One Ghost Per Serving (19 page)

Willa took off her heels, dropped her bag on the floor, and stood at her Dad’s white farmhouse sink to sort through the mail. He received subscriptions to
Cardinal Confrere –
not a Catholic newsletter about Cardinals, but the bird – and
Woodquiddity
. She liked cardinals, but not enough to read a magazine about them, and wasn’t into woodworking, so she would have to cancel those, and whatever else came in for her father, even though doing anything like that made her want to curl up in bed and stay there indefinitely. But she had a daughter, and work, and had to keep going.

She rifled through the rest of the mail, neglected lately. Willa got bill after bill after bill, though not for Taffy’s magazines and journals; somehow Taffy managed to get those for free. She made a pile of mail to shred, a pile for immediate follow-up, and a pile for no action. She opened a large white envelope with printed address labels, including a return label with a Marshall, Texas address.

She slid the contents out onto the blue laminate counter.

“What in the name of Reuben Trane –”

She used a pencil to separate glossy 8x10 photos and document copies.

Then she picked up the phone and dialed her husband. “Are you working? About to go to work? Then get over here now.”

Willa fumed for twenty minutes, but also scheduled a locksmith.

When Eric arrived, he tried not to laugh. “You look like Yosemite Sam.” His wife was tiny and fuming, and Eric expected her to strongly suggest that he
say his prayers!

“First the grocery delivery, now this?” Willa jabbed a finger on the table. “Don’t touch it.”

Eric used the eraser end of the pencil to look through the pile. There were photos of Willa teaching a class, with coupons attached for an energy drink. There were photos of Willa driving in her car, with coupons for coffee drinks. There were photos of Willa parking in Ed’s driveway, with coupons for real estate services and grief counselors.

There were photos of Eric cleaning the windows of the Princess, with coupons for a diesel fill-up. There were photos of Eric shopping at Quality Market with Taffy, with coupons for a purchase at the deli. There were photos of Eric going to the school for his secret sponsor meetings. There were photos of Eric peering into a display case at the market, and photos from the
inside
of the cooler, with coupons for Quantal Organic Yogurt.

“Oh God. The yogurt’s been photographing me
in the bus
.” Eric put an arm across his chest to massage his shoulder.

There were photos of Taffy in the school lab, wearing safety glasses and mixing something blue, with a coupon for lab supplies. Photos of Taffy riding her bike, with a coupon for a bike store; one of her engaged in a transaction by a set of lockers, with a coupon for high-yield savings accounts; and one showing her berating her lab partner, with a coupon for anger management therapy.

“She’s her mother’s daughter,” Eric said.

“This is serious,” Willa said.

“I know.”

There were also copies of intercepted emails, a blank CD with
ES
on it that Eric shoved in the back of his pants, copies of grocery receipts, and a list of places Eric and Willa went based on their credit card activity and cell phone activity.

Willa pulled on a pair of yellow dishwashing gloves and put everything back in the envelope, minus the CD in Eric’s pocket. “This has something to do with you,” she said. “I know it in my gut. So you –”she pushed the envelope at his chest, “are going to fix this.” Then she rose up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. Eric felt like dancing down a rainy, gas-lit street like Gene Kelly.

“But you’re the competent one.” Eric suspected she was right. She usually was. First the yogurts in the store ‘recommended’ that he stop trying to win the contest, and now they were getting creepy direct mail.

After he left Ed’s house, Eric ran a fast mile before he circled back to the driveway and drove away in the Princess.

The next morning, Eric waited in the Princess for the Argosy Food to open. The sky was still dark, but his laptop screen and the yellow glow of a wall lamp illuminated the narrow interior of the bus. He sat on the bed he had made up with a set of Taffy’s old dinosaur sheets, taken from the linen closet at the house.

It wasn’t even five a.m. yet. Willa would have been awake almost a half hour, so she was already washed up and dressed, doing some work over a breakfast of coffee, raisin toast, and egg substitute. Willa would make sure Taffy had breakfast and got on the bus on time. Then Willa would fill her travel mug with coffee and drive to the college.

Eric pulled on a button-front cardigan and wondered if he would live the rest of his life alone in a historical bus, living a one-dimensional existence surrounded by the scraps of a life he once had. Just a sad old man pulling on a threadbare cardigan, eating the yogurt that reminded him of when he made the horrible mistake – one in an epic series of mistakes – of entering to win a contest based on undecipherable glyphs only the ancient unnamed ones could read, in a doomed attempt to bring his family back together.

He tried not to think about it. He turned on the TV to distract himself while he continued searching for information online about Quantal Foods and their various agencies. Through a combination of finance sites, annual and quarterly reports, UCC filings, electronic court records, and filings with the Secretary of State, Eric soon learned that Quantal Foods was a new business. It was also a wholly-owned subsidiary of Anemochore, a Delaware LLC, which was itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Nidus Monolithics, incorporated in the Isle of Man.

