1224 Bingham Street - Ch1.1

"Mudder! Look what I has!" A tiny blonde boy raced into the dimly lit study. 

"Ah! What is it? Can't you see I'm working?" The woman looked up with a furrowed brow, generated by her broken concentration. 

"But I found someting!" he said, not yet deterred from his pursuit of her attention.

"Fine. Quickly," she said, impatiently beckoning him forward.

"A hopper!" He said, prying his tiny hands apart to reveal a bright green grasshopper. It immediately leapt from the confines of his hands and onto her mahogany desk. He quickly reached out to recapture it, upsetting a bottle of ornamental ink on her desk. Ink pooled across a pile of papers while the shadow of frustration spread across the woman's face and she gasped in anger.

"Robert! I really need you to keep Eldon out of here! He's just destroyed three months of work!" She called out, bringing an end to the life of the green hopper with a single blow from a literary magazine.

Eldon's father strode calmly into the room. "How about we take a little drive down to the park?" He asked, noticing the tears welling up in Eldon's eyes.

 "But…my hopper…" Eldon sobbed as his father shepherded him out of the office. Liz shook her head in frustration. How was she ever going to produce a best-selling book with children under her feet every minute of the day? What she really needed was some space. Time and space…

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Cheryn gathered the papers from her car and slipped her laptop case over one shoulder. The sound of her car lock alarm echoed through the underground parking at her apartment building as she made her way to the stairwell. Her ascent up the apartment stairs included repeatedly dropping a few pages, retreating several steps to pick them back up, and pressing on to the fifth floor. 

The elevator had been inoperable for the past three weeks, and she was beginning to get used to her daily climb. The building manager had offered the freight elevator as a temporary solution to those who couldn't climb the stairs, but she wasn't interested in riding the same elevator that forever seemed to smell of dirty diapers and rotting scraps of food.

 As she opened the door to the fifth floor, she nearly dropped the book, and out slid a newspaper clipping with a photograph of a young man graduating from high school as the valedictorian. Cheryn rebalanced her load and quickly scooped up the clipping before she dropped something more. 

As she stepped onto the fifth floor she nearly ran face first into Sal, an unemployed computer programmer who passed his days playing online games with his buddies. He had once explained to her how his severance pay kept him from being homeless, but she was only half listening since he had intercepted her racing into apartment for a certain urgent personal matter.

"Cheryn! Hey, I was just thinking about you! You know, I have some buddies coming over tonight to check out the latest version of Halo. They're bringin' some awesome finger food! Anyway, if you want to check it out, you're always welcome to join the fun."

"Oh, thanks for the invite Sal. I have plans already, but if they don't pan out, I'll let you know." She stepped around him and started to fiddle with her apartment keys.

“Hey, let me help you, there,” Sal said, taking the keys from her hand and opening the door for her. He gently rested them on the top of her pile of papers. “Saaay! Eldon Winters! Cool! That even looks like an original newspaper clipping. That’s one smart dude!” Sal gushed enthusiastically. 

Eldon Winters? She’d never heard of the man. She opened her mouth to interrogate Sal further, then resisted the urge to ask for more information. Google might take less time and emotional investment. At least she had a name to work with. She shut the door behind her and flipped on the light to her tiny apartment. 

The kitchen was tidy minus a blue and white striped dish towel that had slipped to the floor  in her haste to wash the syrup off of her hands from shoving a freezer waffle in her mouth as she rushed off to work that morning. The plate and underutilized fork sat next to the 5-second water torture chamber, waiting for their turn to be washed. 

The fridge whined like it was suffering from some dull, undiagnosed ailment. Perhaps it had something to do with the leaky faucet.  She tossed her keys onto the small round kitchen table and stepped into the living room. There she unloaded her laptop onto the once glamorous teal microfiber loveseat that she found six months ago in the nickel ads. Finally, she spread the papers and book on her battered and chipped coffee table. 

“Okay, Mr. Winters,” Cheryn said out loud, slipping her laptop out of its case. “Let’s see if you’re still on the radar.”

