Hope

  By Rick R. Reed

  Published by

  RCubed Books

  Cathedral City, CA

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Hope

  Copyright © 2019 by Rick R. Reed (first edition published by Dreamspinner Press)

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact the author at rickrreedbooks@gmail.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Second Edition

  October 2019

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  BOOKS BY RICK R. REED

  RICK R. REED | Real Men. True Love.

  FIND RICK ONLINE

  BOOKS BY RICK R. REED

  OBSESSED

  Penance

  A Face Without a Heart

  IM

  Third Eye

  Blood Sacrifice

  Caregiver

  Hungry for Love

  Legally Wed

  Dinner at Home

  Dinner at Fiorello’s

  Dinner at Jack’s

  Dinner at the Blue Moon Café

  M4M

  Mute Witness

  A Demon Inside

  Blink

  Chaser

  Raining Men

  The Couple Next Door Tricks

  A Dangerous Game

  Bashed

  Orientation

  Dead End Street

  High Risk

  Stranded with Desire (with Vivien Dean)

  The Perils of Intimacy

  Husband Hunters

  Lost and Found

  Big Love

  Bigger Love

  Sky Full of Mysteries

  Torn

  Blue Umbrella Sky

  The Secrets We Keep

  Unraveling

  1

  What does a ghost look like?

  Todd was bone-tired, exhausted, rung dry. That’s how he accounted for the bizarre thing he’d seen the first night in his new house. He had spent the whole day alone moving all of his stuff from Chicago into the little house in Fawcettville, the small town on the Ohio River where he’d grown up.

  So it would make sense, wouldn’t it, that his eyes would play tricks? At least that’s what he told himself. Yet, in all his thirty-odd years, his eyes had never once played tricks on him, not really. That was just something people said.

  Wasn’t it?

  He trembled as he stood in the bathroom, looking down the short hallway to his bedroom, and turned the hallway light off again. And, again, it happened—in the dark a figure, perhaps a woman, stood very still, just outside his bedroom. She was little more than a silhouette, but she was there. He could see the outline of her chopped-off-at-the-neck hair and the knee-length baggy dress or robe she wore.

  Todd flipped the light once more, illuminating the hallway.

  And it, or she, was gone.

  He darkened the cut-glass overhead light once more—and she was back. Full light and she was gone. A burst of giddy laughter shot out of Todd’s mouth, having nothing to do with humor or mirth. His hand shot up to suppress it.

  He left the light on and lingered near the bathroom in his flannel boxers, wanting nothing more than to crawl into bed, but he was paralyzed, frozen.

  He wished there were someone he could call for moral support. But he’d left his old friends behind in Chicago. And Fawcettville—well, he hadn’t lived in this little burg at the foothills of the Appalachians in something like fifteen years. Besides, his phone service wasn’t scheduled to be turned on until tomorrow.

  “So you can stand here all night until your legs refuse to hold you anymore, maybe sleep on this orange shag carpeting your mom once loved so much. Or you can use up even more of what’s in your dwindling bank account and head out to the Fairview Motel on Route 11.”

  It was silly. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him, even if this had never happened before.

  He was simply tired. Who wouldn’t be? It had been a long day. His muscles ached. His eyes burned.

  He sucked in some air, straightened his shoulders, and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other and march down the hallway to the bedroom that had once been his mom’s but was now his.

  He never did turn off the hall light. When he crawled into bed, he pulled the covers up over his head and told himself it was to keep out the light seeping in through the sliver where the bottom of the bedroom door met the floor.

  But he wondered if she was out there....

  2

  The morning, bright and sunny, washed away the fear from the night before. When Todd awakened to sparrows chirping outside his window and buttery yellow light spilling across the beige carpeting, he could laugh at himself, imagine how maybe what happened in the hallway was nothing more than a dream. His love of horror movies was simply catching up with him, that was all.

  “Anyway,” he said to himself as he sat up in bed, the sheets and the patchwork quilt his grandma had made many years ago slithering from his too-skinny form, “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

  He yawned and stretched, looking around the bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling boxes occupied the wall opposite the window, and Todd traced the route that had brought him here, to this bedroom, where his parents, now gone, had once slept when he was a little boy.

  He glanced down at a small sore on his instep—brownish red, no bigger than a quarter—and thought that sore, or at least what it represented, was instrumental in getting him here. So was his mom passing away from cancer a month ago and leaving this house and her meager savings—all $976.18—to him.

  He stood up and pulled on his jeans and an old Cubs T-shirt that had a hole in the armpit and shut the bedroom window against the morning’s chill. “Death,” he said, brightly, smiling in spite of himself. “That’s what’s brought me here.”

  He wondered if this business of talking to himself would last much longer, if it would get worse as he rattled around the house on a bluff above the mud-brown Ohio River. Would he become that bachelor who people in small towns whispered about, that tragic, lonely figure who had something peculiar going on? No one could ever put a finger on exactly what it was....

