Installment Six
There are two kinds of mornings in my house. The kind where I wake up on my own, and the kind where I wake up because my brain has been reliving a random event usually from high school since three a.m. and finally decided to include me.
This was the second kind.
I'd gone to bed with a number and I woke up with it related somehow to Algebra One and still sitting on my chest like a cat that doesn't like me. Sixty-one. Curtis Fowler died forty years ago at sixty-one, and Walt has been sixty-one since the morning he turned up next to my refrigerator holding a dish towel the size of a coaster in front of his unmentionables. Which I have oddly, just mentioned by calling them unmentionables.
Sometimes my thought processes wore me out.
Two men, one age, and a dead man who swears on whatever he's got left that he never heard the name.
I dragged myself downstairs at six-fifteen sweating through a hot flash that could've proofed bread, and there he was at the kitchen window, right where I'd left him.
"Good morning," Walt said. "It's going to rain Thursday."
"You said that Monday."
"I can’t explain it, but it keeps being Thursday somewhere."
Jake came down in his motorcycle T-shirt, kissed the top of my head, and got to work on his coffee beans with the hand grinder, which is a sound I have learned to hear as affection. He aimed his mug about four feet to the left of Walt. "Morning, Walt."
"He's over there," I said, pointing.
"He knows I mean well." Jake took his coffee to the deck, making it clear his politeness mattered less than his inner peace and caffeine.
I envied that in him.
Mel let herself in through the garage with a pink box and a smile on he face.
"I is a donut situation," she said, "and I mean it." She set the box down, flipped the lid, and fanned her hand over it like she was presenting a car. "Chocolate iced. Two crullers. Whatever that one is. And a blueberry cake for Fran, because she likes to look."
"Ah, Madone." Ma appeared beside the pantry door in her blue robe and floated straight to the box. "Grocery store donuts."
"They're from the good place,” Mel said as if she had actually heard my mother.
"They're from a place,” Ma said. She circled the box like a hawk over a parking lot. "In my day, a donut had some fight in it. You bit it, it bit back. Those look like someone made them while crying over Dark Shadows."
The 70s TV show reference wasn’t lost on me. I grew up watching that with her.
I slid the box toward the fourth stool anyway. Walt drifted over and looked at the donuts, which is politely and from a distance.
"Okay," Mel said, sitting. "Where are we. Because I laid awake thinking about that death notice, and I have concerns."
"Three lines," I said.
"Three lines and no survivors."
"I’m not Curtis Fowler," Walt said.
"He says he's not Curtis Fowler," I told Mel.
"Love that for him,” she said. “But it still doesn't explain the age."
"Nothing explains the age." Walt's hands came apart. "That's what I've been sitting with all night, if sitting is the word. I'm a man with one fact, and the fact belongs to somebody else. Every one of you keeps handing me his coat and telling me to try it on, and it fits, and I still know it doesn’t belong to me." The flecks came off both shoulders faster, and the kitchen temperature dropped enough that Mel pulled her cardigan closed over her sweater.
"Ope," she said to the coffee maker. "Is another one here? I’m suddenly freezing." She caught Jake’s eye on the deck and blew him a kiss.
"He's frustrated," I said. “He firmly states he isn’t Curtis Fowler, and honestly, I believe him.”
"I’m counterfeit," Walt said. "That is the word. Whatever I am, I'm the copy."
Ma had gone quiet by the pantry with her arms folded, that's important, because four days ago my mother would have been on him like a repo man. She'd have said see, and what'd I tell you, and now we're getting somewhere. But nope. She just stood there looking at him with her edges gone thin.
"Ma."
"I'm listening."
"I know. That’s the problem because that's not what you do."
“What? I’m growing. You got a problem with it?” She looked up at the ceiling. “Take it up with the big guy.”
I let it go, which I'm told is growth as well.
Here's the thing about my job, and I do think of it as a job even though nobody's ever paid me for it. When a spirit can't get at something, hammering the front door doesn't work. You have to go around back. I once dealt with a ghost who couldn't tell me her husband's name, but she could easily recite his phone number because her fingers remembered the dial.
I put down my coffee. "Walt. Stop reaching for your name. The harder you try, the further away it feels"
He looked up. "But that's the only thing I want. Knowing that will fill in the blanks."
"Maybe, but stop anyway. Reach for something small instead. Something you'd have done ten thousand times without thinking. Not what you were, but what your hands did."
He was quiet a long moment. "There is something," he said slowly. "It's been there since the diner, and I keep discounting it because I feel like it's nothing. I feel as though I'm turning something. On this finger." He held up his right hand and looked at it. His face morphed into something I can only describe as embarrassment. "It's a habit. It isn't a memory. It's a —"
And then it was there.
A ring. Right where his thumb had been worrying at the air. Gold gone dull and orange the way old gold does, and a dark red stone in the middle with letters running around it in a circle. The band had worn thin on the palm side.
"Son of a beeswax," I said.
"Information," Mel said. "Now."
"He's got a ring on."
"A ring ring? Like a wedding ring?" She stood so fast she knocked her coffee. "Is he married? Is there a widow? Do you know what a widow does to a timeline?"
"It's not a wedding ring." I took my readers off the top of my head, put them on, and leaned across my own kitchen island to squint at the thing. "It's a class ring."
Ma moved so fast the cold doubled.
"Look inside the band," she said.
"Ma."
"Don't Ma me, look inside the band. They engraved them inside, the initials, right on the — your brothers had them for all the sports they did. Spent a week’s worth of salary on each. Would have for you if sports would have been your thing, but you had to read books and watch All My Children.”
As if that dig was necessary.
“My brother’s had them too, and they were more like this. They made 'em out of nothing during the war, hardly any gold in 'em at all, and they still put the initials in." She was practically standing on top of him. "Turn your hand over, Walt."
He turned his hand over. He did it immediately. Four days of my mother calling him a liar and the first time she asked him for something he did it without a word.
I stuck my head so close my breath should have fogged it, if there'd been anything there to fog. The inside of that band was worn as smooth as a river rock. "Nothing," I said. "It's gone. Rubbed right off."
"Crapola," Ma said.
"But the outside,” I said. “There's a name around the stone. P-O-P — Poplar Springs. Poplar Springs High School, and nineteen forty-two."
Mel swiped through her phone before I finished saying it.
I didn't do anything for a second, because the arithmetic was already going and I wanted to be wrong. I took the lid off the donut box, flipped it over, and did it in ballpoint on the cardboard.
Curtis Fowler died forty years ago at sixty-one. That put him born a hundred and one years back. And a boy born a hundred and one years back walks across a stage at seventeen or eighteen in — "Forty-two," I said.
The kitchen chilled enough that the window over the sink fogged from the outside in.
"No," Walt said.
"Walt —"
"That is my ring. I know it's my ring, I can feel the — " he closed his hand around it " — I can feel where it sat. And I’m telling you it doesn’t make me that man."
"I know."
"You don't, though. You're kind and you're patient. You’ve written the number down." He pointed at the donut box lid. The flecks poured off him and vanished before they hit my floor.
"Okay," Mel said, into the quiet, still typing. "Poplar Springs High School. North Georgia. Consolidated into the county system in nineteen sixty-four, building sold, building burned, building's a hayfield now." She scrolled. "There's a Facebook group. Remembering Poplar Springs. Four hundred members, average age deceased, God love them.” She turned the phone around.
Faculty page. Rows of small square photographs, gray and grainy, every man in a dark suit and every woman in a collar buttoned to the chin.
Ma drifted over and stopped like she'd hit a wall. "Ah, Madone. Who is that?"
I read the caption. "Mr. Alton Sosebee. Principal."
"Look at that jaw. Now that’s a strong jaw. They don't grow them like that anymore.”
"She's picked out a principal,” I told Mel.
Mel looked at the picture and made a noise deep in her chest. "Okay, Fran. Okay. I see you. I would also like to be sent to the office."
