Unfinished Business An Angela Panther Novel (A Chick-lit Paranormal book) (The Angela Panther Series) (22 page)

“Goodness, no. I’m hanging with my girls, learning the lingo. Imma gonna be gansta before ya know it. Ya feel me?”

I giggled. “I feel ya, Ma.” I couldn’t think of anything else gangsta-like to say and was actually grateful for that.

“You homies, you ain’t got nothin’ but drama, I be slack, and chillin’, dude.”

I giggled again and so did she. “Oh my gawd, Ma! Seriously! Stop it.”

“That’s how they talk, you know, those kids at those parties. They sound like idiots. I couldn’t even understand half of what they said, let alone figure out what it meant. They even talked in abbreviations and moved their thumbs while they did it, like they didn’t know how to speak without a phone in their hands.”

“You went to one of those parties?”

“I may have popped into one last night for a minute or two. Strictly for research, you know." Guilt poured out of her words.

“Ma, you didn’t do anything, did you?” I secretly hoped she did.

She stared at me and with all of the innocence she could muster, which wasn’t much. “No?”

I closed my laptop and smirked at my wonderful, annoying mother. “Okay, so if you didn’t do anything, what might you have done if you did?”

“Well, I might have taken the bowl of pills and thrown it up toward the ceiling and giggled a little when the pills went flying all over the room.”

I gave her my,
tell me more
look.

“And maybe I would have blinked the lights a little bit.”

“Mother. You did not.”

“Aren’t we talking hypothetically?”

I let out a big breath of hot air. “Then what would have happened?”

She bowed her head in shame. “Maybe the kids would have gotten a little spooked and after a little screaming and running around, the party would have ended. But nobody got hurt, I promise. Ya feel me?”

I had to give her credit for that. “At least you ended the party without anyone getting hurt, but Ma, you can’t go around haunting parties just because you can.” Even though I thought it was a fabulous idea, it probably wasn’t appropriate.

“Why not? If I stop a child from getting hurt, I most certainly can. I’m like the Goodwill Ghost, ya know?” She smiled, feeling satisfied with that thought process, I could tell. “Yeah, that’s what I am. The Goodwill Ghost, saving kids from harming their stupid selves.”

She did sort of have a point, but still. “Ma, I appreciate that you want to save the world, but probably your way isn’t the best. Maybe we can figure out another, less frightening way?”

She flipped her hand in the air. “Aw, you’re no fun. It was completely innocent anyway. Nobody got hurt. And besides, it was fun to watch them all run like they’d just seen a ghost or something.” She tilted her head, recognizing the irony in her own comment.

I couldn’t help but giggle at the image of the kids running around with pills flying through the air seemingly for no reason. Had I been a teenager and been there, I’m sure I would have peed on myself. “Well, the good news is that none of the kids took any of the drugs, so I guess I can’t be that mad at you. Did you stay to see what happened next?”

“I didn’t stay long. After everyone left, the boy who lives there called his parents crying, and I felt sort of bad about that. I guess they told him to go to the neighbor’s because he ran out of the house like a bat out of Hell. So I left too. I would have cleaned up the mess, but I’m not good enough yet to focus like that.”

“Who was the boy?”

“That’s the thing, I don’t know exactly. The way they were all talking was so confusing; I couldn’t understand most of it. I think his name is Sam but I’m not sure if they were calling him Sam or saying damn. The music was loud, though I wouldn’t actually call it music, so it was too hard to tell. Who’s teaching kids to talk these days? They don’t make any sense. It’s all nonsense. And the abbreviations – what do you call them – acronyms? Why do they use those? O-M-G. L-O-L. Why can’t they just say the damn words for crying out loud?”

I laughed at my mother. “You entered a whole new world last night, Ma. Kids today don’t talk in complete sentences. My seventh grade teacher is probably in a mental institution because of it. They speak like they text. O-M-G means oh my God, and L-O-L means laugh out loud.”

“Laugh out loud? Whadda they gotta tell ya that for? Why not just do it? Sounds like a WOTTM.”

“Huh?”

“Get with the program, Ang. Waste of time to me.”

