One Ghost Per Serving (28 page)

When Willa got back to Ed’s house with Taffy, she refused to let Mark come in with them. He tried to work his charm on her, which stretched her last nerve. Finally, when she was ready to throw a right hook in his direction for being so oblivious, he reluctantly left. Willa was barely holding it together by then, and regretted going to Maritimania in the first place. She went to distract herself, but what was the point? She saw a hundred things that made her think of her Dad, and wished like hell she were alone. She had to duck into the bathroom at the Forecastle Deck Cafe and again by the swinging pirate ship to cry in private.

Taffy grabbed some food and went off to her room. Willa set her bag down and pressed her lips together. Both of her parents were gone, she missed them terribly, and she felt utterly, profoundly alone.

She let out a shaky breath, then noticed something on the dining room table.

A beautiful cake, simple and elegant, with a red cardinal expertly illustrated on the top.

A bottle of her favorite pinot, not cheap.

And a book of photos she had never seen before, of her Dad posing in front of then-cutting-edge HVAC equipment, teaching, and touring plants. Photos of a trip she didn’t even know about that he had taken with her mother to the Southwest. Willa’s eyes burned with tears and she put a hand to her quivering mouth. “Dammit, Eric.”

Because it could only have been Eric.

Eric drove the Princess from the rear of the Fireworks Superstore parking lot to the center of it. He was wearing cut-off chinos and an old shirt. He held a paint roller in one hand and a bucket of paint in the other, and appraised the bus similarly to how Jackson Pollock would snarl at a canvas, or how an evening legal secretary would give a steely eye to a stack of motions, or how a street sweeper would set his jaw the morning after the Annual Jamesville Founder’s Day and Crayfish Parade celebration, or how an efficiency expert for a State Budget Bureau would look at a municipal department’s work schedule with the aim of minimizing overtime hours.

He wasn’t going to be the Princess or the Patsy or the Princess Patsy. Not anymore.

He was going to be Eric Snackerge.

And he wasn’t going to be constrained to a legacy if it didn’t fit his life. Not anymore.

He took the roller and painted the bus like it was the event horizon to a black hole and he was the only man in the world who could paint that sucker closed. He didn’t stop until he was done, and when he was, the bus was a solid matte olive green.

He switched the buckets. He dropped the roller and took the brush in hand. He scrawled
Snackerge
on each side in black paint. Then he went back ten feet to survey his work. He heard a sound and whipped around sixty degrees. Taffy pulled up on her bike.

“Cool.” She planted one leg on the pavement and and kept the other on the pedal.

Eric painted a strip of green paint down her nose with the tip of his finger. Then he took out his phone.

“Who are you calling?” Taffy asked, examining the bus.

“Josh Konga. One of your Mom’s students.” Eric remembered the big guy from Willa’s class who mainly worked as a mechanic but also drove a forklift and sang for a speed death metal band, yet somehow found the time to pursue an HVAC career. A Renaissance man.

Eric caught him between jobs and explained who he was, but Josh recognized Eric right away. Josh was so excited to get a phone call from the yogurt guy who happened to be married to his favorite HVAC instructor that he let out a whoop Taffy heard from under the hood of the bus.

“Dude! I bought your autographed posters, your travel mugs, the stickers, the new lapel pins, and a tote bag for my girlfriend Rhonda.”

“What are you talking about?” But as soon as Eric said that, he remembered Jerry giving him a stack of posters to sign.

“Ha, that’s funny,” Josh said. “You’re funny.”

Eric let it go. He described what he wanted done, then offered to star in a radio spot for the shop Josh worked for. Then for good measure, he tacked on free breakfasts at Sammy’s for a week. Josh agreed, and they arranged a block of time for that night.

Taffy shut the hood. “Dad, there’s a cat living in your engine block. But it ran off into the woods.”

“What did it look like?”

She shrugged. “A tabby, I guess. Just small and furry. Actually, it could have been something else. Anyway, I want to install a spray marker.”

“On the cat? I think it already has one.”

“No, on your bus.” Taffy’s tone was impatient. “Like the ink that explodes in money packets. But it’s indelible fluorescent and you can spray it from the front or the back using a trigger on the dash.”

“Um …”

“It’ll come in handy. Trust me, I know.”

Eric parked the bus in the lot of Argosy Foods.
The sun’s rays shot through the moving cloud cover and glinted off the steel carts. The stock guy Eric had come to see noticed the bus and clamped his hands to his head in astonishment. He hitched up his work belt and met Eric just past the loading doors with an outstretched hand. “Whoa, what happened to your bus?” It looks like a tank! No more Princess?”

“Hey Jimmy. Yeah, I gave it a new look.”

“You told me it was your dad’s, right? Does he know what it looks like now?”

Eric shrugged. “It’s not his bus anymore, it’s mine. Hey, I just wanted to come by and thank you for helping me with the yogurt. Knowing when the trucks were coming from the distribution center was really helpful.”

“No problem.” Jimmy clapped Eric on the shoulder. He checked out the bus again like it was a new barbecue grill he wanted. “You send in the lids already?”