"Can we not?" I asked.
"Where are the students?" Walt said. He hadn't looked at the principal at all. He was leaning in at the phone with his hands folded again. "There must be students. Someone must have put them on your phone."
“It’s not on the phone. It’s a social media app,” I said.
“A what now?” he asked.
“I’ll explain later.” There weren't any photos of the students. Somebody had scanned four pages in 2016 and probably gotten bored or, God forbid, died.
Mel did a little more research on her phone. "Local history room,” she said, grabbing her keys. "Library in Dahlonega. They've got the whole lot of yearbooks from the school."
* * *
About two hours later, we were there because that’s how we roll when we’re on a mission.
The local history room is up a flight of stairs I had opinions about, and my sciatic nerve hated me for it. There's a clipboard by the door to sign in, so, as a rule follower, I signed in both Mel and me. I opted out of signing in the dead in our group which seemed to offend my mother.
At the far table a man in a windbreaker was working through a stack of microfilm printouts and coughing about every ninety seconds. He never once looked up at us, which was fortunate, because I spent the next hour talking to a shelf.
The Poplar Springs yearbooks were stuffed along the bottom row. 1938. 1939. 1940. 1941. 1943.
I sat back on my heels. "Great. Just great."
"What?" Mel asked.
"Forty-two's not here."
There was a card in the sleeve of the gap where it should have been. Somebody signed it out in 2009 and never brought it back.
"That," my mother said, "is exactly what's wrong with everything. In my day you returned a thing. You returned it because you didn’t want to pay the late fees."
“Your late fees were what? A penny?”
“A penny was worth something back in my day, you know.”
“They’re not even making them anymore,” I said.
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“You heard me. I think it’s stupid.”
“That’s the end of the 99 price I guess. Nothing will be $4.99 or whatever anymore.”
“Sure, it is. You just pay five bucks for it now.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.
“You and me both, Ma. You and me both.” I pulled 1941 instead and carried it to a table.
Here's what I'll tell you about a 1941 yearbook. Every high school in America is the same five people. I know that because I've seen The Breakfast Club upward of forty times, and I sat there looking at boys in 1941 and there they were — the athlete with his chin up, the brain with his glasses slid down, the one in the back row who I'd have bet money got detention for something involving a farm animal. Different haircuts. Same kids. It made me sadder than I expected. "Junior class," I said, and turned the book so Walt could see it.
Six rows. Forty-some faces the size of postage stamps. Underneath, in type so small I had to get my nose down in it, a solid gray block of names. First row, left to right. Forty names in a paragraph, no line breaks.
Walt didn't say anything for a long time.
Then he put one finger on the third row, fourth from the left, and left it there.
"That's me," he said. I looked. A skinny boy with his ears too big for his head and his collar too big for his neck, squinting into the sun, mouth open like the photographer caught him mid-word. "You're sure?"
"I don't remember him." The gold was coming off Walt slow now, settling into the carpet. "I remember having been him."
"Okay." My hands were shaking a little. I put my finger at the start of that block of names and started counting across the first row, out loud, the way you count stitches. "One, two, three — Mel, keep your hand off the page — four, five —"
And Walt made a sound. He'd turned his head to the facing page, where they'd printed the snapshots, four of them crooked on the paper the way somebody would paste them in an album. A basketball. A truck bed. Two boys with a fish. And a girl on the school steps, laughing at whoever was holding the camera, one hand up against the sun. No caption.
The temperature in that room dropped so hard the man in the windbreaker stopped coughing, looked up at the ceiling vent, and put his jacket on.
Walt leaned over that page. I watched a dead man's face come apart in a public library.
"Ruby Nell Cagle," he said.
"Walt." I couldn't get much air behind it. "Who is she?"
"I loved her," he said. "And I left her behind."
My mother kept her mouth shut. Wow. I would have thought she’d be all over that one.
There are two kinds of women in this world. The ones who book their color six weeks out like it's a scheduled maintenance, and the ones who wait until the mirror embarrasses them in front of company. I've been the second kind since 2015 when I first saw the top of my head in the mirror. I never considered the top of my head, but at 5’ 1” and shrinking, I thought it might be appropriate to check it out.
I haven’t been the same since.
Everyone I know is taller than me. Tall enough to see the gray sprouts for God only knew how long and never tell me. I held that against Mel and Jake forever, but neither seemed to care. Mel thought I was just growing old gracefully. She hadn’t realized I lived in a fantasy world where things I couldn’t see didn’t matter. Like the top of the fireplace mantle. I can’t see the dust on it so I forget to dust in. Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get back to my hair.
So, Wednesday morning found me in Kat's chair with a cape snapped around my neck and my roots grown out far enough to have their own zip code. Kat had been doing my hair for a few years, since the woman who had done it before drank herself to death. I felt terrible about that, especially because she hadn’t done a good job in five years and I wanted to break up with her. I hated that she died, but I felt worse for feeling that sense of relief for not having to end our twenty-year relationship.
Kat sectioned my hair with the end of her comb and made a small noise.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You made the noise."
"That wasn't a noise. That was breathing." She started painting. "You've got more gray than last time. I think you should consider coloring it all to match.
My eyes widened at her in the mirror. “You want me to surrender?”
"Sometimes we have to admit defeat," she said, which I chose to hear as a general statement, not personal, because I was going to be sitting in that chair for another two hours and I wanted us to stay friends.
Mel had booked the chair next to me. She wasn't even getting color. She didn’t need it. The woman didn’t have a shiny gray anywhere on her head. She once told me her Asian roots stayed dark because God favored Asians over Italians.
I couldn’t prove or disprove that expect from her hair.
She was getting a trim she'd already had three weeks ago and a cup of the free coffee, which she'd doctored with two of the little creamers and pronounced hotel-adjacent.
"You know what your problem is," she said. "You wait until you're desperate. I go every four weeks whether I need it or not. It's called maintenance."
"I have three times the amount of hair you do. For me, it's called multiple car payments."
"It's called self-respect, Angela."
Ma came through the front window in her blue robe. She stopped in the middle of the salon and turned a slow circle with her arms crossed.
"Sixteen dollars," she said. "That's what a wash and set cost, and the woman gave you a butter cookie while you sat under the dryer. Now look at this place. They've got a chandelier and a candle that costs more than the haircut."
"Times change, Ma."
"Times get expensive. That's not the same as changing." She drifted over and inspected Kat's arms, which are covered wrist to elbow in flowers. "In my day —"
"Don't start," I said.
Kat froze. “Is a ghost here?”
Kat knew of my gift because her great grandmother made a connection a while back.
“My mother’s here. I think she’s going to say something about your tattoos.”
"I'm admiring them," Fran said.
"You are not."
“Pfft,” she said.
Walt stood over by the magazine rack with his hands folded in front of him, taking up no room at all, which breaks my heart a little every time. He'd asked to come. That was new. Two days earlier he wouldn't leave my kitchen, and now he didn't want to be left in it.
"The Weather Channel has forecast the same three days four separate times," he'd told me in the car. "It's going to be rain Thursday."
“Walt, you okay?” I asked.
Mel angled herself toward the shampoo bowls. "Is he here? Where is he? Don't tell me he's near the dryers."
"He's at the magazines."
"Hi, Walt." She waved at a rack of hairspray.
I sighed.
“What? You said—oh, you said magazines. My bad.”
Kat worked her magic because she’d learned to ignore the shenanigans that always came with me and Mel. My mother had been circling Walt since we walked in, and I'd watched her build up to something. I just wasn’t sure what it was.
She finally settled in front of him with her chin up. "You slept on it, right?" she asked. "Give the man his name back, Curtis."
"That isn't my name."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
"So you've got a key to a box that belonged to a man you never heard of, in a town you can't remember, from a life you don't have." Ma flicked her hand. "Explain that to me.”
