Cemetery Road by Gar Anthony Haywood

still a call for revenge too powerful for me to ignore. To put myself at ease, I told myself we had devised a plan that even R.J.’s volatility could not impair. All we had to do was follow it to the letter, avoid all improvisation and error, and our success would be assured.
    What I failed to understand is that no plan is ever impervious to chance. No matter how scrupulously rehearsed or executed, the designs of mortal men will always be as prone to the unexpected as cloud patterns in the sky.
    It was a lesson I was doomed to learn the hard way.

EIGHT
    M y brother Chancellor was the only family I left behind when I fled Los Angeles for good in the winter of 1979. Our mother had died of ovarian cancer three years earlier and our father had disappeared six years before that, allegedly with a fat woman who had money. We were our parents’ only offspring, and as far as my brother and I knew, we had no other living relatives west of the Mississippi.
    I cannot say we parted on the best of terms. Olivia Gardner’s death had shaken Chancellor badly, and he was already on the downward spiral that would not bottom out for many years when I told him I was leaving. My reasons were all hollow and fabricated, and he knew it, but all he did to let on was accept them in silence, as if they weren’t even worth the breath it would take to discount them. Like our mother, he had never cared for R.J. and O’, and had always been able to see the trouble my association with them would bring me, so there was nothing about my sudden need to put some distance between us he could find particularly surprising.
    My leaving hurt him nonetheless.
    We kept in contact for the first year or so strictly by telephone, calling each other after months of avoiding it just to keep the illusion of interest alive. Then we just stopped. Chancellor’s descent into alcoholism became too pronounced for him to disguise anymore, and I couldn’t keep the ring of pity out of my voice. I had never before seen the loss of a woman drag a man that far down into despair, and in my ignorance of the phenomenon, I decided it would be better to abandon my brother altogether than to bear witness to his resounding weakness.
    I have no actual knowledge, then, of the depths he eventually reached. I only know that the woman who answered his phone late one night in 1989 could not stop weeping long enough to properly explain his absence, and that was the last time the number I had for him worked at all. I had given him up for dead until he resurfaced four years later, ending our estrangement not with a phone call but a letter, written from a hospital bed. It was an invitation to resume contact and little else, sprinkled with allusions to his recovery from a personal nightmare he would not name.
    Whatever had prompted his disappearance, he came out of it a new man, equally laconic, perhaps, but stronger and less self-absorbed. Gradually, and with considerable caution, we returned to our routine of intermittent phone calls, and in the course of our reconciliation, Chancellor went back to school and married the weepy woman who’d answered his phone that night in 1989. He earned a degree in Journalism from Cal State Dominguez Hills and eventually parlayed it into the steady job he continued to hold today, staff writer for the Los Angeles Guardian , the oldest black-owned newspaper in the city.
    I hadn’t bothered to look my brother up when I’d come out for R.J.’s funeral, having only planned to be in town less than a day, but now that I’d returned with the idea of staying for a while, I couldn’t see my way around to not getting in touch. He invited me to dinner at his home in Carson early Monday night, and I accepted, anxious to see how much of his rehabilitation was of my own invention, and how much was real.
    Like O’Neal Holden had a week before, Chancellor lied and told me I looked good, but he was the one who showed marked improvement from the last time we had met. Gone