“Oh.” Again, she had a point. “Ah, the wonders of teenage-dom. I don’t get it either. When I was that age I spoke Valley Girl, so this acronym stuff is like, totally foreign to me, too, like, for sure.” I laughed at my own joke but my mother didn’t get it, which made me think she didn’t listen to a thing I said to her in the ’80s. Smart woman, my Ma.

“Kids today. Can’t live with them, can’t even swat at them with a wooden spoon. What is this world coming to?”

“Sadly that’s frowned upon now. Anyway, back to the party. Mel and I were actually talking about this early today. We think it’d be a good idea for you to go and keep an eye on things, but maybe you should limit your actions to just visual and let the living handle the rest.”

She
humphed
loudly and frowned. “You really know how to spoil my fun, don’t you? Ah, Madone. You’re right. From now on no scary ghost tricks, I promise." She crossed her heart or at least the place where it was when she was alive.

I shook my head and I knew that regardless of her intentions, she was totally full of crap, like, for sure. “Okay, Ma. Next time you’re going, please let me know ahead of time, and maybe I can figure out who’s having the party and put a stop to it before it even happens.”

“Yeah, that will be good for Emily. She’s already struggling with her friends, so you tattling on them is going to be a big help.”

“I don’t care if she’s popular, Ma. I care that she’s not doing drugs.”

“Well, so do I, Angela, but you can’t destroy her life just to keep her safe. She’s a very sensitive child. A little overly dramatic, which she gets from you, but still, very sensitive. You need to keep that in mind when you figure out what to do about these parties. If kids think she told on them, she’ll be tortured far worse than that Taylor girl has done.”

When did my mother become so right all of the time? It was getting annoying. “You’re right, and by the way, I am not overly dramatic, Mother.”

“Two words, Angela. Bird funeral.”

I started to give my reasons but she just smiled and shimmered. I hated how she got the last word like that.

###

I
spent the rest of the day doing mundane mother and wife-like things around the house. The stuff dreams are made of. No, really. Didn’t every woman dream of scraping black scuff marks off of their wood floors? Isn’t that why we spent our teen years dreaming of the man we were going to marry? So he could sweep us off our feet and then we could sweep the floor on which he carries us? Yeah, that didn’t work for me, either. I have a theory about why, as kids, we thought we’d marry Prince Charming. As children, we watched our parents, most specifically our mothers, and assumed that whatever we saw wrong in their marriage, based on our wealth of knowledge and life experience, of course, was our mother’s fault. Most young girls felt their dads walked on water while our mothers drove us insane and blaming them seemed only logical in our not yet fully functioning brains. So we spent our time fantasizing about our Prince Charming and writing our names with theirs on our notebooks, thinking our future was filled with romance and expensive gifts. We eventually found our soul mate, our Prince Charming, or so we thought, and after years of picking up his dirty laundry up from the floor while he sat in front of the TV watching sports and burping with his hand down his pants, we actually became our mothers. Then we got it. We realized it wasn’t our mothers' fault and that maybe there were actually two sides to the story. That our mothers were, in fact, saints. That however, didn’t stop us from thinking our dads still walked on water.

I took a few breaks during the mundane mother and wife duties to call my dad but only talked with him briefly. It was status quo now for him to say a few words, and then hand the phone to Helen.

“He’s the same. We had to go to the emergency room yesterday because he’s a little backed up, but otherwise he’s the same.”

I felt my body tense. “You went to the ER and didn’t call me?”

“He asked me not to. He knows you’re worried about him and since it was just a bowel issue, I didn’t think it was something to be concerned about. The doctor gave him some medicine and told him to stay close to the bathroom and he’d be fine.”

I allowed myself to calm just a little bit. “That makes sense. Is he feeling better?”

“He seems to be. He’s not eating much still but right now I think that has more to do with his constipation than anything else. I’m not sure I’d want to eat if I were having trouble like that, either.”

“Good point. Please though, will you let me know if anything is going on? I’m really worried about him.”

“I will. I promise, but he seems to be okay. He’s not better than when you saw him, but he doesn’t seem to be any worse, either.”

We spent a few more minutes talking about the kids and other casual stuff and then said our goodbyes.