Walt's shoulders went back. The gold came off him a little faster. "I can't explain it. I've said that from the beginning, yet you look at me like I'm a man selling something out of the back of a car."
"Because you might be."
"Ma."
"What? I'm asking questions. That’s how we solve crimes.”
“We aren’t solving a crime. We’re helping a lost spirit.”
Kat looked at me in the mirror. So did the woman under the next dryer, who moved her purse to the far side of her chair.
Mel leaned toward me whispering, "What's happening? I've got half a conversation and your face doing the thing."
"Ma's after Walt again."
"Ooh." She sat up and pointed the coffee cup at approximately the shampoo bowls. "Fran, you have got to let the man breathe."
"He’s dead. He ain’t breathing," Ma said.
I didn't relay that one. My mother has a filter, and the filter is me. "She says hello," I told Mel.
Mel shook her head. “Right. That’s what she said.”
"A man doesn’t carry a key into eternity because he's sentimental about brass." She was floating an inch off the floor by then, which is what she does when she's building steam. "You forget your neighbors and stuff like your telephone number. You do not forget what you locked up." She pointed at Walt without looking at him. "He didn't lose himself. He put himself somewhere."
Walt went very still. "That's enough," he said quietly. "Madam, I have been called a liar in a kitchen, a diner, a bank, and now a beauty parlor. I am running out of rooms."
My mother crossed her arms. "So, you’re finally admitting it."
"I admit nothing, because I know nothing, and I have said so every single time you’ve asked. I don't know who I am, and outside of your daughter and her friend with horrible direction skiills, I don't have a single person on this earth wondering where I went. All I have left is my word, and you’ve spent four days telling me it's counterfeit."
He walked out through the front window.
I sat there with a head full of foils and dye processing on a timer, but I needed to get to him because I was worried my mother had pushed him too far.
"Kat," I said. "How long do I have?"
"Twenty minutes. Maybe eighteen."
“Be right back.” I got up, still wearing the cape and hurried outside.
He was sitting on the concrete parking block at the end of the row, in front of Mel's SUV, elbows on his knees. I sat down next to him on the curb, which my sciatic nerve filed a formal complaint about, and I ignored it. I also ignored the fact that I wore a plastic cape in a strip mall parking lot. My dignity was already a lost cause.
"You know I have to sit here and be seen talking to nobody," I said.
"You could pretend to be on the phone."
"My phone's inside."
The corner of his mouth moved. Barely. It was the first almost-smile I'd gotten out of him in a while.
"She isn't wrong to wonder," he said. "That's the part I can't get around. If I were her, I'd wonder too."
"Ma isn't wondering. Ma decided, and now she's collecting evidence, which is not the same thing. And trust me, I’ve told her that a million times about a million spirits, and a few high school boyfriends I had, but she was right about them.”
He turned the key over in his hand. "I said that name to myself all night," he said. "Curtis Fowler. Curtis Fowler. Curtis Fowler. I wanted to see if it would open anything." He shook his head. "It doesn't feel like nothing, Angela. That's what's been bothering me. If it were nothing it would go by like a name on a mailbox. It doesn't. When I say it, I get careful."
"Careful how?"
"Careful the way you get when somebody says a name and you don't want your face to do anything." He looked at me. "Why would I have practice at that?"
I didn't have an answer, and I'm not a woman who makes them up. Unless it’s Amazon purchases and my husband’s asking.
We sat there a minute. A car alarm went off two rows over and quit on its own.
"For the record," I said, "I believe you."
"You believe me because you're kind."
"I believe you because I've been doing this a long time. I know a liar when I see one. Liars don’t get tired, Walt, but you do.” I hauled myself up off that curb using the bumper of Mel's car and a prayer. "Come inside. My hair's about to turn a color I’ll regret.”
Mel was out from under the dryer when we came back in, sitting sideways in her chair with her phone six inches from her face and her reading glasses shoved up in her hair, which is where mine live too and which is a subject the two of us have agreed not to discuss.
"Okay," she said. "Sit down."
"I am sitting."
"Sit down more." She turned the phone around. "The county paper digitized their archives in 2011, God bless whatever bored intern did it. I searched Fowler."
The screen showed a scan of a newspaper page, gray and blotchy, the columns crooked the way they always are. She'd zoomed in on the bottom left. A death notice. Three lines. I put on my readers.
FOWLER, Curtis. Age 61. Of Gainesville. Forty years ago, that November, according to the date at the top of the page.
That was it. No cause. No survivors. No services. No beloved anything.
"That's not an obituary," Mel said. "That's a receipt."
I read it twice, and then I did the arithmetic. Miss Alberta's ledger card said box one-fourteen was closed out in person fifty years ago that spring. Contents removed. Key never returned.
Which meant Curtis Fowler had walked into that vault, emptied his box, walked out — and then gone on living for ten more years. Ten years. And at the end of them, he got three lines and nobody's name under his.
"Cheese and rice," I said.
"What?" Mel said.
"He didn't disappear when the box closed. He disappeared after." I looked up. "Mel. When you searched for missing men, what did you search?"
"Missing persons. Recent reports, then older ones. Why?"
"Because nobody files a missing person report on a man the paper already buried."
Mel's mouth came open. "Oh, that's ugly."
Walt was standing behind her, reading over her shoulder, and he hadn't moved in a long time. The gold came off him slowly, drifting down into the swept-up hair on the salon floor and winking out before it landed.
"That isn't my name," he said.
"Walt —"
"It isn't. Fowler is a name on the box, but isn't mine."
"All right."
"You don't believe me."
"I do believe you." I looked back down at that gray, blotchy little block of type. "But I've got a question, and I don't think you're going to like it."
He waited.
"Whose age is that?"
He didn't answer.
Here's the part I hadn't thought about since we stood in that bank lobby where my mother explained the rules of being dead. You don't pack a bag. You wear what you remember wearing. You look the way you remembered yourself at the time of death. That’s what people who die mangled and beaten from say, a car accident, look like that when I see them. It’s only when they accept that wasn’t their final answer, they change.
For Walt, one brown loafer and one bedroom slipper and a cardigan he still can't hold on his left shoulder — Walt built every bit of that out of how he remembers himself.
Which means he built the rest of it, too. The gray at his temples. The soft place under his chin. Those hands he keeps folding in front of him like a man who's spent a long time standing at the back of rooms, taking up no space, hoping nobody asks.
Walt is sixty-one years old. He has been sixty-one since the morning he turned up beside my refrigerator holding a dish towel, because sixty-one is the last shape he had any use for.
"Mel," I said. "How old would you say he is? If you could see him."
"I don't know. Sixty? Grandpa-adjacent. Why?"
"Because the paper says sixty-one."
Mel set her phone face down on the counter. "Okay," she said. "I'm going to need a donut. This has become a donut situation."
"The name is wrong," Walt said.
"I know."
"Then you explain to me why everything else fits,” he said.
I couldn't. That's the trouble with the dead. They ask you the question you were about to ask them.
I waited for my mother to jump on it with both feet. She'd just been handed the whole business gift-wrapped — four days of he's-hiding-something, and here stood a dead man wearing a stranger's age. Ma has never in life or death let a thing like that go by.
But nope. She didn't take it.
She'd come in off the sidewalk sometime while we were reading, and she was hovering by the register with her arms crossed, looking at that phone screen. Her edges had gone thin. Whatever she was doing behind her face, it wasn't suspicion. I've been on the receiving end of my mother's suspicion my whole life and I know it like I know my own soul.
This was closer to scared.
"Ma?"
"I'm thinking," she said.
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true." She said it without any snap at all, which frightened me more than anything else that happened in that salon. She floated forward until she was in front of Walt, and she looked up at him, and I braced myself for it — the whole, you listen to me, mister, or don't play stupid with me, or any of the forty things my mother says before she says the real one.
