One Ghost Per Serving

by Nina Post

  “Hey, are you going to –” he heard Rex say, and it startled him. At first Eric thought he was hearing him even when he wasn’t there, feared for his sanity, and turned around. As he did, he pushed a large promotional sign into a student’s booth, which knocked over a couple of beakers of fluid that incited a plume of smoke and then a small fire.

  “Everybody out!” Security started to herd everyone to the exit doors and an alarm sounded.

  Taffy stood in front of Eric looking like a 1930s-era hard-boiled investigator. The parking lot was full of students and teachers waiting for the okay to go back inside the auditorium.

  “Any idea why we had to evacuate the fair?” she asked, head tilted, eyes narrowed.

  “Nope,” Eric said.

  “I thought you left ten minutes ago.”

  “Nope.”

  “I heard you bumped into Liam’s project.”

  He looked to the side. Looked back at her. He tried to smile, but held off when it felt like his appendix was about to burst.

  “Dad.”

  Someone announced they could go back in and Taffy gave Eric a look that he knew he would be attempting to interpret for the rest of the day to no good end. She left. The students ran and the teachers sort of shuffled through the propped-open doors. It was time to go home – and by home, he meant his bus – then order some pizza and sleep for about ten hours.

  Chapter Seven

  Eric parked the Princess in an empty corner of the Quantity Market then strapped two large cooler bags across his chest like ammo. He was going to fill the coolers to the top with Quantal Organic Yogurt, and if there were any yogurts left, he’d put them in a cart, which he grabbed by the entrance and steered straight to dairy.

  The yogurts, squat and yellow, adorned with strange glyphs, stretched out before him like a pirate’s treasure, beckoning with the possibility of getting his family back on his side. He wasn’t a complete idiot; he could tell that Willa and Taffy were slipping away from him. Was it foolish to put so much personal stake in an obscure brand of yogurt?

  He suddenly felt very alone. Even his parasitic ghost wasn’t around. His old friends, anxiety and dread, zipped through his synapses like they were a roller coaster. Taffy wasn’t like anyone else. He wasn’t worried that she would fall for a boy and let everything else go; she was too focused and ambitious for that. He wasn’t worried that she would start running in packs of girls who were bad influences. What he was worried about was losing Taffy’s affection, losing Willa’s affection, and that they would move away and not want him to be with them.

  Buying these yogurts so he could win this farfetched and evidently unwinnable Amass-and-Win contest was the only thing he could do to get them back. Taffy wanted this prize, and winning this contest would get her what they couldn’t afford to provide. And he would look like the greatest Dad ever. If he could win the prize for Taffy, show that he was worthy of them, maybe that would be enough.

  With a surge of purpose, Eric pulled the little containers off the shelves and dropped them in his bags.

  Then he was corralled.

  Four other customers had encroached upon him from behind and surrounded him as they considered the Quantal with unusually intense interest. Eric had underestimated the popularity of the dairy aisle, and of this yogurt brand in particular. The customers, three women and one man, reached for the yogurt with glassy eyes. Eric nudged them aside, and if one pushed against him, he pushed back. They made a sound similar to Taffy’s greeting in the morning, before her allotted small cup of coffee.

  Eric blocked one of the other shoppers with his shoulder as he reached further into the shelf space for the containers in the back. The customers didn’t seem to notice. “Hey, excuse me,” he said, but they grasped out, crowding Eric until he spread out his arms to retain a pocket of space. He glanced over his shoulder at movement on his left. More were coming. If the store manager changed the music selection from an instrumental version of an adult contemporary song from the Watergate era to something by Bad Brains, he could probably crowd surf.

  “There are other yogurt brands, you know!” Eric raised his voice to a near-yell, but the other customers only wanted the kind with the Amass-and-Win contest and the glyphs. One of them shoved another into the cottage cheese display, causing tubs to tumble off the shelves onto the floor. The tubs burst, spurting and oozing cottage cheese on the floor. Eric let the customers fight. He pushed the other customers away from him on the sides as he took advantage of their apparent lack of mental acuity and grabbed the remaining Quantals and then tossed them into the cart. Eric’s forearm hair stuck to his arms from the competitors’ sweat rubbing off on him.