  “Now you’re a character out of Winesburg, Ohio,” Todd said to himself, heading out of the bedroom and recalling one of his favorite books from freshman English at Miami University in Oxford. That seemed like forever-ago.

  The house was pretty much as Mom had left it, save for the bedroom, which Todd had cleared out before he’d arrived with his small U-Haul containing only his bedroom set and a few boxes of clothes and other personal items.

  He padded down to the brown and gold kitchen, with its wood paneling, maple breakfast set and hutch, and “harvest gold” appliances. “Jesus, Mom, it’s 1997. Couldn’t you have gotten something that at least looked like it wasn’t lifted from the set of The Brady Bunch?”

  Whatever. The appliances worked. Right now the refrigerator had a relatively healthy sounding hum and Todd, ever hopeful, opened its door to peer inside. Even though Mom had passed away a month ago, he prayed there still might be something to eat in the refrigerator.

  But other than a jar of bread-and-butter pickles and a few condiments in the door, the fridge was empty.

  Todd shrugged. What else could he do? Walk the two miles or so to Fawcettville’s tiny downtown and see if the Elite Diner was still there? He grabbed the pickles from the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table with them. “Breakfast of champions,” he said to himself. He was just about to lift one to his lips when there was a knock at the front door.

  Briefly Todd wondered if it would be the woman from the hallway the night before and shivered, letting loose a snippet of giddy laughter.

  He got up from the table and moved through the dining room into the living room, with its floral-pattered couch, matching love seat, and chair. His mom called it a “living room suit.”

  The knock sounded again.

  He opened the door to see maybe one of the most beautiful men he had ever laid eyes on. And Todd had laid eyes on more than a few. This guy, smiling shyly at him, was a paradoxical mix of vulnerability and toughness. The outer stuff—his bristly red hair and matching beard, his short but muscular build (like a fireplug, Todd thought), and the aviator sunglasses—made Todd think of the leather guys he used to encounter out at bars like Touché back in Chicago. But when he spoke, there was a velvety quality to his voice that put Todd at ease, that intrigued him.

  Who was this guy?

  “Hey, sorry to bother you, man. Hope I didn’t get you out of bed, but I’m your next-door neighbor, Cal Hughes.”

  Somewhere, a bell rang in the back of Todd’s mind.

  “I was a friend of your mom’s.”

  Todd closed his eyes. It came back. Cal—her Sunday-night bingo buddy. Cal—the bachelor next-door neighbor. Cal took care of her when she came home from the hospital to wait out what time she had left.

  “You should meet this guy.” He could hear his mother’s raspy voice over the phone, making him feel guilty that he wasn’t the one back in Ohio taking care of her. “He’s amazing. He comes by every night at supper with a covered dish for me. Tonight it was mac and cheese and fish sticks. Nothing fancy, you know, but good—homemade. And he even made sure I had some spinach to go with it. Iron, so I can be strong like Popeye.” Iron, or any other mineral, was too late for Mom, but Todd didn’t say that, of course. Instead he pictured Cal, a middle-aged bachelor with a potbelly and too much time on his hands. Balding, with a nose that was red-veined from too much tippling. Boy, had Todd ever been off base!

  “You’re Cal?” Todd asked in surprise.

  “The one and only.” Cal smiled, and Todd felt his heart melt and his knees go a little weak. “Just thought I’d pop over and see if you were getting settled okay, if there was anything you needed. I saw the U-Haul yesterday. Did your mom mention me?”

  “Only all the time.” Todd stepped back. “You wanna come in? I was just about to have a pickle.”

  Cal cocked his head and brushed by him. He smelled, to Todd, of fresh-cut grass and—putting him in mind of his late dad—Old Spice. Oh Lord, Todd thought, this is so what I do not need. His mother had told him that Cal was, like her son, a fancy man, as she put it. “Maybe you’ll come home and find true love,” she had teased him one night toward the end.

  “Maybe,” Todd had said then, thinking how he needed to get back to his mother. What was there for him in Chicago, anyway? Besides the three Ds: disco, drugs, and dick?

  “A pickle?” Cal asked.

  “Yeah, it’s all I could find.”

  “I think we can do better than that.” And Cal headed off to the kitchen, as if he was the person who lived there and not Todd. Todd stood at the doorway, watching Cal rifle through his mother’s cabinets, withdrawing boxes and bags Todd was unaware of, and a pan. In just a minute or two, the homey smell of simmering oatmeal filled the kitchen.

  Todd wanted to cry.

  3

  After Cal left and Todd stood staring at the two bowls, two spoons, little syrup pitcher, and crusted saucepan in the kitchen sink, he thought about his mom. Cal had made him feel many things—lust, wonder, admiration, but most of all, guilt. This last emotion Cal had forced easily out of Todd with a single question:

  “Why did you wait to come home?”

  He referred, of course, to Todd missing his mother’s last moments, when she lay on her deathbed with, Todd supposed, only the angelic Cal to keep her company. He had intended to get home before she passed, so he could hold her tight and whisper in her ear how much he loved her, but he put it off until it was too late.

