Cemetery Road by Gar Anthony Haywood

R.J.’s daughter said when we were finally alone again, ‘but something inside him wasn’t right. He had everything a man could want – wife, family, career – and he was never at peace with any of it.’
    ‘How do you mean?’
    ‘I mean he’d go months and months acting as if everything was fine, then out of nowhere, he’d disappear for a weekend without explanation. Or lock himself up in the bathroom at three in the morning just to cry himself to sleep. It was all typical behavior for a drug abuser, of course, but he swore to us that wasn’t it. Coke had only been a crutch for him when he couldn’t get work, and he’d given it up the minute he hired on at Coughlin. Or so he always said.’
    ‘You didn’t believe him?’
    ‘I didn’t know what to believe. All I knew was that he needed help, and he was too selfish and stubborn to ever get it, no matter how much his behavior hurt my mother.’
    ‘When you say he needed help – you’re talking about psychiatric help?’
    ‘Of course. Daddy was deeply disturbed. He was either doing coke again or, as Mother suspected, something else was slowly driving him insane. I always believed it was the former, and I still do. His story that he used for fifteen months, then quit cold turkey as soon as the Coughlin job came along, has never really flown with me. But Mother’s never doubted it for a minute. She thinks something happened to Daddy in prison, that he was haunted by something he saw or did there that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to forget.’
    It was not an unsound theory. R.J. had been as hard as nails, to be sure, but his heart was as soft as they came. If during his three years in lock-down he’d witnessed more than a few senseless acts of violence against people he considered friends, it would not have been unlike him to drag the memory around behind him like a burlap sack filled with lead.
    There was at least one other explanation for the depth of despondency in her father Toni Burrow was describing, however, and the fact that she made no allusion to it now could only mean that she was unaware of it. She doesn’t know, I thought, finally allowing myself to stop fearing otherwise, and my sense of relief was almost too overpowering to conceal.
    ‘What about his job?’ I asked. ‘Could whatever was troubling him have been connected to something he was dealing with at work?’
    ‘Well, we wondered about that, certainly. But whenever we’d ask him about it, he’d just say things at work were fine.’
    ‘Exactly what did he do for Coughlin?’
    ‘He was a security guard, primarily. But they had just made him a consultant about a year ago.’
    ‘A security consultant? With a criminal record?’
    ‘It does seem strange, I know. But the man who got him in the door there had some serious pull in personnel, the way it was always explained to me, and Daddy’s duties the first few years were too innocuous to make trusting him much of a concern. Watching the lobby in empty satellite offices, or the gate at small construction sites – he couldn’t have stolen anything worth stealing if he’d wanted to back then.’
    ‘So who was this man who got him the job?’
    ‘I don’t know. I never met him.’
    ‘You don’t have a name?’
    ‘I think his last name was Allen, but that’s just a guess. Mother would know for sure. All I ever heard about him is that he was a rep for the company Daddy met through a work training program Coughlin used to sponsor at the prison.’
    ‘Do you know if he still works there?’
    ‘It’s possible. There were several people from the company at the funeral, but as far as I know, he wasn’t one of them.’
    ‘Can I get you two anything else?’
    The waitress’s name was Rosie. I hadn’t seen it stenciled to the white plastic tag pinned to her blouse until now.
    I looked to Toni, who shook her head, and I did the same for Rosie. ‘We’re fine, thanks.’
    The big Latina laid the bill down in front of me, not