  On his way out of the crowd, Eric lunged sideways like a fencer to take two containers from a woman’s basket. The melee filled in the space Eric had just vacated and the customers, now at least seven or eight of them – Eric didn’t stop to count – groped the shelves, confused at where the rest of the containers went. They breathed like Eric might after a strenuous bike ride, and they felt abnormally hot.

  Eric ran with his cart to checkout while a dairy team member yelled about the mess. He finished his checkout, put the yogurts into bags himself, as he always did, then ran out to the bus and stashed his haul in the back. He kept the coolers packed and left the rest in plastic bags.

  He would need a fridge now. Maybe two, or one really big fridge. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the bus. Sure, he could just take off the foil lids since that’s the only thing he needed, but money was tight and he’d have to eat the yogurt. He ran back into the store and got a local paper. Some of the customers from the dairy melee were wandering unevenly around the store holding their heads like they weren’t sure how they got there.

  Eric sat in the driver’s seat of the Princess and read through the classifieds. He circled three ads for used refrigeration equipment, but his favorite was for a frozen pizza truck that was getting new equipment and selling its current outfit.

  He took out his phone and jumped at a sudden knock on the window. He glared out at a man in his late twenties with sandy hair and what Eric presumed was a deceptively guileless expression. And even though Eric lived in a town where some people didn’t bother to lock their house doors and left their keys in the ignition, he ignored the man. He made sure the door was locked, then dialed the number again. A sudden, loud knock on the window made him fumble and drop the phone.

  “Eric Snackerge?”

  Eric sighed and rolled down the window.

  “Eric Snackerge? Lanson Hark, reporter, Jamesville Tribune.” He stabbed his finger toward Eric. “I thought I recognized you from the piece I did back in,” Eric spoke along with him, “Fall 2002.”

  Larson flashed a toothy smile and slapped his notebook on his leg. “Yeah! My first big feature. Local boy gets a full ride to an Ivy League law school then POW!” Larson slapped his hand and notebook together. “Has a precipitous fall. Loses scholarship, doesn’t even graduate college. Disappears for more than a year. Comes back to his hometown and gets work as a,” he glanced at his notes, “shot boy, serving bachelorettes and girls’ weekend parties at the Buckhead Inn, a rustic lodge restaurant known for its taxidermic displays.”

  Eric unlocked and opened the door, making Larson stumble back. Eric leaned against the bus, crossed his arms and one leg over the other.

  “What do you want, Hark?”

  Larson held up his notebook. “Just a quick Q&A. I’d love to just follow up, tell my readers what happened and why, and what you’re doing now.”

  “Apparently you know all about it,” Eric said.

  “Just a few minutes of your time.”

  Eric rubbed his wrist against the bridge of his nose. “You know what? I’d rather go on a long car trip with my great-aunt Tig.”

  Larson squinted and half-smiled. “Does that – What does that – Are you being ironic, or … ?”

  Eric pushed off the bus and looked down several inches to Larson. “It means I’d rath
er do anything else than regurgitate my personal life for a complete stranger to disseminate incorrectly to other strangers. It means that taking a car trip with my great-aunt, a foul, mean-spirited woman, is the very last thing I would ever want to do. And I would almost rather do that than talk to you.”

  “They’re not strangers. They’re your neighbors,” Larson corrected. “This is a close-knit town.”

  Eric took Larson’s notebook and pen and threw them as far as he could into the muddy grass. Then he got back in the bus, locked the door, and started her up.

  “I’ll write it anyway,” Larson yelled. “I don’t need your side of it.”

  Eric rolled down the window. “No one needs my side of it. Leave me alone, you …” he tried to think of something Taffy had said. “Fluke sack.”

  “Hey!” Larson said. But Eric had already pulled away.

  Larson Hark’s feature story on the rise and fall of local star Eric Christopher Snackerge was published the next day in the Jamesville Tribune.

