The Dead Romantics (100)

“Can you . . . see her, too?” I whispered in wonder, looking from him to the elderly woman and back again. She had gardening dirt under her nails, and a content smile.

“Now he can give her lilies himself.”

“You can.” I curled my hands tightly around his jacket. Because he could see them. He was one, and now he could see them, and that meant—

It meant I wasn’t alone.

When I looked back toward the couple, they had already melted into a brilliant flash of sunlight, and Heather walked through the doorway, arguing with her husband about their babysitter, as if nothing had been there at all.

“Would you like to go on a walk? In the graveyard?” he asked, drawing me from my thoughts.

I gave him a surprised look. “You’re asking?”

“It’s not night yet so it’s technically not illegal,” he replied dutifully. “And it’s a bit stuffy in here, and besides, I’d like to see your dad.”

“I’d like that, too.” I laced my fingers through his, and we slipped out of the reception and down the front steps of the old and sure house of death. And life.

Life happened in old funeral homes, too.

The cemetery was warm and quiet in the summer evening. The iron gate was already closed, but we knew the perfect little broken bit of wall to climb over, and we held each other’s champagne as we did. My family had been busy, it seemed, since Dad’s funeral. Almost all of the tombstones were washed, gleaming like bone shards sticking up from the hills of bright green grass.

Dad was waiting for us on his favorite hill in the cemetery, in a nondescript shaded plot close to his favorite old oak tree, easily lost in the sea of stones. His marker was pristine and the weeds plucked out. Mom had put fresh orchids in the vase, and I picked out the spoiled leaves with care. His plaque only had a single word—beloved. Mom said it was because there were so many things Dad had been to so many people—“Beloved son, beloved parent, beloved husband, beloved pain in the ass . . .”—but secretly I knew Mom had requested only that word because it was her word to him. Her soft I love you.

Her beloved.

I brushed a ladybug off the plaque.

It still felt like he was here some days, like the world still turned with him in it. And parts of him still were.

Ben crouched down beside the tombstone, and I let him have some privacy as I followed the path up to the bench under the oak tree and sat down. The night had cooled off, and the wind whispered through the trees, and a murder of crows cawed in the distance. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine Dad sitting beside me like he used to, chatting about rates of flower arrangements and the cost of coffins and Carver’s newest chair he built and Alice’s latest chaos. I breathed in the sweet scent of freshly cut grass.

And things were okay.

Ben came over to sit down beside me after a while.

“So, what did y’all talk about?” I asked.

“This and that,” he replied, rubbing his father’s wedding ring on the chain around his neck. “Told him to give Annie a hello. And a thank-you. If she hadn’t asked you to ghostwrite for her . . .”

“A ghost asking an author to ghostwrite, that has to be a first.” I sighed, and leaned my head against his shoulder.

“What’re you going to do next?” he asked, folding his fingers through mine. He began to rub circles on my thumb knuckle thoughtfully. “You turned in Annie’s last book. Her contract’s up.”

“Well . . .” I debated my answer. I still had to get through line edits of Annie’s book, and copyedits, and pass pages, but those were all things Ben already knew. I also still had to accept Molly’s offer of representation, but I’d do that on Monday. “I think . . . I’m going to write another book.”

“What’ll it be about?”

“Oh, the usual—meet-cutes and high jinks and grave misunderstandings and conciliatory kisses.”

“Will there be a happily ever after?”

“Maybe,” I teased, “if you play your cards right.”

“I’ll be sure not to cheat.”

“Unless it’s to help me win, of course.”

“Always. I’m yours, Florence Day,” he said, and kissed my knuckles.

Those words made my heart soar. “Ardently?”

“Fervently. Zealously. Keenly. Passionately yours.”

“And I’m yours,” I whispered, and kissed him in a cemetery of immaculate tombstones and old oak trees, and it was a good beginning. We were an author of love stories and an editor of romances, weaving a story about a boy who was once a little ghostly and a girl who lived with ghosts.

And maybe, if we were lucky, we’d find a happily ever after, too.





Eccentric Circles


IN THE DAYS Gone Funeral Home, in the back corner of the largest parlor, there was a loose floorboard where I once kept my dreams. I kept them locked tight in a box, storing them like treasure, until the day I could take them out and brush them off, like old friends coming to greet each other.

I didn’t store my dreams in a small box underneath the floorboards anymore. I didn’t need to.

But there was a girl who was a little bit tall and lanky for her age, dark hair and wide eyes, who wrote her dreams on spare pieces of paper and put them in a jar like fireflies, and when she found her mother’s old metal box and its smutty, smutty X-Files fanfic, she decided to store her dreams there, too.