The glow of her computer filled the still dim living room, lit only by the glow of the kitchen light fixture. Just as she logged onto a search engine, her cell phone rang. She shuffled through her laptop bag for a moment and then realized that the noise was coming from her jacket pocket. She glanced at the screen to make sure it wasn't Sal and sighed with relief. It was her receptionist-turned-cosmetology-student friend Stacy. “Hey Stacy, what’s up?” Stacy bubbled on for several minutes about the hot new instructor at the school of cosmetology, and then announced the real reason for her call.

“Anyway, we had a contest today to see who could match the new instructor’s hair color the fastest, and guess who won?”

“Hmmm. John? Maggie? Philippe? Oh, no wait, I think I’ve got it! Jazmine!”

“Very funny.” Stacy pouted. Jazmine had accidentally turned Stacy’s hair bright orange the first time Stacy let anyone color her hair. She still wasn’t convinced it was an accident.

“You, of course!” Cheryn finally gave in.

“And as a reward for your correct answer, you will be permitted to accompany me to tonight’s Jazz concert, the grand prize for matching the new instructor’s hair color!” Stacy announced.

“Really? I mean, congrats on your prize and thanks for considering me as your companion.”

“Who else, silly. I only have one condition. You have to wear something snazzy.” Stacy said somberly.

“Snazzy? Have you seen my wardrobe lately?”

“Oh, not Cheryn-snazzy. I mean something Stacy-snazzy. I’ll be over in a few minutes. I’ve got just the thing.”

“Hmmm. I can’t wait.” Cheryn said unenthusiastically as she hung up the phone and resumed her Internet-search posture, leaning back in one corner of the loveseat and kicking one foot onto an empty corner of the coffee table.

She pulled up MSN white pages and searched for Eldon Winters. Up came two possibilities, one with a phone number in the same area code as Bingham Street. This was just too easy. She glanced down at the book. "It's been lovely, but I think we may have found a home for you. She inhaled deeply and dialed the number. A man's voice answered on the other end of the line.

"Mr. Winters?"

"Yes," he said, a little cautiously.

"Hi. My name is Cheryn, and…"

"Is this a telemarketer?" he asked suspiciously.

"No," she replied with a nervous laugh.  "I found something that may be important to you. What I mean is, do you know someone named Robert, someone who died many years ago?"

"Yes, Robert was...my father." He said, still cautious about this strange call.

"Well, in that case, I think I may have some writings from your mother."

"Writings from my mother? Is this a joke or some hairbrained scam?"

"Yes, I mean no. This is not a scam. I think these writings may have been thrown away unintentionally. I couldn't find a name, but... I recovered them and wanted to return them to you."

"Writings from my mother, you say?" He asked.

"Yes! And I think they are quite…"

"Unusual? Unique? Quite good?" He interrupted. "Well, I suppose a great many people would agree with you, considering that she spent almost every waking moment of her life writing. How unusual, then? Well, not so very. So how much are you after? What "hidden manuscript" have you unveiled this week? I've had enough of these unpublished manuscript scams, and what better timing than after her burial, right? Well, wouldn't you agree, then?"

"I'm sorry sir, I wasn’t aware…This isn't a manuscript. It’s a journal or, perhaps a…" Cheryn started to say, but was again interrupted.

"Let me tell you this. I read every scrap of garbage that my mother wrote because I was the one who helped her publish it. She refused to type, so I had to read her scrawled out mess and translate it into something legible, so don't try to sell me on some missing manuscript garbage, or now with this new idea of a 'journal.' Really, have some respect for the dead by not putting words into her silenced mouth." She could hear him muffle the phone and speak to someone in the background.

Sharon inhaled deeply. "I assure you, sir, that I am not engaging in any sort of scam. I am merely trying to return something that flew out of the garbage to its rightful owner. It seemed to contain such personal details about her life." 

"Well, if you stop by your local big-box bookstore, you may find that her life wasn't so personal after all. In fact, most of it was recorded in her ridiculous books. Why would anyone need more than what she told them since she certainly never practiced any reservations in the past. You go read her books and then tell me if you really found anything new and 'undiscovered.' If you have, then I assure you it would be of little interest to me. Her writing was her whole life. Let her fans consume these "New and undiscovered" writings like they consumed every minute of her day." Sarcasm dripped from his angry words that were thrown at the phone with such force that she could almost feel the phone vibrate with his rage. "You keep what you found. I'm sure you'll get something off at the auction block for them for your time. Good day."