  JAMESVILLE TECHNICAL COLLEGE, HVAC TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT, FACULTY LOUNGE

  Willa’s nemesis, David Midthunder, held an antacid-beverage in one hand and the spine of a newspaper in the other. He sipped his drink and flapped the paper so it rustled. “Isn’t this your husband?”

  Willa opened the fridge and pointed to a moldy plastic container. “Isn’t this your wife?”

  David laughed, a nasal HA-HA-HA that always made Willa think of a creepy ventriloquist dummy, its jaw hinging down then straight back up, its eyes soulless and empty, an empty vessel ripe for demonic possession.

  “I guess you take home the bacon, huh?” He took a step forward as though to poke her in the arm, but thought better of it and swung his arm around in a slow, Popeye-esque right hook.

  And Eric brings home the antlers, she thought. She liked to think of herself as Artemis and Eric as Actaeon, the hunter she turned into a stag, with some modifications to the story. When he did put on those antlers (and she loved him for wearing something he associated with a job he didn’t like just to please her) everything else fell away. She thought of the moment she first saw him in college, tall, lean, shirtless, and sweaty from a hot room with a garage band at a house party, big blue eyes fixing on hers from across the front lawn, making the rest of the world shrink down to the two of them. He knew what he wanted, then. He had stared right at her, went right to her, and she was his. They kissed before speaking, like they were coming together again after lifetimes. But now … her eyes burned and she pressed a fingertip into her temple.

  David lingered.

  “Don’t you have an acidic cesspool to ooze back into?” Willa said, genuinely angry now that her co-worker was in the same room, angry that her marriage had fallen apart, angry at her husband, angry at herself. She wanted a strong family. She wanted to provide for them, build a legacy for them and carry on the one from her father, and she expected some loyalty and gratitude in return. Was that too much to ask?

  David emitted one lone, half-hearted “Ha.” He tossed the paper on the table and left with his mug and a haughty air.

  Willa rubbed the back of her neck as she glowered at the paper. Finally she picked it up and opened it. When Eric Snackerge met Willa Fellier – Miss Jamesville Crayfish ‘97, Lutheran Chili Cookoff winner ‘96, and HVAC instructor – it was love at first sight.

  “Yes, it was,” Willa said.

  JAMESVILLE UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, JR/SR SCHOOL, EAST HALL LOCKERS

  Taffy accepted the girl’s deposit for an order. She filled out a receipt from a carbon-copy book and noted the girl’s ‘LOVE’ shirt.

  “My mom read about your dad and says he could’ve made something of himself, but now he wears nothing but horns and his underwear at work,” Love Shirt said.

  “Flavor,” Taffy said, eyes flat.

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Flavor.”

  Love Shirt folded her arms and pouted. “Pizza.”

  “Size?”

  “Eight-piece,” Love Shirt said. “You heard what I said, right?”

  “Pickup? I’ve got Friday after second period or after fourth period.”

  “After fourth.”

  Taffy noted these selections.

  “Eight-piece custom order of pizza-flavor candy for pickup Friday at my locker after fourth period.” Taffy ripped off the receipt and presented it. “Thanks for your business.”

  Love Shirt girl scrunched up her face then haughtily stalked off.

  Taffy opened her locker. Inside, she had glued a walnut-color laminate material to the otherwise standard white particle board locker shelving unit. A rechargeable DC power pack and an AC/DC inverter powered a tiny cooler. A calendar of famous chemists hung on the inside door, and each day before the current one was X’d out with a red pen. Taffy took a can of club soda from the cooler. It was ice cold – colder than one from the vending machine. She replaced it with a room-temperature club soda.

  Love Shirt returned with a friend, Purple Headband. Taffy knew that Love Shirt wasn’t done with her yet, and brought in Purple Headband as backup. But she also knew that Purple Headband would put in an order, because most kids did. That’s how she could afford to buy pretty much anything she wanted for her bike, and a few things for her lab. So she waited for them to speak first while she drank from the can.

  “Brooke says you make candy?” Purple Headband said.

  Taffy raised her eyebrows as though to say ‘Go on.’

  “You do custom flavors?”

  “Almost anything.”