She started to, but she only got as far as opening her mouth. Then she closed it, and she started over. "Maybe you had another life. Or lived as someone else.”
Unknown Entities
Installment Four: The Key
There are sentences you never expect to hear over a slice of peach pie, and “I think I died here” sits right at the top of the list.
I set my fork down. Carefully, because the pie was good and I wasn’t finished with it, but some things take priority.
“Walt,” I said, behind my hand. “What do you mean, you died here?”
Mel choked on her sweet tea. “Died? Who died? Is this actually the Murder Diner? Because I was kidding.”
“Nobody died,” I said, then corrected myself. “Well. Walt died. But we knew that.”
“He died here?” Mel’s whisper could have seated the next four tables. She looked around the diner like she thought everyone murdered the ghost.
Walt stood in the aisle with both hands pressed flat against his cardigan, staring at the counter. Then he moved down the row of stools and stopped at the third one from the register. The one with duct tape on the seat, the silver gone gray with age.
He sat down on it. Sat. Not hovered. Weird.
His elbows pressed onto the counter, his shoulders settled, and the whole scene folded into place like it had been waiting for him to show up and finish his coffee.
“This was mine,” he said quietly. “This seat. I don’t remember sitting here. I remember having sat here. Does that make any sense?”
“None of this makes sense, Walt. Keep going anyway.”
Ma had drifted down from the pie case without a sound, which she’d been doing a lot lately, and it unnerved me more than I wanted to admit. My mother has never gone anywhere quietly, alive or dead. She hung back by the register, arms crossed, watching Walt on that stool with an expression I couldn’t read. On Ma, an expression I can’t read is rarer than a compliment.
“Ma? You want to weigh in?” I couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t. Even when I asked her to stay quiet.
“I’m thinking.”
“You can do both. You’ve done both my whole life.”
She didn’t answer.
I picked up my phone and held it to my ear, because the two men in the corner booth had started watching me talk to a counter stool, and I’ve learned it’s easier to look rude than crazy. “Walt. You said you died here.”
Walt was quiet for a moment. The gold flecks slid off his shoulders and vanished into the checkerboard floor.
“Not died,” he said finally. “That was the wrong word. I’m sorry. It’s more —” he wobbled his hand, that gesture he does when he’s trying to find the words “— the last night of my life started on this stool. I just don’t know how or where it ended. But it started here, with a cup of coffee that tasted a little burnt. Funny, I didn’t know it was my last one.” He looked down at the counter. “You go your whole life not knowing which cup is the last one.”
“Madone,” Ma said.
Brandi came back around with the coffeepot and the check, and that’s when Walt did the most human thing I’ve seen a ghost do in all my years of seeing ghosts. He reached for his pocket. It was pure reflex. A man’s check arrives, he reaches for his wallet. That habit outlives the body it came in, apparently. It should have been sad, and it was, right up until Walt froze with his hand halfway into his trouser pocket and a look on his face like he’d just had an epiphany.
“Angela,” he said. “There’s something in my pocket.”
“Dead people don’t carry things with them,” Ma snapped, and the speed of it told me she’d been more rattled than she was letting on. “Pockets are for the living. It’s one of the rules.”
“He’s wearing trousers, Ma. Trousers come with pockets.”
“He made the trousers. Out of nothing. You don’t get to make a pocket and then act surprised there’s something in it.”
Except that was the case. Even Ma went quiet when Walt pulled his hand out.
With a key in his hand.
It was old brass, the flat kind with an oval head, the teeth gone dark at the edges. It shimmered the way Walt’s cardigan shimmered — there but not there, gold flecks caught in it like dust in a sunbeam. A ghost key. In a ghost pocket. Held up by a ghost, over a slice of very real peach pie.
“What’s happening?” Mel asked. “Your face. It’s shocked. I need information.”
“Walt found a key in his pocket.”
“Ghosts have stuff in their pockets?”
“That’s what I said,” Ma told her, which of course Mel didn’t hear.
“Ma agrees with you.” I leaned across the table and squinted. Then I sighed, took my reading glasses off the top of my head, put them on, and leaned forward again, because apparently I’ve reached the stage of life where I need readers to examine things that don’t technically exist. The two men in the corner booth got their money’s worth watching me inspect a spot of empty air from four inches away.
There was stamping on the head of the key. Worn, but I could make it out. “Guardian Safe Deposit Company,” I read. “And under it, a number. One fourteen.”
Mel already had her phone out. She can’t see a ghost standing three feet in front of her, but give that woman a clue and she becomes the FBI. “Guardian Safe Deposit,” she muttered, typing. “Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Private vault company. Gainesville. Went under in the eighties.” She scrolled. “Says here the boxes and the records got absorbed by North Georgia Savings and Trust. Which still exists. Which is —” she turned the phone around like she was revealing a prize on a game show “— twenty-five minutes from here.”
Walt stared at the key in his palm. “Why do I have this?”
“Because it mattered,” Ma said. “Think about it. Why would it matter to you? Were you rich? If you figure out why it mattered, then we can figure out the rest.”
We all looked at her. Well, Walt and I did. Mel looked at the napkin dispenser, which was close enough.
“Or we could just go to the bank,” I said.
“Maybe, but the universe does what it does for a reason,” she said, and for once there was no lecture in it, just fact, delivered the way she used to tell me the oven was hot. “Whatever you’re wearing when you show up, whatever’s in your pockets — you didn’t pack a bag, capisce? You made yourself out of how you remember you. He can’t imagine himself without that key. I’m guessin’ he carried it a long time.” She looked at Walt, and something in her jaw set. “The question is why. What does a man hold onto a key for, God knows how long, and into eternity? Especially if the box is done with him.”
“We don’t know the box is done with him,” I said.
“Not yet, we don’t.”
Brandi boxed up the rest of the peach pie at Mel’s request — “for research,” Mel told her.
Somebody dropped a quarter into the jukebox and Journey came on, insisting we don’t stop believing, which felt either encouraging or sarcastic depending on how you looked at it. I chose encouraging. I’m a glass-half-full woman when there’s pie.
The drive to Gainesville took twenty-five minutes, most of which my sciatic nerve spent explaining what it thought of the Starlite’s booth benches. Walt sat in the back with the key cupped in both hands, protecting it from who knew.
Ma hovered beside him and criticized my driving. “You merge like you’re apologizing,” she said.
“I merge like a person who wants to live. You don’t have skin in this game anymore. Literally.”
From the looks of it, North Georgia Savings and Trust had been recently renovated. Blond wood. A coffee machine with buttons. A teal accent wall. Nothing like a bank in my opinion, but they hadn’t asked me.
“In my day, a bank looked like a bank,” Ma announced, drifting through the door I was holding open for no visible person. “Marble. Bars on the teller windows. A man named Sal who knew your whole family. This looks like a frozen yogurt shop.”
A young man walked around the welcome desk wearing a lavender dress shirt and a beard that looked like he spent all day dragging his hands down it until it molded into a point at the tip. His name tag said Hunter.
Ma took one look and made her teakettle noise. “He’s a looker. Not many of them these days. No one looks like Rock Hudson anymore.”
Which was a good thing since the man was dead. I hated to think what he looked like in his grave, but I did anyway, because I’m oddly literal at times.
“Welcome in,” Hunter said. “What can we help y’all with today?”
“Hi.” I gave him my best committee-volunteer smile. “This is going to be a strange one. I’m helping settle some old family business, and we’ve come across a key to a safe deposit box. The thing is, it’s not from this bank exactly. It’s from a company called Guardian Safe Deposit, and we were told your bank took over their —”
“Records and holdings,” Mel said, stepping up beside me. “We’re aware this is an unusual request. We’re prepared to be flexible.” She used her business voice, the one she saves for returns without receipts at Macy’s.
“She’s my associate,” I said.