Sharon sat looking at the phone. Maybe he was right. Maybe it really was all written in books, but what books? Who was this mysterious author? She couldn't quite place any author with the last name Winters. He'd mentioned her burial. Perhaps she could find something online in the obituaries. She reached for her computer to search the local paper online, but just then she heard a knock at the door. “Open up, Police!” said the voice on the other side.

“Oh, hold on a sec. I need to stash my bank loot.” She called back as she stood to answer the door. There stood Stacy with a sequin shirt. “No, take me to jail, but PLEASE don’t make me wear that!”

“Stacy-snazzy! You agreed!” Stacy countered, pushing the bejeweled blouse toward Cheryn.

“I’d better not see anyone I know.” She said, taking the blouse and wandering into her bedroom to change.

Stacy pounced onto the couch and picked up Cheryn’s laptop. “Are you randomly picking up dates on the Internet again?” She shouted to Cheryn. “Mr. Eldon Winters. Now why does that sound familiar?”

“This book landed on my car today and Eldon was one of the names in that book..." 

"ON your car? A book fell ON your car? Like from heaven?" Stacy called back.

"Nooo, from a garbage truck. Anyway, quite the irate fellow, that Eldon. He thought I was making it up. He said his mom was a writer, but I don’t know any writers with the name Winters, do you?” She called back, opening the door to her bedroom and then jumping back because Stacy was staring back at her with saucer-like eyes.

“Wait, did you say Winters? As in Liz Winters?” Stacy stammered in amazement, forgetting how much Cheryn appreciated her personal space.

“Liz who?” Cheryn asked quizzically.

“Better known as Ella Chamberlain? Best-selling author of anything containing her name alone? Right up there with Grisham, McCullough, King, Crichton, Rowling?” Stacy prattled on.

“Oh my… Ella? Ella Chamberlain? Did she? She just died, right?”

Stacy sat on the arm of the loveseat and snatched up Cheryn’s laptop, tapping in her name. “‘Ms. Ella Chamberlain passed away Tuesday evening from heart failure…’ or this one, ‘Family of Chamberlain refuse to disclose burial location for privacy reasons.’ Or how about, ‘Famed author leaves behind three children.’”

“That last one, is one of the children named Eldon?” Cheryn asked.

“Aye lassie. ‘Family representative Eldon Winters pleads, No flowers.’ “

Cheryn shook her head in amazement. “All of those books, and all about successful business women. Maybe he's right. Maybe it's all in her books after all.”

Stacy cocked her head and closed one eye. “What are you talking about?”

“The book…” Cheryn rushed over to the coffee table. “The book, the journal… of Ella, er Liz. At least I am pretty sure that’s what it is.”

Stacy reached out and picked up a loose page or two. “How did you find this again? This could be worth millions. You’ve got to get it to the family members! What an amazing find with her dead and all. This is invaluable!”

“I told you, it landed on my car today, off of a garbage truck. Only… only her son didn’t want it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. He practically said that it should have stayed where I found it. I just don’t get it. He said that everything in here is probably already in her books anyway, so why would he want this?”

“That’s odd. When my grandma died, everyone wanted something to remember her by. My uncles fought over her daily notebooks like they were gold, even though they already knew what was in them.”

“That’s what’s so strange. I just can’t figure out why someone would be so acidic toward someone who just died unless…”

“Unless what?” Stacy queried.

“I don’t know. It’s probably unfair to speculate. Wait, what time is it? We’d better go unless we want to miss out on the concert. We can take a look at this book later. What I need to figure out is if there’s anything new or different in this book than is recorded in her novels. Her son said that he wasn’t interested because he thought he’d already read it through her novels.”

“I’ve read all of her books, so that shouldn’t be a problem.” Stacy said as they headed out for the concert. As they opened the door into the hallway, a pizza delivery guy knocked on Sal’s door.

“Hey Cheryn! Lookin’ good!” he called out as they walked past in all of their glimmering glory.