Quantal Foods retained the services of Jerry’s small ad agency, a one-stop print, branding, and digital shop. They used a different agency for promotion, Jerry had mentioned. After a few minutes, Eric found Cynosure Promotions, based just outside of Jamesville in the city. The company’s management team page contained the names of only a few officers, without any photos or other details pertaining to their background. The CEO was DZ – just DZ, strange – and the Vice President was Nathan Watling.

DZ had a personal blog. Most of the posts were photos of things he had recently purchased, like egg-shaped pressure chambers, giant-sized candy bars, luxury yurts. Eric scrolled to the bottom. First in the list of recent posts was a heading that didn’t appear on the main page. Eric clicked on it. The text boasted about the successful completion of Phase 2 of his plan, code-named
Helios,
which involved deploying sponsored snack boxes to a domestic airline. After some initial trouble with a vendor, DZ, the CEO, “triumphed” and the deployment of the snack boxes ran as “effectively as the infestation of giant African snails in Miami.”

Eric rubbed his arms then pulled the blanket up over his shoulders. Holding the blanket at his collarbone, he stretched over to get the second blanket from the box under the sofa.

“What’s Phase 3?” Eric said to an empty bus, thinking of the now hundreds of people with a fevered zeal for Quantal Organic Yogurt. Why wasn’t he affected like they were, especially since it was all he could afford to eat? Did he have some kind of stomach bacteria or enzyme that –

And then Eric felt like the dumbest person in the world. It was just like Rex said: Those customers were possessed like he had been, only with a variation – a different strain. On the plus side, whatever strain of possession this was, it probably wouldn’t spread human-to-human. It could probably only spread from the yogurt to the person who ate the yogurt, though he didn’t know for sure. Did Cynosure Promotions know about this? Did Quantal Foods know that their organic yogurt was infected with spirits?

“Of course they know,” Eric said, falling back against the pillows. And he wondered again why he escaped unscathed this time.

Maybe Rex was like the spirit possession equivalent of a vasectomy.

Eric stopped into the frigid and sweet-smelling Moo-ateria, a dairy-themed store and counter he found just outside of Jamesville.
The Moo-ateria sold the entire line of Quantal products, including Quantal Organic Yogurt. They also sold milk, sour cream, other brands of yogurt, eggs, and ice cream cakes, and made egg creams and milkshakes at the counter.

Eric pulled up a stool and ordered a plain vanilla shake from a man in a cow costume. He needed the calories. The guy’s nametag read ‘Patrick.’ He had watery blue eyes and pale, freckled skin.

“Hey, are you Eric Snackerge?” Patrick said, taking a tin container off a stack.

Eric shook his head. Those damn videos. “Look, Patrick, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve had a crappy day and an even crappier week, so I really don’t feel like talking about –”

“You’re like, my hero.” Patrick inserted the cup, turned on the mixer, then raised his voice as he spoke over his shoulder. “You’re an inspiration. I read the piece in the paper about how you had all this hope for the future and then the universe just barfed in your hair, like my roommate’s dog did to me yesterday. In bed.”

Eric felt a warmth in his chest. He wasn’t sure what it was. The effect of empathy? Heartburn?

Patrick was about to pour the shake from the tin into a glass when Eric put up a hand. “Just the tin. And a straw.”

Patrick arched a brow but handed him a gaily striped straw. Eric relaxed as he drank the sweet and thick vanilla shake, steadily and without stopping. “I … well, you and I,” Patrick said, “we’ve got something in common.”

Eric paused to speak and watched the level creep down in the inside of the tin. “Yeah, what’s that?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Patrick said, cleaning the machine. “The point is, I had a similar situation. My parents thought I would accomplish –” he took in a breath, “more. And now I’m serving you a milkshake. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an honor, but I’m working in the Moo-ateria in the middle of nowhere. But you took on this big project, and you’re still at it, aren’t you?”

Eric drank the rest of the shake through the yellow-striped straw. “Yep. Still at it.”

“That’s great.”

Eric paid for his milkshake and got all of the Quantal Organic Yogurt they had. He thanked Patrick, wished him good luck, then went back outside. It was a crisp October day. The leaves were still a brilliant red and orange, though he knew an upcoming cold snap would strip them down. An Amish buggy with two glossy brown horses clipped down the road past fat orange pumpkins and twined bales of hay. Eric stopped to enjoy it. And since he hadn’t had a proper lunch, just a milkshake, he took a yogurt out of the bag and peeled off the lid, though he was getting tired of dairy and would kill for a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, or a steak.