One Ghost Per Serving (21 page)

“But you started this without knowing I could read the glyphs,” Rex pointed out. “You believed that you could win the contest despite not having any idea what the symbols even meant. Right?”

Eric leaned back. “I guess.”

“It wasn’t a requirement of pursuing the contest,” Rex said. “You went for it anyway, like the stubborn doofus you are. You knew in your gut that you should go after this contest for Taffy, even though the very means of winning were unavailable to you.” Rex grinned. “You didn’t need anyone’s advice or permission.”

Eric looked at the ceiling. Then he went to his safe and got his foil lid collection.

“Argosy doesn’t open for another half hour, at least,” he said. “Start spelling.”

Rex raised a brow at the vast number of lids.

“What are these glyphs from, anyway?” Eric asked.

Rex chuckled once, softly. “They’re from an ancient – really quite extremely ancient – language that only the, um, that only the very oldest spirits would know.”

Eric smirked.

“Shut up,” Rex said.

“Seriously, how old are you?” Eric said.

Rex crossed his arms and frowned. “The ancient Egyptians created the first commerce spirit.”

Eric waited. Rex raised a brow.

“You?” Eric said.

Rex grinned and spread his arms. Then he hummed The Bangles’
Walk Like an Egyptian
and pointed one hand up and the other behind him like a drawing on an Egyptian sarcophagus.

“Stop messing around. Can we spell PUDDING or not?” Eric jiggled his leg and drummed his fingers on his knee. His anxiety felt like too much caffeine coursing through his bloodstream.

Rex rolled his eyes and held up a hand. He rifled through the lids and started arranging them into a line. “Ta. Da.
Bitch
.” Rex jabbed a finger at the line of lids then leaned back and put his hands behind his head.

“I’ll photocopy them in case they get lost in the mail, then send them in,” Eric said. “And
you’re
the bitch.” Eric waved his hand through Rex’s chest.

Willa wanted to spend the weekend planning for the job she was considering, look at some real estate on the web, and develop the scholarship fund she was creating in her father’s name at Jamesville Tech.
Taffy would be working in her room all weekend. Her daughter was low-maintenance to a fault; she liked to shut herself up in her room and work on a project, not that Willa ever knew what that was. She only ever knew when Taffy moved on to a new one.

Willa had to coerce and bribe and blackmail to get Taffy to do any kind of activity with her, and even then it always wound up being a place her daughter was willing to go, or where she preferred to go, like a glassmaker’s studio or a tour of a Civil War battle site. There was no dropping her off at the mall or a roller rink or a ballet lesson. Willa had learned that lesson the hard way. So when Mark Bollworm tried to arrange an activity for the upcoming weekend, Willa knew he was in for a difficult time. She prepared dinner, a stir fry, while Mark attempted to persuade Taffy at the dining room table. Willa thought he may as well try to talk the ficus tree into the same thing.

“How about the petting zoo out by Daily Farm?” Mark pointed to a brochure. “They have chickens, roosters, baby goats,” he said brightly to Taffy. “And a cafe. Wouldn’t it be great to have lunch there, then go pet the animals?”

Taffy gave him a hard stare, the kind that normally preceded a shiv between the ribs. Willa glanced over her shoulder at the dining room from the kitchen. “You couldn’t have a worse start, Mark,” she said in a voice low enough for no one to hear.

“A petting zoo?” Taffy’s tone was viperous. “You may not be aware, Mark, that animals can be sick yet not exhibit symptoms. They can transmit salmonella and E. coli, to name just two potentially dangerous parasites. You mentioned baby goats? You can get
Mycobacterium bovis
from goats, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t have time for all the diarrhea and vomiting or the potential hospitalization from kidney failure or prions. Also, I’m twelve, not five. But thanks for thinking of me.”

Willa brought a bowl of stir fry with a large spoon to the table.

“And domestic poultry can be an intermediate host for a virus,” Taffy said.

Mark tried again. “They have free elephant rides this weekend only.”

“I guess you think I also have time for tuberculosis or
Staphylococcus
,” Taffy said in a bored tone. She popped a piece of broccoli in her mouth. “I really don’t.”

Willa figured that Mark was regretting that he was a contracts attorney, not a trial lawyer. But even a trial lawyer would probably give up at this point. She considered rescuing him, but was kind of enjoying it. On one hand, she secretly wished Taffy were more open, more happy, less secretive, not so intense. More … expressive. Sometimes it hurt like hell to not have her baby anymore, which was when she considered conceiving again, if she even could. Willa knew how her daughter could come off to other people – prickly, hostile, rude – but Taffy was her hero.

“Okay, Taffy. Why don’t
you
suggest something?” Mark said.

“My suggestion is, I stay in my room and work on my project.”

Mark smiled and leaned forward. “Oh? What kind of project?” Willa put a big bowl of rice on the table. She knew Mark was expecting an answer like, ‘book report,’ or ‘diorama.’

“I don’t talk about my projects.” Taffy stabbed some chicken and pepper on her fork. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“You can tell me,” Mark said, working his charm, sure to be under the impression that Taffy just wasn’t used to being listened to by adults.