“Yeah, thanks.” Cheryn said, untouched by the compliment. As the door to the stairwell closed, she mumbled to Stacy, “Thanks a LOT. I’ll heretofore be known as "The Dancing Queen.”

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1224 Bingham Street - Ch1

Gray clouds threatened to beat down upon the handful of family members gathered around the unembellished grave. The smell of rain filled the air, but held its distance from the somber crowd. They had arrived only moments prior to the graveside service, too busy with their daily lives to pause for a fistful of flowers to brighten the dark mound of dirt. Eldon's wife Nancy had gently pointed out a flower shack as they passed through town toward the cemetery. Her gesture was shrugged off with a curt mumble about being late and wasting good money on fancy lawn fertilizer. 


Oddly, the fragments of family present at the service had requested a viewing at the graveside in lieu of a formal funerary event. Indeed, the opening of the casket had very little to do with a need for closure, although nobody cared to ask for an explanation. I suppose you could say that the real reason rested somewhere between confirmation that the woman was really dead, and the satisfaction of knowing that she hadn't hidden any of her fortune inside of the coffin.


Eldon stood in his tailored suit, cut at his request a bit smaller than was recommended for his generous size. His waif of a wife wore a dainty draping dress that clung to her tiny form like a sheet on a coat tree. She refrained from gawking at the pallor figure resting in the black satin-lined coffin, while Eldon and his comrades leaned in suspiciously, studying the embalmed figure.


The interment consisted of a severe rationing of words garnished with an unseemly number of snickers and side comments. After the last words were uttered, the would-be mourners did not budge, but looked around expectantly. After an uncomfortably long pause, Eldon spoke. "Where are the shovels, then?"


The undertaker blinked in amazement, uncertain if he'd heard Eldon correctly. "Beg your pardon sir?"


"The shovels then, I say. Shall we have this finished?" Eldon repeated, a bit impatiently.


The timid man paused, and then nodded in understanding. "Well, sir, 'tis a backhoe that we use these days."


"Where is it, then?" Eldon said, quite immune to his own repetition of the word, 'then.' He'd heard the word used by an admired associate and fancied himself quite the intellect for having adopted the practice into his own daily conversation. He was blind to the fact that it had quite the opposite effect on his listeners


"'Tis yonder, sir, waiting out of respect for those grieving to depart before..."


"I assure you that the only grief felt at this moment is due to a lack of shovels. Still, I suppose a backhoe will suffice. Well, then?" He asked, leaning toward the undertaker expectantly. Muffled snickers were offered by his fellow relations.


The undertaker attempted to mask the surprise in his eyes, and then turned to place an arm high in the air. He waved the backhoe forward. It crept out from behind a cluster of trees, lurching and jerking as the tracks ground against the gravel road in an unholy fashion. It halted several yards away, filling the air with the hum of its engine and the scent of burning fuel.

"Please step to the other side of the road." The undertaker shouted rather elegantly over the sound of the backhoe engine, attempting to mask the disdain in his voice.


The family obediently shuffled across the road, giving sufficient distance for safe admittance to the metal contraption. If art could be had in maneuvering a backhoe, this operator had mastered it. Despite the spastic lurching of the machine, he gracefully replaced the dirt and patted it carefully into place before obediently limping off behind the clump of trees once again.

Without another word or a glance backward, the family melted away into their respective vehicles and vanished from sight. The undertaker stood, staring off into the distance at the cemetery gate.

"Now what was that all about?" The backhoe driver stood with his hands in the back pockets of his overalls. 

"Never in 45 years have I encountered a family so eager to toss a body in the grave. Some you suspect would, but they have the decency to feign affection and grief of some sort. Jack, I confess, I could not have been more surprised had they brought along a fiddler so they could dance a jig on the grave!" 

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Chance fills the gap where conscious decision and destiny fail to meet. It is the crevice in which a single coin falls to determine the fate of a wishful heart, or the tiny slip of paper containing an a scrap of information that will lead astray the driven soul. It is the cast off, unforeseen element that begins a chain of events in which the parties involved unknowingly leap down the veritable rabbit-hole or swallow some catalyst for life-long change. 


