My Sunshine

        My Sunshine

By Emmanuel Enyeribe Chukwudi

Copyrigh
t


2013 by Emmanuel Enyeribe

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any means without the prior permission from the author and/or publisher.

Events and persons in this book are purely the imagination of the
author. All similarities to actual people or events are coincidenta
l
`
.

I want to extend my gratitude to

my mum
, Bernadette Enyeribe. Without her I wouldn’t have come this far.

Chapter One

John
Bernett yawned and rubbed his eyes. Driving

made him sleepy, especially when he had to do it

alone. Being alone wasn’t something he was used to.               John was one-fifth of a music group, Parrison, which was the standout group of a crop of “boy bands” that had sprung up in recent years
.
`
For four of the past five years, the group had been touring and performing non-stop. They were currently enjoying a hiatus from touring, and just doing a few shows intermittently.

During the summer, one of his bandmates,
Bright, had become a father and another, Josh, had gotten married. And another, Dennis, was getting married in a couple more months.

For “teen idols” they were doing very grown-up stuff.

He was more than six hours into the eleven-hour trip from Carolina Beach, NC to his hometown near Nashville. He had been in Carolina Beach visiting Bright and his wife, Jane, and their two-month-old son, Will. He could have flown, but traveling from his current home in Orlando to North Carolina then to Nashville involved so many layovers and plane changes that it wasn't worth the trouble. And being alone was calming, something else he wasn't used to. He turned up the radio as new song started. It was a song by a group called Daybreak, which was another “boy band.” The members of the two groups were not friends and their rivalry was often fodder for the tabloids. Ordinarily, he would have changed the station, or at least turned the volume down, but this song reminded him of a night and a woman he couldn’t seem to shake from his memory. He had danced to this song with Jane’s sister, Mary, the night before Mike and Jane’s wedding.
Mary, Mary, Mar
y
. His lips curled into a smile. She had come without her husband to Florida to celebrate her sister’s wedding, and the night before the ceremony, John had taken Mary out for a cup of coffee. It had started innocently enough. They had struck up a conversation at Bright and Jane’s, and they weren’t ready to stop talking when the party broke up.

Over coffee,
Mary had confided in him that her sex life with her husband wasn’t all that it should be, and John had become excited. He took her back to his place spent all night showing her the pleasures that she had been denied. She had eagerly returned the favors.

His car losing power brought his thoughts back to the
present. He glanced at the gauges on the dashboard. The needle on the tachometer was quickly falling toward zero RPMs, and the lights on the console that would not normally be on while the car was running were lit. His car had shut off. He was still moving at almost sixty miles per hour, and he quickly shifted into neutral and turned the key. The car started again with no trouble. “What was that all about?” he said aloud.

He drove a few more miles down the interstate before it
happened again. He shifted into neutral and turned the key. Nothing. He was losing power fast. He managed to steer it off the interstate and onto the exit ramp before the car rolled to a complete stop.

“Damnit!” He banged his hands on the steering wheel. He
tried the ignition again with no luck. With an exasperated sigh, he got out of the car and looked around
.
Well, at least I haven’
t
broken down in the middle of no-where
.
He looked at his watch. It was close to eleven, and it looked like the fast food restaurants he could see from his position at the bottom of the exit ramp were open. He locked his car doors and began walking to the top of ramp.

He stood on the side of the highway looking at his food
choices. He was always ready for a meal. He didn’t feel like fried chicken or burgers and the pizza delivery place wouldn’t have a dining room, so he headed off in the direction of the Subway sandwich shop. He pulled open the door to the empty restaurant.

 
“I’ll be right there,” a female voice called from the back room. John stood there studying the menu board just for a few seconds before the girl showed herself. She smiled at him. “Let me wash my hands.” She came to the counter. “What can I get for you?” “Umm, let me get a foot-long meatball on white please.”

She began to cut the bread. As he watched her make the
sandwich, he studied her. He guessed she was about twenty. She was average in height and weight; she wore glasses and not a stitch of make-up. Her black hair was all one length and it hung in a ponytail to the middle of her back. She was very pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way, but she had the most amazing blue eyes that John had ever seen, so blue that the whites of her eyes were even tinted. She didn’t seem to recognize him, and that relieved him.

“Anything else with that?” She asked as she moved to the
register.

He nodded. “Yeah, I need a drink, large, and some chips,
please, Chloe,” he said, reading her name off her badge. She smiled, handed him a cup and pointed him in the direction of the chip rack. “Help yourself.” She took his money and made change.

John
took the cup from her and frowned. There was his picture, bright as daylight, along with the other four guys on the side of the cup. They had signed the endorsement deal with Subway a few months earlier. Jared, the guy who had lost two hundred and some odd pounds with his now famous Subway diet, pretty much monopolized the television commercials, but Parrison was plastered all over the restaurant’s print ads, and, as John noticed, all over the cups and napkins. She had to have recognized him.

Okay, maybe she doesn’t care
.
He fixed his drink, selected a brand of chips and settled himself in a booth. Chloe came around the counter into the dining room and locked the front door. “We close at eleven,” she explained.

John
looked at the clock on the wall: 11:01. “Oh, I’m sorry. Do I need to go?”

She shook her head. “No, no. Stay and eat. Do you mind if
I go ahead and start cleaning up?”

He shook his head and watched as she began breaking
down the counter where she had fixed his sandwich. “You here all by yourself?”

“Yeah, my help left about a hour ago.” She was silent for a
moment. “So what brings you to Canton?”