Hunter typed for a while and then he shook his head. “Yeah, so, our system only goes back to 2003? Anything Guardian would be, like, pre-me.” He leaned back and hollered toward a partition. “Miss Alberta!”
Miss Alberta came out from behind the partition looking like she’d been at that bank since the revolutionary war and honestly, thank God for that. When you want an old key looked into, you don’t want a Hunter. You want a Miss Alberta.
“Guardian,” she said, and pulled her chained glasses up onto her nose, which made me feel a real kinship with her. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. My daddy kept a box with Guardian.” She held out her hand for the key. I gave her the number, and she disappeared into the back long enough for Mel to eat a complimentary peppermint, for Ma to inspect and critique the teal wall, and for Walt to stand in the middle of that lobby holding his hands together and breathing deep breaths.
Miss Alberta returned carrying a long gray card from a ledger.
“Box one-fourteen,” she said. “You’re lucky. When Guardian shut down, somebody had the good sense to keep the registry cards.” She set it on the counter and ran her finger along it. “Opened in fifty-eight. Rent paid annually, cash, in person. And closed —” her finger stopped “— fifty years ago this past spring. In person. Contents removed, box surrendered, key never returned.” She looked up over her glasses. “Which would explain your key, I suppose.”
“Fifty years,” I said. Behind me the cold sharpened, and I didn’t have to turn around to know Ma had gone very still.
“Whose box was it?” Mel asked. “Is there a name?”
“There’s always a name, honey.” Miss Alberta turned the card around so we could see the line, written in the kind of fountain-pen cursive nobody’s hand makes anymore.
Curtis Fowler.
I looked at Walt. Walt looked at the name. For a second, nothing happened — no flecks, no shimmer, no flicker in the cardigan. He just read it like it meant nothing to him.
And then everything happened. The gold came off his shoulders in a rush, the key trembled in his hand, and the temperature in that frozen-yogurt-style lobby dropped so fast Hunter looked up at the air conditioning vent and frowned.
“Does that name mean anything to you?” I asked quietly, phone at my ear, associate voice, very normal customer.
“No,” Walt said. “I’ve never heard it. I’d swear that on whatever I’ve got left to swear on.”
He looked at me, and underneath all that politeness was something I hadn’t seen in him before. Not confusion or grief, but something with sharp edges that unsettled him.
“I don’t know my name or my face or who’s supposed to be missing me. But I know it the way I knew the peach pie, the way I knew that stool…” the flecks poured off him now, winking out against the blond wood floor “I’m not Curtis Fowler, and whoever he was…”
He closed his hand around the key. “I don’t think I liked him.”
The problem, of course, was sitting right there because the only thing Walt had carried out of his entire life was that key.
And the key belonged to someone named Curtis Fowler.
My mother stayed gone almost two days, which in Fran time is a sabbatical.
She shimmered back into my kitchen Thursday morning while I was elbow-deep in the junk drawer hunting for my spare reading glasses, because my regular pair had wandered off the way things do once you hit your fifties and function like a robot with broken everything.
"They're on your head," Ma said.
I felt the top of my head. They were, in fact, on my head. "I knew that."
"Sure, you did."
I shut the drawer and gave her the once-over. Same blue robe. Same crossed arms. Same expression she wore when she knew something and had decided, against every natural law governing my mother, not to share it.
Which I thought incredibly rude. "Well?"
"Well, what?"
"You said you'd be back. You've been back eleven seconds, and you haven't said one word about where you went or what you found."
"I had business."
“Yes, I know you had business. I’m asking what that business was.”
"Celestial business." She floated over to her spot above the fourth stool. "And before you start with me, no. I'm not saying anything until I'm sure, and I'm not sure yet.”
“That’s almost as annoying as you shimmering in and out of here without invitation.”
“That’s not rude. That’s effective parenting.”
“I’m over fifty. You don’t need to parent me anymore, Ma.”
“You’re still my baby.”
I sipped my coffee. “Of course, I am. So, what did you find out?”
“You want me to ruin a man's afterlife on a maybe?"
Walt drifted in from the family room, where he'd spent two days watching the Weather Channel because he claimed the forecasts soothed him. He stopped when he saw Ma, and the hope on his face just about broke me. "Did you learn anything?" he asked. "About me?"
"I learned plenty about plenty," Ma said. "None of it ready for company."
The gold flecks slid off his shoulders a little faster, and he went back to the window without another word, which somehow was worse than if he'd argued.
That's where things stood when Mel let herself in through the garage at eleven-thirty, car keys in hand, sunglasses pushed up in her hair. "Get dressed. We're going to lunch. You've been trapped in this house with dead people for three days, and no offense to the dead people, but you're starting to talk like a hostage."
"I'm dressed."
She looked at my leggings. "You're covered. There's a difference. Go put on real pants. I'll wait."
"Can I come?" Walt asked.
I relayed the question.
Mel froze halfway onto a stool. "He can leave the house?"
"I don't know. Walt, can you leave the house?"
"I don't know either," he said. "I haven't tried. I've been afraid that if I walk out that door, I'll just — " he wobbled his hand, " — come apart. Like fog, but I feel it might work if you’re there."
“I can’t promise that,” I said.
"You won't come apart," Ma said from the ceiling. "Madone. It's not that kind of dead. You hold yourself together the same way you put on that hideous cardigan. You decide to." She sniffed. "Took me a week to figure that out and nobody helped me, by the way. I had to learn celestial travel alone, like a pioneer.
“You glued yourself to me from the second you died,” I said. “And haven’t left since.” That might have been an exaggeration, but I reserved that right as a 35ish percent Italian.
"I was learning."
And that is how I ended up driving to lunch with my best friend in the passenger seat, my dead mother floating somewhere above the console, and a ghost with one slipper sitting very politely in the back of my car, both hands folded in his lap like he was on his way to church. And not for his funeral.
Mel lasted a mile before she started squirming. "Is he behind me? He's behind me, isn't he? Something's doing something to my neck."
"He's behind Ma. Nobody's doing anything to your neck."
"Then why does it itch?”
“Bed bugs,” Ma said.
I snorted.
“What?” Mel asked.
“Ma said it was her, but she’s stopped now,” I lied.
Mel stopped rubbing her neck. “It’s cold in here. Can we kick on the heat?”
For once I didn't mind the cold. I'd had a hot flash brewing since breakfast, and riding around with two ghosts turns out to be cheaper than running the air conditioning at full blast. Menopause has taught me to take my victories where I find them.
The plan was the new cafe on the square in Dahlonega, the one Mel had been talking about for two weeks because it served something called a deconstructed avocado toast, which as far as I can tell is regular avocado toast with the price rearranged.
We never made it.
We came around the square, past the antique mall and the fudge shop, and Walt made a sound I'd never heard a ghost make. Low, like the air going out of something.
"Stop the car."
"What?"
"Stop the car. Please. Angela, stop the car."
I pulled into a spot in front of a squat brick building with a sun-bleached sign shaped like a coffee cup. THE STARLITE DINER. FINE FOOD SINCE 1954. Half the neon was burned out, so at night it probably said something like TAR DINE, but at noon it just looked tired and stubborn, like I felt when I forgot my estrogen.
Walt hurried out of the car. He didn't bother opening the door. He just floated straight through it and stood on the sidewalk staring up at that sign with his mouth open.
"What's happening?" Mel asked. "Why are we at the Murder Diner? I was promised deconstructed toast."
"Walt's — hang on." I got out. "Walt?"
"I don't know," he said quietly. "I saw the sign and something turned over in my chest. Which is ridiculous, because I don't have a chest. Not a working one." He looked at me as the gold flecks came off him like dust off a shook rug. "Can we go in? I need to go in."
Ma drifted up beside him and studied the sign. "The Starlite," she said. "Hmph."
"Does it mean something to you, Ma?"
"It means they should fix their sign."
