Read Online Providence by Chris Coppernoll - Free Book Online

corner of Alder Street and Thatcher. We moved in thirty minutes after handing over a cash deposit and signing the lease.
    On Monday I wired my twenty-four-thousand-dollar nest egg from home, and Mitch and I set up shop. That summer of 1985, we would drink about a million bottles of Pepsi because something called New Coke had elbowed real Coca-Cola aside, and finding it was like finding treasure in Al Capone’s vault. McDonald’s Fry Guy glasses cluttered our kitchen shelves, and paper Kentucky Fried Chicken barrels filled the back of the fridge.
    Mitch soon found a part-time job at Providence Athletics, a sporting-goods-and-school-supply store still in business on Broadway. I was hired at the famous City Club Restaurant and Bar, a downtown eatery on Fifth Avenue, simply known to patrons as City Club. It went out of business after I left college, but in its prime in the mideighties, it was the place to be. I worked there every Friday and Saturday night through football season, and a couple of lunches during the week. For this I made two hundred and fifty dollars a week. In student terms, a small fortune.
    We became friends with Brian Aspen, Reggie Moehler, and Kim Prang, the guys in the apartment directly above ours. We all flirted with the two girls across the hall, especially the blond with movie-star good looks, Jennifer. But Jennifer left college before the end of our second semester. We didn’t know the reason until later. Turned out she was pregnant. Amy, her roommate, was the first girl Mitchell pulled into his magnetic gravitational field.
    Each weekend brought carloads of new freshmen and returning upper classmen. Dorms became an unloading zone. The apartments, a daily ritual of lifting two-ton sofas up three flights of stairs. The streets and cafés of Broadway, the campus’s main drag, filled with rowdy undergrads and beautiful Providence College girls.
    The last days of summer are blurred snapshots now. Mementos, once textured to the touch, now time smoothed of distinctive details, their essence blended together: Mitchell grilling steaks on the terrace, the girls next door playing the same Go-Go’s album over and over, Mitch and I watching the Cincinnati Reds playing well late into August. All was right in our world. If only we could have frozen that season of life. It was preseason for Providence football and preseason for Mitch and me.
    I turned out the bedside lamp and wondered why I’d come here. Was it because of Ruthie? Was it all those pictures in the college catalog of happy students wearing their silver Providence College sweatshirts and maroon baseball caps? Or had Providence simply sprung up like an oasis, a cool place to rest and shelter my soul?
    I thought about the yearbook pictures from Overton I kept in the drawer next to my bed. Every dime I earned had paved another inch of asphalt to Providence. Ruthie had disappeared, but Providence College remained.

~ S even ~
    Do you ever dream of me
Do you ever see the letters that I write?
    —Elton John
    “Nikita”
    One appointment remained on my work calendar—a lunch date I’d refused to cancel with my friend Raymond Mac. Raymond has lived in Norwood most of his adult life. Back when the majority of Norwood’s residents weren’t sure they could trust us, dismissing our efforts, Raymond took our commitment seriously, championing our cause.
    Raymond stands five feet seven inches, though he swears he was over six feet tall in his prime. He has silver hair on the sides of his head and, since he stopped driving, walks with his cane wherever he wants in Norwood, when the weather allows. We celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday together a couple of years into our friendship and his seventy-fifth in July this year.
    Marvin’s is a rib joint on the edge between two worlds—Norwood and the rest of Providence. Raymond, like a lot of the people who live in Norwood, doesn’t venture outside the neighborhood much. I never met Ray’s wife, Ella. She died