CHAPTER ONE
Three months ago, as I entered this sun-drenched foyer with colorful prisms dancing on soft blue walls that were produced by stained glass windows embedded in the doorsills and dark woodworks framing the Italian marble floor, a welcome feeling enveloped me. Bliss shaded my dark brown eyes, hope filled my ample bosom and Byron Blazer, the greatest love of my young life, was directly behind me. We had come to this handsome three-storied brownstone to rent an apartment together. Of course we were not married yet, but that would surely come soon after Byron experienced the joy and contentment of living with a woman who loved every atom God had assigned to him. This was merely the first step on the long, merry road to becoming Mrs. Rachel Marstan-Blazer. Genuine physical evidence my dream was coming true, or so I thought.
Our apartment was on the second floor front and provided an exquisite view of the rising sun over the impressive Philadelphia skyline. The large living room made the missing dining room a non-issue, and the kitchen would easily accommodate a seating arrangement for four. I had immediately fallen in love with the gleaming hardwood floors and high ceilings. The antiquated plumbing fascinated Byron. He had never seen a sink with both hot and cold faucets or a bathtub with feet, and he had absolutely no idea what the rubber stoppers attached to the chains were for in the sinks and bathtub. There was limited closet space in the one bedroom apartment, but we felt that we could work with that.
Byron and I signed the lease that very afternoon and he caught the train home later on that evening. He would be renting a U-Haul truck to move what few possessions he had in his mother’s home in Richmond, Virginia to our apartment on Saturday. Byron had graduated from Drexel University two months earlier and was scheduled to begin working at Online Graphics as a graphic designer one week later.
I had also recently graduated from Temple University, but was continuing as a graduate student in pursuit of my Law Degree. My family could hardly be considered wealthy by any standards, but my father was a partner in Marstan and St. Charles, Attorneys-At-Law, and I was just a little girl following in Daddy’s footsteps. My parents financed my education and I worked part-time as a word processor at Marstan and St. Charles to finance my independence. I lived in a tiny, center city, efficiency apartment that worked well for one human inhabitant, but would have two at each other’s throats in less than a week.
My parents, Raymond and Gladys Marstan, took the news of my pending move like most parents with a single daughter shacking with a man whom they knew absolutely nothing about. They yelled and stomped, threatened and forbade. When they were done it was perfectly clear to me that I was displeasing them and definitely going to hell. The fact that I had only known Byron for three months and had met him in a nightclub reduced my mother to tears, and rendered my father speechless for a few moments. I was the youngest of three; and my brother, Keith, and sister, Regina, had never done anything my parents found risky or unsavory that day. Keith’s pot smoking in Nana’s basement and one of Regina’s breast being outside of her bra when the lights came on suddenly in the den had somehow evaporated from the landscape of troubling occurrences in the lives of the Marstan children. Of course I knew different, but parents have that god-like power to forgive at will, and they assured me that there was a deep hole with my name at the bottom of it in this immoral relationship.
I could not tell my parents that Byron had the chiseled body of a Nubian king with flawless features or that he could deliver a kiss that transported me to heaven, and I certainly could not tell them that when he made love to me he sent me so far away I did not know my own name afterwards. I had to depend on the known fact that they loved me more than they disagreed with my decision, and I moved into the apartment with Byron, knowing neither one of my parents would ever set foot outside the door, nevertheless inside.