“Is that where I am?” He frowned. “My car broke down on
the exit ramp.”

“Your car? That doesn’t sound right.”

“So you do know who I am.”

“Yeah…no. I mean, of course I know you’re part of that group Parrison.” She motioned toward his cup. “I mean, how could I not know? But I’m not sure which one you are. I don’t know your names, one from another. You’re the redheaded one.” She shrugged slightly, giving him the impression that she couldn't have cared less. He smiled, happy that she wasn’t a fan. “I’m John. John Bernett, and my car did break down. Can I borrow a phone book?”

“Certainly.” She left his line of sight for a second, then
returned, phone book in hand. “Are you by yourself?”

John
nodded. “Yeah, just me.”

“Where are you headed?”

“Back to Nashville. That’s where my parents live. I’ve

been down at the coast with some friends.” He flipped through
the yellow pages. “You know a mechanic?”

“I sure do. My brother has a shop...and a tow-truck. You
want me to give him a call?”

“That would be great. There wouldn’t happen to be a hotel
around, would there?”

“As a matter of fact, there’s one on this exit.” She pointed
out the window. He turned around and saw the neon lights on the sign above the Budget Inn. “Not fancy, but it’s the only one in Canton,” she said.

“It’ll do.”

“Let me call Daniel,” she said before disappearing again. She left his line of sight for several minutes, and he concentrated on his sandwich.

“
Daniel said he’d go over and pick it up in a little while. It will give you time to get some things out of it if you need to.”

John
nodded. “Thanks. I would like to get my bag if I’m going to be spending the night.”

“I’ll be happy to drive you,”
Chloe volunteered. “You shouldn’t be walking around this time of the night. You’ll just have to wait for me to finish up here.”

John
accepted her offer and busied himself with reading a copy of the local paper that someone had left on the table while she swept the floor. When she rolled a big yellow mop bucket out into the middle of the dining room, he got up from his seat.

“I’ll do that,” he said. “If you’ve got something else you need to
do. I’ll help.”

She shook her head. “No, I can’t let you do that.”

John took the mop from her. “Do you have something else you could be doing?”

She nodded and looked up at him. She had been handing
out those cups for a few weeks now and hadn’t really paid that much attention to the guys on them, but she paid attention to John now. He was about five inches taller than her; she estimated his height at about six feet. His hair was red, and she imagined that when he was younger he had resembled Peter Taylor. His eyes were brown, although for some reason she had expected them to be green. He was quite attractive.

“Then I’ll mop,” he said, pulling the mop away from her.

She was still staring at him. “Is something wrong?”

“I thought your eyes would be green.” She immediately
clamped her mouth shut
.
Why did I just say that?

John
smiled. “They’re brown.”

“I’ll be ready in a few minutes,”
Chloe said, walking away from him. “You are such an idiot,” she mumbled to herself as she entered the back room.

She pulled out the closing paperwork, but instead of
concentrating on the numbers, she looked up at the security monitor. She could see Johnin the dining room
.
What was h
e
doing here? And why would a big star like him be standing i
n
the middle of the Subway in Cantonholding a mop
?
It was certainly unbelievable. Her heart was palpitating, but she was sure she wasn’t letting her excitement show.

“I wish I had a camera,” she called out.

“Why?”

“Because no one is going to believe that you were here
doing that.”

John
laughed. It was a nice, deep, rich laugh that filled the room and warmed Chloe to her toes. It made John feel good too. It had been a long time since John “if-there’s-a-party-John-is- there” Bernett had genuinely laughed. Sure, around the other guys he laughed and joked and had a good time, but they

were like family. They were family.

But he was so used to putting up a front, being the celebrity that had been portrayed in the media, that it had been a long time since he had been himself. He had almost forgotten who that was. But now here he was in some small mountain town, slinging a mop around in a fast food restaurant. At that moment, he decided that there was no place that he would rather be. It had been a long time, too, since he had slung a mop around. It was often the punishment for the kids in detention at his high school and John had become very familiar with the mop. He mopped his way to the door that lead to the back room. He knocked before opening it. “I’m done.”

Chloe
was sitting on a stool counting money. “Can you just dump the water over there for me?” She pointed to the back corner. John rolled the bucket in that direction and dumped the water into a concrete “sink” with a drain in the floor. Chloe walked up behind him. “Thank you. You really didn’t have to

do that.”

“No problem. So, are you all ready?”

Chloe
nodded. “Yep.” She led him back through the store, stopping to pick up her pocketbook and keys. He followed her to her car. “So what kind of car do you have?”

“It’s a Lexus,” he said. “2000.”

“It’s getting a little old, then, isn’t it?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

He chuckled. “It’s a good car. I like it. Well, it was, and I
did.”

“How many do you have in your fleet?”

“How many to you think?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. I watched this special on E! the
other day about…oh what’s his name…in that other group… Ben something-or-other. Anyway, he has like a dozen cars, and a house on each coast and a ranch in the middle somewhere and all this other stuff.

“Ben
pierce is a prick,” John replied about the celebrity in question. Ben Pierce was a member of Starboys.

“Well, that was certainly the way that he came off, but what
does that have to do with his cars? I thought all you people had lots of stuff like that. So how many do you have?”

“I have the Lexus, and I have a Viper, and I have a Prowler.
That’s it.” He looked at Chloe and could tell by her expression that she thought even the three he had was excessive.

“I hardly ever drive the Prowler,” he added.