39. Ghost Stories
39
Ghost Stories
WE DID NOT end up catching
either
of the bachelor parties that night, but I was very certain neither Carver nor Nicki remembered the night very well anyway. From what I heard, there’d been an impromptu concert where Bruno almost threw out his back howling the laments of Dolly Parton, Carver accidentally lit the bar counter on fire, and Alice mooned Officer Saget right in the middle of Main Street. Sad that I missed
that
part, but I was glad we didn’t end up going.
Someone
had to be coherent on the wedding day.
I busied myself with final wedding preparations, rearranging the flowers in the parlor rooms while sneaking tastes of desserts in the kitchen. I wasn’t sure how Carver talked Alice into letting them have it in the funeral home for
free
, so I made a mental note to ask him what sort of blackmail he had on Alice for her to be so agreeable about it all.
The Days Gone Funeral Home looked like it was decorated in a flower crown, with large sunflowers on the porch and white ribbons draped across the old wooden roofbeams, and the once-
suffocating floral-and-formaldehyde smell was replaced with the scent of bright and beautiful sunshine. The windows were open, as were the doors, and every so often a clever, happy wind raced through the old Victorian house, and the foundation creaked and groaned in hello.
Ben looked so at home in the red parlor, helping me arrange the sunflowers in vases kept from Dad’s funeral, as if he’d been here all this time.
Alice elbowed me in the side and said, with all honesty, “Good catch, sis. Not my type, but good catch.”
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
“That does it for the flowers,” Ben said, finishing up the vase he was working on. He wiped his hands on his trousers and said to Alice, “Nice to formally meet you.”
Alice gave him a once-over. “You take care of my sister, you hear?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And no more cheating at cards.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “I wouldn’t
dare
.”
“Mm-hmm.” Her phone vibrated and she took it out of her back pocket and quietly cursed. “The caterers are here—ugh. Can you two finish setting out the decorations?”
I gave her a salute. “Aye, aye, boss.”
“Weirdo,” she muttered and left out the front door, shouting at the caterers to move the van around back—“No, not through the
grass
, you
heathens.
”
When she was gone, Ben took a sunflower out of one of the vases and tapped me on the nose with it. “Your sister’s doing a great job with the business.”
“She is, isn’t she?” I looked around at the parlors, strewn with colorful flowers and pearly white ribbons, and I wished Dad could
have seen it. A wedding in a house of death. I kissed Ben on the cheek. “Thank you for being here.”
“Thank you for inviting me. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be than beside you.”
I rolled my eyes and playfully shoved him away. “Stop being so sappy,” I complained, hoping he didn’t notice my reddening ears. If he talked like that much more, I was going to be in a permanent state of blush.
He liked me; it was still so hard to believe.
Benji Andor
adored
me.
And for the first time since Dad passed, everything felt almost perfect. The sky was this almost-perfect crimson—the color of Dad’s suit when we buried him—and the sweltering July heat had abated to a soft humidity that still felt sticky, but it was as close to perfect as you could get in the summer, and the entire town had come to watch my brother and his husband say their actually perfect vows.
They slipped on each other’s rings and professed their love under the ancient rafters that had echoed more sobs than cheers, and the purpling light of evening eased softly in through the windows, painting everything in shadowy hues of rose, and it was a fitting wedding for a funeral home.
Dad would have loved it.
After the wedding we popped champagne and played Dad’s favorite burned CD and danced through the parlors to all the good goodbyes, because endings were just new beginnings. And right now, we were happy, and Carver and Nicki were dancing with each other, and Rose and Alice were flirting in the kind of way that would lead to something else.
(What kind of romance writer would I be if I didn’t see how they fell?)
Because the same look was on my face, too, every time I looked at Ben. When he left to get us a refresher of champagne, Mom slid up beside me and gave a hard sigh. “Would it be frowned upon if, during the couples’ dance, I danced, too?”
I offered out my arm to my mom. “I’m not Dad, but I can dance with you.”
“I’d love that, sweetheart, but I was referring to your man.”
And just as she said that, Ben swooped in and offered his hand to—my
mom.
I gasped, scandalized. Ben said, “Patience makes the heart grow fonder.”
“What charm!” Mom cackled and wiggled her eyebrows at me as she let Ben lead her into the throng.
He winked.
(Ugh, this was for saying I’d put googly eyes on his washboard abs, wasn’t it?)
I moped about on the edge of the parlor like a lonely island, swilling the red punch that was
most definitely
spiked. Everyone had someone to dance with—even the
mayor
. And here I was, left to lean against one of the tall tables with the owner of Bar None and Bruno. They were smoking cigars that reminded me of the ones Dad liked—strong and sweet.
Bruno nudged his chin toward Ben and Mom dancing. “I haven’t seen your mom so happy in ages.”
“He’s a catch,” the owner agreed.
I bit the side of my cheek to hide a grin, watching Ben trip over his own feet. He and Mom laughed, and it pulled at something deep in my chest. It ached, but not in the way I’d felt when Dad died. It was a good sort of pain. The kind that reminded me that I was still alive, and there was still life to live and memories to make and people to meet.
“How’d you meet him?” Bruno asked.
I tilted my head. The song ended, and I wondered how to explain it. He was a ghost who haunted me after I failed at turning in his grandmother’s last manuscript—“I met him at work,” I finally supplied. “I thought he was an absolute stuck-up asshole at first.”
“And she was a chaos gremlin,” Ben replied, surprising me. He put his hand on the small of my back. “I didn’t think I stood a ghost of a chance.”
“You were
so
deadly serious.”
“And
you
were too much of a free spirit. But I think I love that the most.”
I turned around to him. “Is
that
what you love the most?”
His lips twisted. “That I can say in current company.” Then he offered his hand to me, and I took it. He spun me around, away from the table and onto the dance floor.
“I didn’t know you danced,” I said, tongue in cheek, because we’d danced before.
A lifetime ago.
He laughed and brought me closer to him. “What love interest doesn’t?” We danced across the ancient oak floorboards, around Mom and Alice, and Seaburn and his wife, and Karen and Mr. Taylor, though I only knew that later, because all I remembered was Ben. The music was a little dampened, and the evening light slid through the open window in lazy hues of oranges and pinks, and he looked so perfect painted in it.
We danced slowly, his hands soft on my hips, swaying to a slow song that I didn’t know, but I liked it. It was sweet, with violins, with lyrics about want and yearning and everything that you really needed for a good love song.
A glimmer in the corner caught my eye. I glanced over.
An old woman with beautiful wide brown eyes stood in the doorway to the parlor, her hand outstretched to an elderly man in
an orange sweater and brown pants, who took it tightly and kissed her knuckles. They shimmered in that star-glitter way spirits did. Ben glanced in the direction I was looking.
“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.