A Day In the Death of Walter Zawislak

by Molly O'Keefe

  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.

  16

  July 11, 1973

  Meyers Jewelry and Fine Gifts

  Main Street, Beaverton

  * * *

  “Something special?” Dale asked, wiping a hand down his red tie.

  Holy mother...Walter couldn’t believe it. He was in his young body. Wearing it like a Halloween costume. No glasses. No stomach. His heart...he paused and li
stened to its hard chug and thump.

  He ducked and looked at his reflection in the oval mirror that sat on one of the glass cases.

  Hot dog, he thought, stroking his clean-shaven chin. Look at me.

  No wrinkles. No broken blood vessels. No hanging, jowly flesh.

  “Excuse me?” Dale asked. “Are you looking for something special?”

  “Yes, I am,” Walter said with a big grin. His thoughts from all those years ago played like a staticky radio station in his head. Dim and distorted.

  I should have dressed up, the young him thought, eyeing gleaming cases and the carpet that looked like no one had ever walked on it.

  Underneath the thrill of being in his young self, he felt shabby and dirty in his work pants and lined flannel shirt. And carrying in a can of change. Really. What kind of idiot walks into a jewelry store and pays for a ring with pennies? His thoughts echoed back to him across the distance of years.

  The panic and worry and embarrassment he’d been overwhelmed with the first time he’d done this sat like a cherry pit in his throat.

  Such wasted emotions. Such stupid selfishness on my part.

  He wouldn’t make such mistakes again. Not with this gift of a second chance.

  Dale Meyers looked like an evening newsman on TV, and Walter liked that about him. Gave this occasion, terrifying as it was, some pomp and circumstance.

  Walter’s body, still under some control of his younger, headstrong and proud self, stood still, poised to run, every young muscle tight and awkward.

  “For someone special?” Dale asked, a gray eyebrow lifted.

  Walter smiled.

  It’s for Rosie. He’d walk into a jewelry store naked on fire for that woman. Something he’d forgotten the first time around.

  “I need an engagement ring,” he finally said. The words shot out of him like dogs at the track. “Something nice.”

  “Well,” Dale Meyers smiled with charm and understanding, that, even if it was fake or put on, had done the trick and Walter’s shoulders relaxed away from his ears. “Luckily, we’ve got some nice engagement rings, so you came to the right place.”

  Dale was being so nice to him, Walter felt compelled to get the dirty truth right out there in the open. “I don’t have much money.” He lifted the coffee can. “One hundred and seventy five dollars.”

  Dale nodded, wisely. Sagely. Reliving this moment, he saw Dale Meyers for the generous man he was.

  “That’s all right, son. We can get her something beautiful for that amount.”

  Walter swallowed and would have done anything Dale Meyers told him to do at that point. If Dale had told him to propose to Rosie with wool socks, Walter would have bought them.

  Dale took two steps toward a case in the center of the store. “You can get a diamond, but I’m afraid not a very big one.” He pulled out a tray of rings with something called diamond chips in them.

  They looked small and unworthy of sitting on Rosie’s lovely hand. What was the use of proposing if he didn’t have a diamond? Engagement rings were supposed to be diamonds.

  “I need to save more money,” Walter said.

  He felt the urge to run. To take the change down to Rudy’s and spill it across the counter and drink himself back to normal.

  He quashed it.

  “But,” Dale said, “if you are perhaps looking for something out of the ordinary for an out-of-the-ordinary woman—”

  “Yes,” Walter said, nodding his head vigorously, marveling at how nothing creaked or cracked in his joints. “She’s out of the ordinary.”

  “Well, then, let’s look over here.”

  Dale took another two steps toward a case on the left of the room. More rings. But these had blue stones and green ones the color of grass. Some were blood red.

  Dale unlocked the cabinet, reached under the glass, and pulled out a small tray of pearl rings.

  Under the jewelry store’s fancy lighting, the pearls looked alive and seemed to give off their own special light, a slight pink glow like the skin of Rosie’s shoulders.

  Walter took a step toward the case and carefully, so as to not get anything dirty or scratched, he placed his Folger’s can down on the glass and picked up one of the rings.

  A pearl sat in the middle of gold that looked pink in some places and green in others, and was made to look like leaves around the pearl. Like the whole thing was a flower.

  “That’s very special gold from the Black Hills,” Dale said.

  Walter had forgotten how beautiful the ring really was. He’d convinced himself that it wasn’t all that special, that it was ordinary, in fact. But he could see now that it was perfect.

  “It’s nice,” Walter said. The first time he’d gotten this far, he’d imagined the special gold and the flower pearl on Rosie’s finger. He’d imagined himself on one knee, this ring in his hand, tears in Rosie’s eyes.

