbed cobwebs which drape over it like a cocoon.
Outside of Billy’s shop the world around him was on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Life was fast-paced and moving further away from the world Billy longed to recapture. The technology that was now at the fingertips of every man, woman, and child was mind-numbing. The telephones had gone from corded to cordless. Cellular phones were originally big and cumbersome and were now tiny enough to fit in your pocket. People could access the World Wide Web from anywhere in the world. GPS devices could determine where you were and where you wanted to go and give you precise directions on how to get there. Large boom box radios had given way to portable music devices that could store and play the specific songs you had chosen. Electronic tablets had become extremely popular in replacing paperback books. People could store countless books in one small, slender device that in their original form would have been impossible to carry. There was no question about it, life as Billy had known it was gone forever.
After years of burying himself in work and locking himself away from the world, Billy emerged from his shop one day neatly shaven, appropriately dressed and rested. He seemed to have a renewed desire for life. He even placed a call to Sherry and asked her to visit him. He had never done that before, and she was thrilled yet a little confused and leery.
She planned a visit for the following weekend. Sherry spent the rest of the week playing out all sorts of scenarios in her mind. Why had he snapped at her the last time she visited? Why was he calling her now out of the blue? Perhaps he was simply extremely stressed when last they spoke and now he was feeling a little more like himself. What if he was sick and he was calling her to visit so he could break the news in person? That week was one of the longest in her recent memory. She wanted so badly to pick up the phone and scream, “What?” but that would have been completely out of character for her so she would simply have to wait and see for herself why the sudden change in pattern for him.
Sherry set her alarm clock on Friday night to be certain to wake up early Saturday morning. She was startled out of a dead sleep at 6 a.m. and immediately climbed out of bed and stepped into the shower. She took a few minutes to stand and breathe in the hot steam and clear her head. Since she wasn’t sure what prompted this call she needed to prepare herself for the worst. As nervous as she was to see Billy after all this time she was equally as excited. She took a little extra time to pick out her clothes and make sure her hair and makeup did her justice.
She made the drive from Derry in the early hours of the morning at his request. Looking back on the trip, it seemed very much like a dream to her. Her mind was wandering the entire trip, and she immersed herself in the classical music that drifted up and drew her mind back to simpler times much the same way that the smell of a freshly baked apple pie effortlessly returns you to your youth. The summer sun shared the ride with her like an old friend. Its gentle glow seems to lead the way, drawing her closer to the answers that had swirled through her mind since receiving his call.
Upon arriving at his shop around eight o’clock in the morning, she entered his shop and was quite surprised at his appearance and demeanor. Although it was still like
stepping back in time, it was obvious that he had taken the time to clean the place up and she complimented him, “The place looks great, it’s so good to see you,” and she gave him a big hug.
“It’s great to see you too, you’re as beautiful as ever and a sight for sore eyes,” Billy responded.
Now Sherry was extremely confused. He had never commented on her appearance, and she wasn’t quite sure how to respond to him.
“Thank you,” she mustered in the same quiet, shy voice he remembered from childhood.
The meekness in her voice made him wonder, had no-one ever told her how beautiful she was?
“What would you like to do today?” she asked with a ring of energy that Billy found invigorating.
His answer was as out of character as everything else this morning. “I thought we could take a walk to the beach before the sun worshipers invade the sand. It’s so peaceful this time of day, and I wanted to share it with you.”
Sherry was oddly intrigued by this stranger. He was much more outgoing than she had ever remembered seeing him. It was impossible for her not to notice that he seemed more confident and comfortable in his skin then she had ever remembered as well. Regardless of the reason she was enjoying the pleasant surprise that greeted her
Memories Are An Old Man's Toys Page 5