  It was self-pity that made him delay, causing him to miss a moment he could never get back.

  But in facing his own mother’s mortality, he was recently facing his own. At least Mom was approaching eighty. Todd was only thirty-four.

  He recalled being in Dr. Shapiro’s office, down on Wabash Avenue in the Loop, after his annual physical the week prior. This latest appointment—to get his results—was something of a blessing, a distraction from the horror of his mom expiring. They had done all the usual stuff—the prostate check, the weighing and measuring, the blood draws—and Todd had left the week before certain fate would not be so cruel as to visit anything too terrible on him, not with his mother dying.

  But Dr. Shapiro was saying something odd, something about his HIV antibody test coming back “abnormal.”

  Todd laughed, even though he had every reason not to. This could not be happening to him, even though there was every reason it could, what with the lethal combination his last couple of years had been—too many men and too much coke inspiring way too much “I’ll play safe next time.”

  Yet fate couldn’t be so cruel, could it? He’d gotten away without consequences as he witnessed death after death of his brothers from AIDS. He must be immune or something, right? Surely, with all the chances Todd took, he’d be infected by now if it were going to happen.

  And the doctor, with his blather about “abnormal” results, certainly was talking about something else, right? Maybe what he meant was that the test was inconclusive, so Todd had laughed. And laughed some more.

  The bearded and bespectacled doctor had cocked his head, looking at him like he was an animal in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Todd realized the doc was speechless.

  Todd punctuated his question with chuckles. “What do you mean, abnormal? Like, they got the samples mixed up?”

  Doctor Shapiro had placed his hand on Todd’s knee, and Todd stared down at it, feeling like a rat was crawling into his lap. The doctor forced Todd to meet his gaze. “It was positive, Todd. It came back positive.” He went into all the details, something about a Western blot and confirmation tests and other stuff Todd couldn’t make out because of the ringing in his ears. He mentioned T-cell count and some number too astronomical to have anything to do with Todd.

  He felt faint.

  “I got AIDS?” he gasped. This wasn’t supposed to happen to him. The guys he tricked with all seemed so healthy....

  “No. Not AIDS. The tests simply show there are antibodies to the virus in your bloodstream. You don’t have anything.” Dr. Shapiro glanced down at the floor and whispered, “Yet.”

  Todd hated him then.

  The diagnosis had come only days before his mom had passed. He’d planned on heading back to see her, had even packed just before going in to see the doctor and kept thinking he’d have time, but then time, that pesky bastard, ran out on him. Just as his mom did.

  No. It was his own fault. But that didn’t make him feel any less crushed when his Aunt Eleanor had called a few mornings after Todd’s diagnosis and told him Mom had “gone into the arms of her maker. She’s free from pain now.”

  That very morning, Todd, perhaps spurred on by the fear that there was no cure for this thing that had taken hold in his body, had decided to simply dissolve his whole life, such as it was, in Chicago and go live in the house his mother had left him. It was a way to be close to her, he thought.

  So he’d picked up the phone and quit his job as a catalog copywriter at a downtown office products company, giving two minutes’ notice over the usual two weeks. He didn’t care.

  He had donated all his furniture to Howard Brown, a gay health-related charity for sleazy men just like himself. A truck had come around surprisingly quickly, and the two guys on it quickly and efficiently cleaned him out, leaving only his bedroom furniture, clothes, a few books, some CDs, and personal photographs and papers behind. Oh, and a tax receipt Todd could fill in later.

  Once the furniture was gone, there was little to do other than pack up his rented U-Haul, drop off the keys to his Edgewater walk-up studio apartment, and head east on the turnpike.

  It would take him seven hours to get home, seven hours to change his life—what was left of it—completely.

  He had driven all night and arrived on the day of his mom’s funeral. Even though he was so tired his eyes burned, he had delivered her eulogy at the hilltop cemetery where she’d be interred next to his dad.

  This was what he’d said, without even thinking much about it.

  “Mom was always on my back about something. My hair was too long. My attention span was too short. I was going out wearing that? I often thought of her as a nag and wished she’d just shut up and let me live my life.

  “And now, that wish has come true.” Todd shrugged. “It actually came true a long time ago, when I moved away to the big city.

  “But even being away, she was always there, meddling, asking too many nosy questions, the answers to which were often lies, lest I’d curl her hair more than it already was.

  “Yet now I can see all that nagging, that meddling, was nothing more than love and concern for her boy. Now, too late, I can see how she always put me—and what was happening with me—ahead of anything and everything in her own life.

  “You know, like mothers do....

  “She didn’t even tell me about her cancer until it was too late, until she was at the end of that road and so tired.

  “She said she didn’t want to worry me....”

  Todd rambled on and on, for the better part of a half hour, tears running down his face, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other. He hoped the message that came across was the plain one he just couldn’t seem to find a simple way of saying: that he knew how much his mom loved him. And that his love for her was immeasurable.

 

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