Inside, a bell over the door announced us, and the smell hit before the hostess did. Coffee that had been sitting on the burner a hair too long, bacon grease, and fifty years of pie. Booths with duct tape on the corners lined the windows. A pie case by the register with only two pies, one some form of berry and the other, pumpkin, turned slow. A jukebox sat against the far wall, the real kind, all chrome and colored light.
Walt stopped dead in the middle of the aisle. Okay, that was a poor choice of words, but you know what I mean.
"That smell," he said. “I know it.”
"It's coffee, Walt. You've been standing next to my coffee maker for three days."
"No." He shook his head slowly. "Not coffee. This coffee. Scorched on the bottom of the pot. I know this coffee, Angela. I know it like I know — " He stopped, because he couldn't finish the sentence. He didn't know anything like he knew anything. That was the whole problem.
A waitress young enough to be my daughter seated us in a booth by the window. She had a full sleeve of tattoos, roses and koi fish all the way down to her wrist, and a name tag that said BRANDI.
Ma took one look and made her teakettle noise. "In my day you got one tattoo, and you got it because you were young and stupid and somebody dared you, and then you spent the rest of your life keeping it covered in front of your mother. Now they wear the whole funny pages."
“No one really got tattoos in your day,” I said.
“I was being kind.”
“Really? That’s new, but you do realize the only clue we have is a tattoo," I said, low, behind my menu.
"That's different."
"How is it different?"
"Because in my day," Ma said, and then she stopped. Just stopped, mid-sermon, with her mouth still open. Her eyes had gone to Walt's shoulder, and for a second the shimmer went out of her edges. Then she caught me watching and cranked her chin back up. "In my day a tattoo meant something. Maybe they were few and far between, but people got ‘em. That's all I'm saying."
It wasn’t all she was saying. It was all she was willing to say, which with my mother are two very different animals.
I put on my reading glasses to look at the menu, because apparently, I now need them for anything printed smaller than a billboard. Mel ordered like a woman who had given up on deconstructed toast and decided to have a real lunch out of spite. Patty melt. Onion rings. Sweet tea.
"And a slice of pie for the table," I added, because Ma was hovering over the pie case making demands. She can't eat it. She likes to look at it. We've all made our peace with the arrangement.
"Cherry or peach?" Brandi asked. “We have peach in back and cherry in the case.”
"Peach," Walt said.
He said it instantly, before I could open my mouth, the way you answer a question you've answered a thousand times. Then he heard himself, and his whole face changed.
"Peach," I told Brandi, and when she'd gone, I leaned toward the empty side of the booth and did the trick where I hold my phone to my ear so the other customers think I'm on a call instead of interrogating the upholstery. Even though Mel sat beside me. "Walt. How did you know they'd have peach?"
"I don't know." He was standing at the end of our table, turning in a slow circle, taking in the counter stools, the pie case, the register. "I don't know how I knew. It just came out. Like the coffee. Like — "
Somebody at the counter fed a quarter to the jukebox, and Air Supply came on. All Out of Love, which under normal circumstances I consider a public service, because I’m Gen X and some things imprint for life.
Walt flinched like he'd been slapped.
"Turn it off," he said. "Please. Can somebody turn that off?"
"It's a jukebox, Walt. I can't un-play it."
"Then I'll wait outside. No. No, I don't want to wait outside." He pressed two fingers to his temple, hard, the way he did the first morning. "It's the song. It's not the song, it's — there's something behind the song and I can't see it. It's like a word on the tip of your tongue, except it's everything. It's all of it." The gold flecks were coming off both shoulders now, fast, winking out before they hit the checkerboard floor. "Why can I remember that this coffee tastes burnt and not remember my own mother's face?"
"Memory lives in the nose," Ma said. She'd come down from the pie case without a sound, and her voice was gentler than she'd ever admit to. "The nose and the ears. Ask anybody dead. The names go first. The smells stay till the end."
Mel had gone still with an onion ring halfway to her mouth, watching me talk to air, reading my face the way she's learned to do after all these years. "What's happening? Is he okay?"
"He's remembering the pie," I said.
"That's good, right? Pie memories are good memories. Nobody ever got murdered over pie." She thought about it. "Okay, somebody probably has. But statistically."
Brandi came back and slid the peach pie into the middle of the table, one slice, one fork, steam still rising off it because at the Starlite they warm it whether you ask or not, which told me everything I needed to know about the place.
I loved it, and I’d return for the pie. Repeately, most likely.
Walt leaned over that pie like a grandfather leaning over a crib. nHe didn't say anything for a long moment. The jukebox sang about being all out of love. The gold flecks drifted down and disappeared into the crust, and Ma watched him with an expression I couldn't name, and my coffee sat there getting cold from all the company.
"Walt?” I exhaled. “Talk to me."
"I think I used to come here. No, I think I died here."
By the next morning, Walt was still in my kitchen, and I was still fifty-something and falling apart at the seams with a ghost I had no idea how to help.
Just peachy.
I hadn't slept much. A dead man hanging out at my house is, honestly, less disruptive than my own left hip, which had spent the night filing complaints with my brain. That and Jake snoring beside me like a Harley that wouldn't quite turn over did me in. Somewhere around three I threw off the covers, dragged them back on, sweated through a hot flash that could've steamed a tamale, and finally gave up around five-thirty. When I came downstairs, Walt was standing in the same place as the morning before, looking out the dark window.
“Rough night? I asked.
"I didn't sleep," he said. "I lay down on your sofa out of habit and remembered I no longer have the equipment for it." He turned. The gold flecks drifted off his shoulder, settled, then shimmered to nothing.. "I kept thinking about what I said yesterday.”
“Remind me what you said, please. I’m tired and haven’t had my coffee.”
“That I might have been somebody else. I'd like to take it back, if that's allowed. It sounds insane after thinking about it for — how long has it been?”
"Walt, I see dead people. Nothing’s insane to me anymore."
I made coffee, which is the real reason I get up, and added the cheap creamer again. I’d gone to straight black coffee for a while, but I hated it. Okay, I didn’t exactly hate it, but I didn’t quite like it either, and coffee is meant to be liked.
Right on cue, the pantry door breathed open and Ma drifted through in her blue robe, already mid-sentence. "That creamer is an insult to the cow that died for it."
I rolled my eyes. "Cows don't die for creamer, Ma. Or milk. They die for the steak you loved so much when you were alive."
"I’m willing to be in trouble with the animal people for a good steak.” She floated to the island, gave Walt a long up-and-down, and sniffed. "Still one slipper, I see."
Walt looked down at his mismatched feet. "I'm focusing on the larger questions."
"Hmph."
Jake came down in his motorcycle T-shirt, kissed the top of my head, and went straight for the good beans he keeps in the ‘fridge. He grinds them by hand, because my husband considers pre-ground coffee a personal failing as a coffee connoisseur. "Morning," he said. "We still have a houseguest?"
"Yep. By the fridge."
Jake lifted his mug an inch in Walt's general direction, which is more than Mel ever manages. "Morning, Walt." He's never been able to see ghosts either, but he's lived with me long enough to aim politely. He turned his head toward me before grinding his fancy beans. "You good, babe? You've got your figuring-it-out face."
"Just peachy. I’ve got a dead man with no name, and a missing body. The usual."
"Sounds about right." He kissed my head again, finished making his caffeinated masterpiece and took it to the deck. Jake's real gift is knowing which problems are his and which ones come with gold flecks. He stays away from the gold-flecked kind.
Mel let herself in through the garage before I'd finished my first cup, this time with a laptop under one arm and a white bag in the other hand. She never comes empty-handed. It's the one rule she has. "Okay." She dropped the bag on the island. "Croissants. And I'm close to find your dead guy on the internet, because that's what I do at two in the morning when I can't sleep. I solve crimes nobody asked me to solve." She felt the cold, stopped, and squinted hard at the coffee maker. "Morning, Walt."