  The girls lingered. “Why do you wear neon orange high-tops?”

  “Is that a flavor?” Taffy said.

  Purple Headband cocked her head. “Uh, no.”

  “It’s funny how your name is Taffy and you sell candy,” Love Shirt said.

  “That’s clever. I’ve never heard that one before,” Taffy said without inflection.

  “Really?”

  Taffy had a business to run, and couldn’t care less what people thought about her or said to her. But it rankled to hear people talk crap about her Dad.

  “You always wear the same thing,” Love Shirt said. “Like those high-tops, those jeans, some stupid shirt with something weird on it. But then, your Dad wears like, hot pants or whatever.”

  Taffy finished her drink and tossed the can into a nearby blue bin. “Your Dad’s been with Diane Holliday about twenty times this year. In a baby-making way. Saw him when I was riding my bike.”

  Love Shirt gasped, and Taffy delivered the final blow.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s where he’s been getting his Oxycontin, too.”

  Love Shirt burst into tears and ran down the hall.

  “That was mean,” Purple Headband said.

  Taffy shrugged. “Both of you came over here to mess with me. Some would say that’s mean.” Then, “Do you want to place an order?”

  Purple Headband considered this. “I could probably get it from someone else.”

  Taffy smiled. “Nope. I’m the best at chemistry, and I’m the best at making flavors.”

  “Your Dad’s in the paper, you know.” There was a gap of silence. “Aren’t you embarrassed?” She gave Taffy a section of the paper from her bag, which had a pattern of tiny black Scottie dogs.

  Taffy pulled on her backpack. “You know what embarrasses me? That the school system barfs out people like you and your friend.” She headed to chem lab, thinking that it was hard to operate a candy business when people kept insulting your shot boy father. On the way, Taffy looked at the article.

  Eric and Willa have a daughter, Taffy, age 12, whose hobbies include bike riding and modification, chemistry, and emerging infectious diseases –

  “Hobbies?” Taffy said loudly and with disdain, causing other kids to look at her.

  She was working on undescribed projects that were ‘none of your [expletive deleted] beeswax’ when I spoke to her.

  Taffy swore under her breath. She vaguely remembered some
one calling a few days ago on her red emergency phone. At the time, she figured he was calling from the classifieds to clarify her posting to form a bike collective, though she had very little hope that she would find the right people.

  THE LAW FIRM OF MARGOT, CHICKEN & DAVIS: OFFICE OF MARK BOLLWORM, ESQ.

  “Hey Mark, aren’t you friends with this guy that we saw working at The Buckhead?”

  Mark rested his hand on his paperwork. Striped Tie held up the Jamesville Tribune. Chronograph joined him.

  “It actually says he used to work here. Is that true?” Striped Tie laughed derisively.

  “As a paralegal,” Mark said, moving a paper to a different stack.

  “He get hooked on drugs or what?”

  Mark stopped trying to write his motion. He wheeled back from the desk. “He wasn’t on drugs.”

  “Crazy?”

  Mark hesitated for a nearly imperceptible second before shaking his head.

  A third associate stepped inside around Striped Tie. “You guys read this piece in the Trib? Can you believe we used to have shot boys here? I don’t know if that’s disturbing or awesome.”

  “He was a paralegal then,” Mark repeated, “not a shot boy, and would have become an attorney. Get out, all of you,” and wrangled his colleagues out the door. “What are you luddites doing with a paper Trib, anyway? Is this 1995?” Mark shut the door against their reply and returned to his desk with the paper.

  He read, During college, Snackerge interned at the law firm of Margot, Chicken & Davis until he was fired over a robo-signature scandal and blacklisted from the field. Soon after that, he lost his scholarship and disappeared.

  Mark touched his shirt collar and rubbed a tiny cross between his fingers.

  SAMMY’S DINER & INDOOR SHOOTING RANGE

  The manager of the Jamesville Drive-In Theater left the money on the counter and took his jacket from the back of the leather stool, leaving a shabby, hot sauce-stained copy of the paper. The owner, Sammy, turned the paper around with the tips of his calloused fingers and peered down at it through his bifocals.