  He’d imagined, hoped, and prayed for her whispered yes.

  It had only been forty-six days. And he’d been ready to wait four more until her birthday. It was foolhardy and reckless but he’d been dumb with love and he’d thought she was the same way. The way she looked at him, like he’d fixed something that had been wrong in her...she wouldn’t look at him like that unless she loved him.

  Walter smiled inwardly, remembering this doubt and worry. He wished he could tell himself that he had nothing to worry about. He would barely get the question out before she would say yes.

  “Yes,” he said and looked at Dale. “This is the one.”

  “Well,” Dale laughed. “No need to rush into this. There are some emeralds here and aquamarines that are very popular.”

  Walter shook his head. This was Rosie’s ring.

  “How much?” he asked. “For this one.” He held it out to Dale, who carefully took it from Walter’s thick and clumsy fingers.

  Dale pulled the small sticker from underneath the ring and rolled it into a ball between his thumb and finger.

  “One hundred and seventy-five dollars, tax in,” Dale said, obviously cutting something off the price.

  Walter never knew why Dale did it. Why he lied. Charity or pity or if he really respected the fact that Walter was standing in his jewelry shop with a can of change. Maybe Dale really was that kind. That generous. But at the time, Walter hadn’t seen it that way.

  “I don’t need your charity.” The words came out before Walter could stop them.

  “It’s not charity, son,” Dale said, taken aback.

  This was the point at which Walter had walked out last time, leaving the beautiful Rosie ring behind. He’d never bought another engagement ring, went so far as to propose at Christmas with nothing to slide onto her lovely hand.

  Now, it would be different. He rooted himself to the spot. Dug the fat wad of singles from his front pocket and slid them and the can across the glass counter.

  “Thank you, Dale,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  The past reorganized itself, scenes and moments flipped and flopped, and this ring gleamed from Rosie’s ring finger in all of them.

  The look on her face when he’d proposed, pulling this dark blue velvet box from the pocket of his coat. The tears and kisses. The way yes had tripped from her tongue with surprise and glee, so different from the solemn, serious way she’d said yes before. As if she knew that agreeing to a life with him was going to be work.

  She took it off to do dishes every night. Setting it on the windowsill above the sink.

  She lost it once, for a week, and Jennifer had found it under the little rug in front of the toilet in the bathroom.

  She made him turn back around on the way to the lake one summer, because she’d left it on her bedside table.

  “Please,” she said, rubbing the naked skin of her ring finger. “I feel so weird without it.”

  Those last months, she’d lost too much weight to wear it. So he’d strung it on a gold chain and put it around her neck, and every night in the hospital she fell asleep clasping it
in her hand.

  Jennifer took it in the end. A memento, the gold whisper thin along the band. The pearl as pretty as ever. He didn’t know if Jennifer ever wore it. He would like to think that she did, out of fondness for her mother.

  And then he remembered the chain and the charm she’d been wearing at his deathbed.

  It had been this ring, worn around his daughter’s neck and never taken off. A touchstone for her. A piece of the mother she’d loved.

  Walter bit his lip against a surprise bark of grief and delight.

  Dale Meyers polished the ring and set it in the blue velvet box and Dale didn’t even bother to count Walter’s money. He had the good grace to act like men came in and bought engagement rings with pennies all the time.

  And maybe they did, Walter guessed. Maybe there was something in the act of buying a ring for a woman that reduced men to their bare bones.

  Walter walked out of the jewelry store, the ring like a thousand-pound weight in his pocket. His heart like a cloud in front of him and over him. For such a small thing, a ring that in the hot summer months turned Rosie’s finger green, the past and the future changed, remarkably.

  But he, oddly, was the same.

  17

  The ride was smooth this time, though the landing was rough and Walter pitched headfirst into the big pine tree in the backyard.

  He pulled himself free, only to hear Peter, the shit, laughing at him.

  “You’re getting the hang of it,” he said and Walter scowled, shaking pine needles from his hair.

  “Well?” Peter asked, from his vantage point on the swing. He twisted in the swing, wrapping the chains around each other until he could barely touch the ground and then he lifted his feet and spun like a black top.

  Beside him, Beth did the same, double dervishes. One ghostly and black, the other diminutive and pink.

  “How do you feel?” Peter asked when the spinning stopped. “Redeemed?”

  Walter smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  The little girl walked away from the swing and staggered like a drunk, falling, a giggling mess, onto the muddy ground. Peter watched her with a fond smile, but when he stood, there was no staggering. No feet actually, just that smooth glide toward Walter.