Such was the case with Cheryn Hammond, a woman of simplicity in every possible way. She was the type of individual that never catches the eye. She was not too thin, nor too heavy. She was not beautiful, nor did she have anything about her that would cause one to pay attention to her for lack of beauty. She did not fancy herself fashionable, nor did she consider her style particularly frumpy. She was never a cheerleader, an all-star, a champion, or an MVP, but she had always remained active and successful in her own small way. Above all else, she had considered herself an observer of humanity, watchful without being nosy, curious without prying,  and hopeful without being overly optimistic.


She wore glasses because she could not afford contacts, and usually wore her hair in a simple stacked A-line cut because it required little maintenance on her part if she had it cut each month. Her friend Stacy had tossed her receptionist career to the curb eight months ago in pursuit of becoming an aesthetician, making Cheryn's monthly haircut financially feasible.


Cheryn refused to wear perfume, mainly because her mother reacted so badly to fragrance. She could not justify sending others into anaphylactic shock in order to safe face by masking some unseemly body odor. The only scent that she occasionally carried with her was the faint and temporary smell of vanillaroma car freshener from her seven-year old Honda Accord. 


When Cheryn left work that day, she certainly did not expect anything unusual to happen to her. She had become quite accustomed to the fact that anyone with the name Sharon was destined for monotony and normalcy. She found little comfort in the blatant misspelling of the name. Her entire elementary and secondary education was spent trying to explain why her name SOUNDED like Sharon, and yet was spelled completely different. Her parents' creative attempt to give her a competitive edge with this unique orthography had failed miserably. 


While Cheryn sat waiting in the left turn lane at Bingham Street and 45th, she noticed a large green garbage truck driving up Bingham Street from the opposite direction. Just as the left turn signal turned green, the garbage truck swung in front of her onto 45th. Being of the ordinary type, she sighed with resignation and followed the grinding, smelly truck down the road toward the freeway. 


"Ugh. Really?" She said out loud as a flurry of loose paper scattered into the air from the open top of the truck. She turned on her windshield wipers to keep the pages from sticking to her window, but somehow they slipped under the wiper blades, blocking her vision. She heard a loud clunk and pulled to the side of the road to remedy her sightless condition. The driver behind her generously offered the sustained fermata of his horn as he dramatically swerved into the middle of the road to avoid her. 


She ripped the papers off of her windshield in frustration, and inspected the hood of her car to identify the source of the loud clunk. As she looked under the front wheel of her car, she noticed a large, old book. She wasn't sure how it had escaped the garbage truck given its weight. As she reached out to remove the book, she noticed that some of the pages that she had crumpled in her hand were torn from it. They were hand-written in a shaky scrawl. 


She straightened the page in her hand and began to read the first few lines:


Tonight I walked alone to Robert's grave. The moon was bright, so it was easy to find the way in the darkness. It's so hard to think that he is gone, and with him my one connection to the children. I know I will never see them again. 


Another driver blasted a car horn in Cheryn's direction, but she didn't notice who it was. She was contemplating this old journal that had somehow fallen into her world. Something  in those four brief sentences had stirred something in her heart. 


She glanced around at the sheets of paper. Some were scattered in the street and danced wildly each time a car drove by. Others were clinging to the chain-link fence on her left, and a few were lying in the gutter beneath her car. 

She picked up the book and set it gently on the floor of her car along with the torn pages in her hand, and then proceeded to collect the scattered pages. Some had old newspaper clippings or theater ticket stubs attached with brittle yellow tape. Others had drawings or lists scrawled on them. Some bits of paper were just scraps of garbage that had flown out along with the book, and these she left behind. 


Time seemed to fly as she carefully followed the trail of the garbage truck on foot, sorting through bits of paper for book pages until the paper trail ran dry. She wasn't sure if she had them all, but at least she had those that had been left behind by the truck. Content, she looked at her armful of paper, and turned to see her car sitting almost a mile back. A police officer was slipping a ticket beneath her wiper blade. 


"Wait!" She called out, but to no avail. The officer had just climbed into her car and was pulling away. Cheryn shook her head in frustration, wondering if her sudden urge to become a garbage collector was worth the $45.00 parking ticket. 


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