Eric nodded. “Now I just cross my fingers.”

“Deliveries of Quantal Organic Yogurt have been cut in half, I guess because the contest ended.” Jimmy shrugged.

Eric knew DZ must have had something else in mind now. Assuming DZ wanted to keep infecting people with commerce spirits, the reduction in deliveries didn’t make sense. “The Quantal Organic Yogurt was always delivered in Nidus Monolithics trucks, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Jimmy squinted. “I never figured out why the Quantal stuff came in a Nidus truck, but fleet management, that isn’t my thing. I just receive and stock, receive and stock.”

Eric crossed his arms. They both looked at the bus. “How do you know when to expect a delivery?”

A beer truck pulled into the loading area.

“Oh, we have this website we can check to see when deliveries are coming.” Jimmy turned toward the truck, ready to help unload it.

“Is there a password?” Eric asked. He had to be direct.

The truck backed up with a slow beep-beep-beep, then the driver hopped out and unlocked the back door. Jimmy stood near the back of the truck and Eric took a few steps closer along with him.

“Password?” Jimmy said. “No, we just click in our region. And we can look at the deliveries for all Argosy Foods in the area.” Jimmy grabbed the first box of beer and loaded it onto a tall stacker with wheels.

Eric sat in the driver’s seat of his bus, feeling like an oblivious, self-involved fool for not realizing how serious the problem was when he started to buy the yogurt. He was the guy who ingested a spirit from a POUNCE! He was the one who somehow survived an eighteen-month-long spirit possession, and he still wasn’t aware that at least half the population of Jamesville had also ingested spirits. The customers Eric had once viewed as contest competitors were even worse off than
he
had been with Rex possessing him. They were still conscious, but controlled by the commerce spirit they consumed from the yogurt. But Eric was so reactive that he just wanted to punch them for getting in his way, and he had put his family in danger.

He started the ignition, shaking his head at himself. Cynosure would want to reach as many customers as possible, and at some point DZ would use the Nidus Monolithics resources to make it happen. He had to put aside his own problems and shut down Cynosure’s operation for good.

Eric walked into the support group meeting in the middle of a heated argument between He Who Cleans House and another sprite he hadn’t seen before. The other attendees had taken refuge by the food table; they had adopted Eric’s additions to the offerings, namely vanilla cream cookies, cashews, pretzel sticks, doughnuts, and decent coffee. They didn’t need to eat, but the shrimp had admitted at one point that it was an emotional thing: they liked to partake of the human food when there was something to celebrate or when they felt bereft.

Rex was nowhere to be seen and Eric got anxious. He sidled over to the table. “What’s going on?”

He Who Eats Grapes, the gorilla, rolled his eye. He Who Squeaks made an aggressive series of undulating abdominal squeaks and wheezes, and even though Eric didn’t speak spiracle, he got the distinct impression that the caterpillar was displeased at the direction of the meeting.

“Well –” He Who Eats Mucous was always up for some gossip. “He Who Cleans House’s cousin, who’s also a sprite but insists that he’s a brownie –”

“It’s a regional difference. Be sensitive,” He Who is Delicious said.

“– showed up with no advance notice and announced his intention to stay with He Who Cleans House,” He Who Eats Mucous said.

“But He Who Cleans House hates his cousin and hates the whole idea of him staying,” He Who is Delicious said.

“He Who Cleans House runs a tight ship,” He Who Reclines said. “He protects that house and looks after everyone in it, even though they have no idea that he’s there and trample over his feelings all the time.”

He Who Eats Mucous hopped off his chair. “Why would he want another homesprite – sorry, Brownie. Whatever. Why would he want him in his house? If I’m confronted with a similarly-sized shrimp in my area, I have to kill it before it gets bigger, turns male, and takes over my territory.”

As though to emphasize the shrimp’s point, Eric overheard He Who Cleans House say, “The Dixon house is a
one homesprite household
! I must insist that you stay in a motel.” The sprite’s tone turned political and calculating. “Wouldn’t that be more interesting, with allthat turnover? I have to protect and look after the same people, day in, day out. Talk about tedious. But a
motel
– that’s the stuff.”

Eric caught the pickle jar’s attention. “Where is Rex?” He Who Is Delicious loaded his plate with vanilla cream cookies and Eric wondered how exactly he ate those, being a jar of pickles. “Rex? Oh, he went outside a few minutes ago. Said he had a phone call. No, wait – he just came back in.”

“What are
you
doing here?” Rex said by the door, almost in a bellow. “And you two, give it a rest,” he said to the sprites. “Brownie, stay with your cousin for one week while you make arrangements to live somewhere else. Sprite, be generous of spirit and focus on your cousin’s good qualities. You,” he said to Eric, “I’m not talking to you. I hope He Who Eats Grapes eats you and craps you back out.”

“Says the see-through guy,” Eric said.

“Ooh, good one! I may be see-through, but I’m not a coward.” Rex crossed his arms.

He Who Squeaks let loose an overlapping succession of violent squeaks.

“How am I a coward, you insubstantial relic?” Eric said.