Taffy cocked her head and looked at Mark the way a maximum-security prisoner would look at the new guy who served him a scoop of mashed potatoes from the cafeteria line. “Sorry.” She was firm. “You’re not an expert in the field.”

Mark’s smile faltered. Willa wondered if Mark was perhaps gaining a new respect for Eric. And Taffy. “I was hoping that we could all go out and do something fun,” he said.

“As a family?” Taffy’s tone was like a klaxon to Willa, but Mark didn’t notice.

“Yes, as a family!” Mark said, enthused.

Taffy didn’t respond right away, and Willa could tell her daughter was vividly picturing laying waste to Mark’s entire neighborhood and the neighborhoods of his extended family. Time to intervene. “I have dessert. Taffy, why don’t you take it in your room so you can get some more work done.” She winked at her daughter when Mark was getting up and looking away.

Taffy came to collect her dessert, pumpkin cake, from the counter. She kissed her mother on the cheek as a thank you. Willa gave her a pat on the butt as she left.

“Seriously, what kind of project is she working on?” Mark asked Willa when Taffy had closed her door.

“I have no idea,” Willa said.

After a long shift at Sammy’s, and even though Sammy had organized a ‘yogurt drive’ to get all of the employees to donate Quantal Organic Yogurt, Eric stopped at Mrowman’s grocery for another haul.

It was nearing the last stretch of the game period. Eric had devoted almost all of his time outside of work to buying an insane amount of yogurt. He was tired. His feet hurt, his legs muscles ached. He was fearful that this wouldn’t work in the end, that he wouldn’t get Willa and Taffy back on his side, and that his efforts were separating them all even more, but that was a risk he had to take. He brought one cooler bag full of yogurt and another cooler bag full of a few other things to the check-out and put the bag on the counter.

“Hey Oscar,” Eric said to the short, dark-haired man working the check-out line. “How’s Jessica?”

“Eric! Nice to see you. She’s doing great, thanks for asking. Okay, how many you got here?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Not too bad.” Oscar ran Eric’s credit card through. “Hey, I saw some of your videos.” Oscar flashed a smile. “They were pretty cool. ‘Truffaut-esque,’ Jessica said.”

Eric laughed.

Oscar ran Eric’s store discount card, and his smile faltered. He chewed his bottom lip.

“What’s wrong?” Eric said. “I reach my discount limit?”

The cashier looked pale. “I’m sure it’s some kind of mistake. I know what you buy, buddy, and this isn’t it. I’ll see what I can do.”

Oscar left, and Eric watched him go into the manager’s office and shut the door. He didn’t know what Oscar meant, but it wasn’t good. It couldn’t be a credit card problem – Eric stayed obsessively on top of his finances, as wretched as they were. And Oscar’s expression changed after he ran his
discount
card, not his credit card.

Eric sneaked a glance at the manager’s door, then leaned over the counter to look at the screen, which informed Eric that his buying patterns had flagged him as a potential terrorist. “Oh, crap.” He forced himself to thoroughly look at everything on the screen while his stomach plummeted. Those weren’t even his purchases. He had never bought any of that stuff.

The system instructed the cashier to detain the customer and wait for the authorities to arrive.

Eric wasn’t going to wait around. Maybe Oscar was buying him time by going into the manager’s office. Eric grabbed his bags – he had already paid, after all – and hurried out the front. He race-walked as casually as someone can race-walk, then ran to the Princess and got out of that parking lot as fast as possible, an action he was more than familiar with. This was why he needed new pants.

In the morning, Eric borrowed Willa’s car to take into the city, telling her he had a job interview, which of course he didn’t. She was wary, but handed over her keys after she set up a carpool with a colleague whom, she stated, was definitely not ‘that invertebrate David Midthunder’.

Eric loved being in Willa’s car: a 1977 Datsun 280Z Sunshine Yellow “Zap” edition. It smelled like her balsam shampoo and her glycerin soap and the natural cleaner she used for the interior. There was some kind of HVAC-related manual in the backseat, an empty iced coffee in the cup holder, and a Duran Duran CD (Eric guessed Rio) in the CD player.

In the city, Eric scoped out the building where Cynosure Promotions was located. This took a number of walks up and down the block, because all of the branding reflected the building’s anchor tenant, a ‘Parasitic Extraction’ company. Once he determined the building was, in fact, the right one, Eric waited across the street in the alley next to a grilled cheese sandwich restaurant. More than forty minutes later, a sleek silver Aston Martin pulled up to a spot in front, then a man who matched the photo of DZ from the Cynosure web site got out of the car and walked into the building.

An Aston freaking Martin,
he thought.

So it
wasn’t
in the shop.

Eric held his location until lunch, entertaining himself by obsessively re-imagining every interaction he had with Willa and Taffy during the past few days. DZ came out and walked a few city blocks to a department store. Eric followed him into a restaurant on the top floor, where DZ took a booth seat by himself. Then DZ made a few calls, and soon he had two women and one man sitting with him at the table.

“Doesn’t like to be alone,” Eric said under his breath. He had been alone a lot lately. Even when he had been with people, or non-people like Rex, he still felt alone, except for the sponsor meetings at the school. For some crazy reason, even thinking about the meetings reassured him.