I’d been texting Mel throughout the day, mostly because we had very important social issues to discuss. Our main topic of conversation today was the reason why some women bleach the hairs in their butt cracks. Apparently it’s the new, big thing. We both are signed up for a coupon program like Groupon, and the offer of the day was an anal bleaching, something neither of us even knew existed and were completely fascinated by.

“I think they do it to stop the occurrence of dingleberries,” she texted.

“Gross. One can stop the occurrence of dingleberries by simply wiping properly.”

“Perhaps they don’t have enough time. Maybe their kids are waiting outside the bathroom door, whining.”

“Then might I suggest they get rid of the kids? I’d get rid of the kids if that meant I didn’t have to have someone bleach my butt.”

“I wonder if it burns?”

“How could it not?”

“Exactly.”

“For the record,” Mel texted. “I would NEVER get my butt hair bleached. Probably never.”

“Never, ever. EVER,” I texted back.

“Yah, never. How did this start in the first place? Did someone actually say,
damn girl, yo ass is freaking me out! Get that stuff bleached
?”

“I’d rather hear my vajayjay is stinky.”

“Seriously, you wouldn’t. Just sayin’.”

“You’re probably right, but I do occasionally do the sniff test.”

“I don’t even want to know.”

“Yeah, you probably don’t.”

I love how my friend added a big, heaping dose of spice to my otherwise mundane life. Mundane except for the seeing ghosts part, that is.

T
hat night I was blessed by the sleep Gods and didn’t even remember my head hitting the pillow. I slept hard and dreamed in detail about the dead woodpecker. She talked to me and told me she was thankful I held her while she died, and that she had a young family and would really like it if I put decals on the window. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up I actually believed the bird talked to me. Did birds become ghosts? And if they did, could they speak human? I really needed to call that psychic Linda.

I slept for just under seven hours, more than I get on average, so at five thirty a.m. I was already out of the house and pulling into Starbucks.

“Hey, I've been thinking about what happened." Jenn made drinks at the bar.

I surveyed the store and saw two women waiting for drinks, but both were texting on their phones, not paying attention. “You were?” I tried to sound casual.

“Yes. I’m going on break in a few minutes. Are you going to be here?”

“Yup. I’m staying for a bit before I go to the gym.”

“Great, I’ll come over in a little bit.”

“Okay.”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted to talk about, and honestly, was a little nervous. The only people I’d really discussed this...this gift, or whatever you want to call it, with was Mel and Jake, and my mother of course, but since she’s not actually alive, I didn’t think she should count.

“So, I’ve been thinking,"

“Okay.”

“I could tell you weren’t comfortable doing what you did for me so I wanted to see if you’re okay.”

I smiled at my friend. “Thanks, I appreciate that. This is all new to me, and honestly, I’m not sure what to do with it or really how I feel about it all. I’m still working through it.”

“I can only imagine. If you’d like to talk to the Pastor at my church, I’m sure I can help you see him,” she offered.

“Thanks.”

“Anytime. My mom and my aunt talked yesterday. I think they’re working towards patching things up."

“That’s great,” I told her.

“Yes, it is. Listen, if you need to talk, you know you can come to me, okay?”

“I know. I appreciate that.”

Jenn held my hand for a second and then said she had to get back to work. I’m always amazed at how some people reach out to others just because they can.

I finished my coffee and headed to the gym for a forty-five minute cardio session. I’d found an interval, high intensity treadmill routine in a fitness magazine and thought it was a great way to torture myself, so I figured I’d give it a try. In the middle of the torture I saw the group of body builder women all standing around the smith machine talking. I couldn’t help but wonder how they looked so good when mostly all I ever saw them do was stand around and talk to each other and there I was, busting my butt and still looking like a mom. Probably it had something to do with my cupcake addiction but I wasn’t ready to accept that theory just yet.

On the way home I called Linda.

“Hi Angela. I’ve been expecting to hear from you.”

Holy crap. She
is
psychic! She knew it was me calling. “Um,” I stammered. “I have been meaning to call, but just haven’t had a chance. How did you know it was me?”

“Well, I’m psychic, of course. And I have caller ID.”