Walt stood by the refrigerator. "She's three feet off again," he said gently.
"He says good morning," I told her. "And you're talking to the Cuisinart. He’s by the fridge."
"Oh, whoops." She faced the refrigerator. “Hi.” Without waiting for a reply she wouldn’t hear anyway, she sat at the counter, opened the laptop, and cracked her knuckles. "Alright. I'm basically Egon now, minus the charm and the federal funding. Missing men. Let's do this."
Mel types faster than anyone I know, and she’s not afraid to make a phone call in a voice that will ger her answers. I handle the talking-to-dead-people part, and Mel handles the part that involves Wi-Fi.
"Tell me everything," she said.
"He's around sixty. Gray hair, cardigan, polite. Doesn't know his name. Knows he's dead, knows his body's missing, knows somebody should be looking for him."
Mel typed. "Missing man, sixty, north Georgia." She scrolled. Scrolled more. Her face did something I didn't like. "Huh."
"Huh what?"
"Huh nothing. That's the problem. There's no recent missing-persons report for a man his age. Not in the county or state databases.” She pounded her fingers on the keys. “Not anything on local news Facebook group pages either." She tried three more searches. Her lips moved as she typed. "No news reports. No silver alerts. No nothing. Walt, buddy, it's like you never even existed."
"Type his face," Ma said, leaning over Mel's shoulder, fascinated and appalled at once. "You can type a face into that thing now, can't you? I've seen it. The phones know your face better than your own husband does."
"You can, sort of," I said. "But we don't have a photo of a ghost, Ma."
"In my day we had a thing called asking around. You'd go to the butcher. The butcher knew everybody and everybody else’s business." She squinted at the screen. "What's she doing now? Why is it all blue?"
"It's Facebook. That’s their color."
"It looks like a hospital."
"Think harder," she said to Walt as she drifted back from the screen. "A man doesn't just misplace himself. Who you are is stuck in there somewhere." She pointed to his head. “Dig it out.” She flicked her hand the way Italians do. “Or you’re messin’ with us for attention.”
"I do not want the attention," Walt said. For the first time there was an edge under the manners. "I’d give anything to be myself, as boring as I worry that might be. I’d love to be the man who paid his electric bill and watered his ferns and was missed by absolutely nobody of consequence. But I’m telling you the truth. And I just don’t get it. Somebody, somewhere, should have noticed I’m gone. But that computer proves they didn't." He pressed two fingers to his temple, the way he had the morning before. "Why didn't they notice? Who am I that I don’t matter to anyone?"
"Walt." I set my cup down. "We'll figure it out."
"You keep saying that." The gold flecks spilled faster off both shoulders. "Forgive me, but everyone in this kitchen thinks I'm either lying or performing, and I can't defend myself, because I don't know the truth either. I'm arguing a case with no evidence and no memory of the crime."
Ma opened her mouth. I gave her the look that has worked on two children and one husband, and sometimes, if I’m lucky, Mel.
“Why the look?” she asked.
“Because I know you. Please, either help or shimmer away.”
She floated up to the ceiling with her arms crossed, but she didn't leave or stop watching him.
Mel pushed the croissant bag toward the empty stool. "Okay, new plan. We can't find you by your name. So let's find you by your parts. Is there anything different about you? Identifying scars, maybe? Glasses? A face only a mother could love?"
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.” I looked Walt over properly, and then, because being dead apparently comes with a loose grip on your own buttons, the cardigan flickered. Just for a second the whole left side went see-through, and underneath, on the curve of his shoulder, I saw ink.
"Walt. Hold still. You've got a tattoo."
He twisted to look but couldn't. "I have a what?"
"A tattoo. Left shoulder. Hang on." The cardigan shimmered back into place. "Take the cardigan off your shoulder.”
He sighed, scrunched up his face, and the cardigan dissolved from the left side. There it was. Old ink, faded to the blue-green of a ballpoint pen nearly dried. It wasn’t a modern tattoo or anything a kid would get today. It was a small bird with its wings half-spread, and two letters tucked underneath that had blurred into the skin so badly I couldn't read them.
"What is it?" Mel asked. She hovered over the laptop. "Describe it, and I'll search for it."
"A bird. Little one, wings out. Letters under it, but they're gone to mush." I looked up at him. "Does this mean anything to you?"
Walt stared down at his own shoulder like it belonged to a stranger. "No," he said quietly. "Nothing." He tried to touch the spot and his fingers passed straight through it. "It's mine. It's on me. And it means nothing to me at all. Do you have any idea how that feels?"
"Bird tattoo, faded, vintage," Mel muttered, typing. "Old-style bird shoulder tattoo." She scrolled. "Swallows, sparrows, doves, a thousand Pinterest boards. This is a needle in a haystack, and the haystack's made of needles." She sat back. “Fran, why couldn’t you come from a line of witches instead of mediums? We could cast a recognizing spell be done with this.”
“Don’t get me started on the witches,” Ma said.
I blinked. “We’re not having that conversation again.” She’d once almost convinced me that the witches we read about in fiction are real, but I stopped right at that door and turned the heck around as fast as I could. Ghosts were one thing, but witches? Well above my pay grade.
“Whoever you were, Walt,” Mel said, “you didn't leave a footprint. No report, no record, nothing.”
I looked up. Ma had come down without a sound. I hadn't even seen her move. She was floating an inch from Walt's bare shoulder, close enough that the cold doubled and my coffee quit steaming. The shimmer had drained right out of her edges. She wasn't doing the celestial-super-sleuth squint. This was something else. Something bothered her. "Ma?"
She didn't answer.
" What is it?"
"That mark." Her voice came out small, and small is a word I have never once used to reference anything about my mother. "I know that mark, Angela." She lifted a transparent hand toward the little faded bird and stopped just short of it. "I haven't seen ink like that in fifty years. Madone.” She looked at me. "I knew somebody once who had that exact bird. On that exact shoulder."
Walt froze.
"Who?" I asked.
But Ma had already drifted back, shaking her head, pulling the words in behind her teeth. "No. No, I won't say it out loud. Not until I'm sure. You don't say a name like that out loud until you're sure."
And for the second time in two days, my mother, who has never in life or death met a thought she could keep to herself, closed her mouth and would not open it. “What? Seriously?”
“I’ll be back.” She shimmered away.
I leaned onto my kitchen counter and sighed. “Well, crap.”
THE GHOST WHO LOST HIS BODY
A Midlife Psychic Medium Newsletter Serial
Chapter One: The Naked Ghost
The thing about being a psychic medium is that it doesn’t keep business hours.
I was up before six because my sciatic nerve had opinions about the way I’d slept, and because somewhere around four a.m. I’d had a hot flash that could’ve thawed a Thanksgiving turkey, and once I’m up, I’m up. So I did what any reasonable fifty-something woman does when her body betrays her when it should be recovering. I went downstairs to make coffee and feel sorry for myself in private.
I got the coffee part right.
The privacy part fell apart the second I flicked on the kitchen light and found a naked man standing next to my refrigerator.
Now, I want to be clear. I have seen a lot of things in this kitchen. I’ve seen my mother float through the pantry door uninvited. I’ve seen Jake make a pancake shaped like something I won’t describe before the second cup of coffee. But a strange, undressed man by the Whirlpool at six in the morning was new, so I did what came naturally, which was scream a word my children are not allowed to hear. Even though they’re adults.
The man screamed too. Then he grabbed the dish rag off my oven handle and held it in front of himself, which would’ve been gallant if the towel weren’t the size of a cocktail napkin. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so terribly sorry. I don’t — I didn’t mean — oh, this is mortifying.”
That’s when I noticed the cold. The whole kitchen had dropped about fifteen degrees, the hair on my arms stood at attention, and a few flecks of gold drifted off the man’s shoulder then winked out before they reached the floor.
