The Dead Romantics (61)

I quickly turned my head away from him. Looked toward the foyer, and the colorful moonlight that slipped through the stained glass window.

“It isn’t your fault he’s a dick, Florence,” he said. “You deserve so much better than that fuckhead.”

“Strong language, sir.”

“Do you disagree?”

I turned my head back toward him, the specter sitting so still in the parlor room where I had buried my hopes and dreams beneath the floorboards. “No,” I replied simply, and then I smiled. “You know, you being angry on my behalf is kinda sweet. I wish I’d met you sooner when you were alive.”

He returned the sad smile. “Me, too.”





24





Such a Scream


KEYS JINGLED IN the front door as Mom unlocked it and stepped in. I only took my eyes off Ben for a second as I scrambled to my feet, but when I turned back, he was gone. Disappeared again, though I didn’t know where he went. Mom jumped when she saw me standing in the parlor, and put a hand over her heart.

“Don’t scare me like that. I thought you were your father,” she said.

“Expecting him?”

“Would I be crazy if I said yes?” she ventured with a secretive smile.

I shook my head. “Not at all.”

“Good! I’d hate for my own daughter to think I was crazy,” she said with a laugh, and held out a takeout box from Olive Garden. “Well, since you’re still here, take your Alfredo.”

She handed me my food after I pulled on my coat. “Thanks. I haven’t been here for that long, have I? You guys just left.”

She shrugged. “It was weird without Xavier. We couldn’t stay.”

“Everything is weird without him.”

“Yes, though not sad. Your father wouldn’t want us to be sad.” Then she fixed my scarf and wrapped it once more around my neck. “If you’re on your way out, would you do me a favor and escort your old mother home?” she asked nobly, crooking her arm so that I could take it, and I did.

She was taller than I was, and thin like Alice. They both had dark hair, and when Alice was going through her rebel phase, she would steal dark lacy dresses from Mom’s closet and wear them to school like a real-life Lydia Deetz, though by then I was already in college and well away from Mairmont.

Mom locked the funeral home doors on the way out, and we stepped down into the brisk April night. There was still a chill tucked into the wind, but I could remember the way April warmed so suddenly to summer it was almost a shock. One week there were coats, the next shorts and flip-flops. Maybe tonight was the last cold one, maybe tomorrow, but either way time was passing, slowly ever on, leaving people behind like a flower losing its petals one by one.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Mom began, looking ahead of us. “The occasion I could do without—but I’m glad, nonetheless. Xavier said he’d get you back here one way or the other.”

“I doubt he’d have planned this.”

“Certainly not! But it does suit his style,” she said with a soft laugh. “Oh, he was gone too soon, Florence. Gone much, much too soon.”

“I wish he was still here.”

“I do, too, and I will for the rest of my life.” She squeezed my arm tightly. “But we’re still here, and he’ll be with us long after the wind is gone.”

I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Yeah.”

We passed the ice cream parlor where she and Dad went every weekend when I was little and she was pregnant with Alice. She always craved pistachio ice cream. If I closed my eyes, I could see Dad in the booth by the window with his sundae, feeding Carver with a small plastic spoon. “Here comes the Douglas DC-3 aircraft in for landing! Zzzzzzoom!”

But the parlor was different now, with a new coat of paint, a new owner, new ice cream flavors. However much Mairmont stayed the same, it kept shifting ever so slightly. Just enough for me to feel lost, for my past to feel like another lifetime ago.

“I should’ve come home, Mom. Years ago. I should’ve visited. I should’ve . . .” My voice cracked. I swallowed the knot in my throat. “I can’t remember how many times you tried to convince me. But then you stopped.”

“Trying to change your mind was like trying to lasso the sun,” Mom replied. “You’re stubborn—like your father—and you take everything on your shoulders like he did. Everyone else’s problems. Never his own.”

“But I’m the opposite. I’m selfish. I—I never came home. I should’ve. I never told Dad . . .” That I was a ghostwriter. That I did keep writing novels after I failed, like he wanted me to. That, although in the strangest sense of the word, I’d done exactly what he believed I could do. And he never knew it.

“I hated this town after they chased you out,” she said scornfully.

“They didn’t chase me, I left.”

“Because other people couldn’t stand that a thirteen-year-old did something they could never do.”

“Talk to ghosts?”

“Help people. Listen. Do something so incredibly selfless, you had to leave for it—oh, don’t give me that look.” She added, “You didn’t have to go to the police, but you did. You helped them solve a murder they wouldn’t have otherwise, and then when you told them the truth—it wasn’t your fault they didn’t believe you. For all I care, this entire town can fuck off.”