Dead. Of course he was dead. The living ones at least knock. Unless it’s Mel who hasn’t knocked since God created the heavens and the earth.
“Oh, my.” I pressed my hand to my chest to keep my heart where it belonged. “You scared the life out of me.”
“I scared the —” He stopped and looked down at himself, then back up at me with the kind of horror I had grown to expect from a ghost who didn’t know they were dead. “Why am I not wearing anything?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Madam, I would never. I am a gentleman.” He clutched the dish towel tighter and turned a delicate shade of see-through. “At least, I believe I am. I — please give me a moment.”
And then, I swear on my reading glasses, he scrunched up his face and clothes shimmered onto him, a piece at a time. A cardigan. Brown trousers. One brown loafer and one bedroom slipper, which I related to on a serious level. He looked down at his mismatched feet and sighed.
“Better?” he asked.
“Love the slipper.”
He shrugged. “I’ll keep working on it.”
I should’ve been more rattled than I was. But there’s something about a dead man apologizing for his nudity in a cardigan and a bedroom slipper that takes the fear right out of a situation. I poured my coffee, added too much of the cheap creamer my mother hates, and leaned against the counter. “Okay. Let’s make this simple. I’m Angela Panther, and I can see you because I have a gift. Though honestly, it’s not always a gift in my opinion. What’s your name?”
The man opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His face scrunched up again, harder this time, and the gold flecks flickered at his shoulders.
“I don’t — ” He pressed two fingers to his temple. “That’s strange. That’s very strange. I know it’s in here. I can feel the shape of it. It’s like reaching into your coat pocket for your keys and finding someone’s cut the bottom out.”
“You don’t know your name?”
“Apparently, I do not.” He said it slowly, the way you’d confess something to a doctor. “But I know three things. I know I’m dead. I know my body is — ” he wobbled his hand in the air, searching, “ — missing. Somewhere. I don’t know how I know that, but I do. I think that’s why I’m here. It isn’t where it ought to be. And I know that somewhere out there, somebody should be looking for me. Somebody should have noticed I was gone.”
He said that last part so quietly that I forgot, for a second, to be put out about my morning.
That, naturally, is when my mother showed up.
“Ah, Madone, who’s this one?” Ma drifted in through the pantry door in her floor-length blue robe, took one look at the man, and folded her transparent arms across her chest. “And why’s he in my kitchen?”
“It’s my kitchen, Ma.”
“You keep thinkin’ that.” She floated a slow circle around the man, head to toe, like a customs agent who already doesn’t like what’s in your suitcase. He stood very still and let her, which I respected. “Hmph. Cardigan. One slipper. Where’s the other slipper?”
“He’s working on it,” I said.
“He’s lying.”
“How would you know? He hasn’t said anything with you here yet.”
“I can tell.” She drifted closer to him, narrowed her eyes, and then — this is the part that stuck with me — she stopped. Just stopped mid-float. The shimmer left her edges for a second. Something crossed her face, and on my mother, that was as good as an alarm bell.
“Ma?” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.” She snapped back to herself so fast I almost believed her. “I’m a celestial being. I’m always okay. I’m just telling you, this one’s hiding something. You mark my words. I’ve got a sense about these things. It’s the celestial super sleuth in me.”
“The celestial super sleuth got the wrong house number for a ghost asking about his family three separate times. Don’t ask me to trust your super sleuthing skills.”
“That was a clerical error, and you know it.”
The dead man cleared his throat, which is a remarkable thing for a man with no working lungs to do. “I’m not hiding anything,” he said gently. “That would mean I had something to hide.”
Ma harrumphed and floated up to the ceiling to sulk, which is her version of leaving a room without the dignity of a door.
That’s when Mel let herself in through the garage holding a pink bakery box, because Mel believes that life unaccompanied by pastry is a problem not taken seriously.
She got two steps in, felt the cold, and froze like a deer in a Kroger parking lot. “Nope.” She hugged the bakery box to her chest. “Why is it freezing in here?” She shook her head. “Tell me it’s just Fran.”
“It’s Fran. And a guest.”
“A guest, guest, or a — ” she dropped her voice to a stage whisper the entire neighborhood could’ve heard “— a dead guest?”
“Dead. He’s by the fridge. Cardigan, very polite, missing a shoe.”
Mel turned and squinted hard at my dishwasher, which was a solid three feet to the left of where the man actually stood. “Hi,” she said to the dishwasher, lifting one hand in a little wave. “I’m Mel. I’m not scared of you. Okay, that’s a lie. I’m a little scared of you. Just don’t do anything ghost-y, and I’ll be fine.”
“She’s talking to the GE,” Ma announced from the ceiling, briefly humored by her. “Madone, the woman is gorgeous and she can’t find a ghost with a flashlight and a map.”
“Ma says hi,” I told Mel, because I have manners.
The man inclined his head toward the dishwasher, anyway. “A pleasure, Mel. I apologize for the temperature. I gather that’s my fault. I don’t entirely have the hang of being dead yet.”
“She can’t see or hear you,” I said. “But I’ll tell her.” When I did, Mel’s whole face softened, the fear melting into something a lot closer to motherly.
“Aw,” she said. “He’s polite. Angela, the dead guy’s polite. The last one called me a name I had to look up.” She set the bakery box on the island and flipped it open. Cannoli. She slid the box toward the empty fourth stool, the one Jake always sets a coffee at for Ma, even though Ma can’t drink it. “Here, you two go. I know neither of you can eat it, but maybe if you just look at it you can get a sense of how it tastes. That’s the best I can do.”
“Thank you,” the man said with real feeling. He drifted over to look at the cannoli as if it were the nicest thing anyone had done for him in years. Which, given his situation, it may well have been.
“We can’t keep calling him ‘the dead guy,’” I said. “It’s rude.”
“We should call him Walt,” Mel said.
“Why Walt?”
“Because that’s what I imagine he looks like.” She turned the wrong way intending to acknowledge him, even though she couldn’t see even a shimmer of the ghost. “I mean, he’s grandpa-age, right?”
“Yes.” I looked at him. He looked back, hopeful and apologetic at the same time.
“Walt,” I tried. “Does that ring any bells?”
“No,” he admitted. “But it’s a kind thing to be called. Walt it is.”
From the ceiling, my mother made a noise like a teakettle deciding whether to whistle.
“Don’t get attached. I’m telling you. There’s more to this one than a missing slipper, and I don’t like it one bit.”
“You don’t like anything you can’t control, Ma.”
“I’m dead, Angela. I can control things you can’t imagine.”
“Right. Because you’re a celestial being.”
“Excuse me,” Walt said. “I mean no offense, but are you two Italian?”
I laughed. “What makes you think that?”
“What’s who think?” Mel asked. “I need information.” She stuffed half a cannoli into her mouth. “Please.”
“Walt asked if Ma and I were Italian.”
She burst out laughing. “Walt, Fran is as Italian as you can get, and Angela is a close second.” She winked at me. “Is he asking because of the bickering? That’s their love language.”
“She’s right,” I said. I poured a second cup of coffee because it was going to be that kind of day.
I’d just gotten the milk back in the fridge when Walt spoke again. He wasn’t looking at any of us. He was looking at his own reflection in the dark kitchen window, frowning at it like it belonged to a stranger he’d met once and couldn’t place. “Angela,” he said quietly. “May I tell you something, and you won’t laugh?”
“Walt, you can tell me anything.”
He was quiet a long moment. The gold flecks drifted slow off his shoulders, settling and vanishing, settling and vanishing.
“I keep reaching for who I was,” he said. “And every time I get close, it doesn’t feel like reaching back into one life.” He turned from the window and looked at me, and there was something underneath the politeness now, something that made the kitchen feel colder than any ghost ever had. “It feels like reaching back into two. I think —” He stopped. Steadied himself. “I think I used to be somebody else.”
Up on the ceiling, my mother went very, very still.
And she didn’t say a single word.
