by K. J. Emrick
When someone was gone, they were gone. You didn’t get to hold them, or talk to them, or tell them how your day was in school, or ask them to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich just the way you liked it. When they were gone you were never going to see them again.
Except sometimes, when your last name was Sweet and you could see ghosts.
Darcy reached over and put her arms around Colby again. “I promise you, if there is any way for me to come back and see you when I’m a ghost, then I will.”
Colby searched her mother’s eyes to make sure she was telling the truth. “You really, really promise?”
“I do. I really, really do.”
Darcy meant that with all of her heart, she just didn’t know how to tell Colby that it wasn’t up to her. Even with the gifts she had, to be able to see and interact with ghosts, Darcy didn’t have a good grasp on how the afterlife worked. Some people came back as ghosts, some people didn’t. Some ghosts were tortured souls looking for redemption, and some souls were happy to just hang out and observe their family moving on with their lives. She had no idea, for instance, whether she would see Helen’s spirit floating through her living room, or hovering around her casket to see who came to her funeral.
But if there was any way to make it happen, when she died she would be back to let Colby know everything was all right, and that she would never be alone. Not really.
In a hundred years of course. When she died.
“So if Helen isn’t the mayor anymore,” Colby asked, “who gets to be mayor now?”
Darcy hadn’t thought about that. Helen’s political opponent would undoubtedly take over come January first, but that was a month and a half away. Who would take over in the meantime was a question for someone else. The town must have some sort of plan in place for what to do when they lost their mayor.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “I guess we’ll have to see.”
“You were going to vote for Helen, right? Because she was your friend?”
“Yes, she was my friend. But, she was also the best candidate. Helen would have been a much better mayor than that Carson Everly.” She bent down and kissed the top of Colby’s hair. “I’d be willing to bet that man couldn’t tell the difference between his butt and a hole in the ground.”
Colby began giggling uncontrollably. “Mom! You can’t say things like that!”
“No, you can’t say things like that, because you’re still young and innocent and people expect you to be cute. I’m a mother. It’s okay if I’m not cute.”
A big hug from her daughter nearly squeezed the air out of her. “I think you’re still cute,” Colby told her. “Plus you know the difference between your butt and a hole in the ground!”
“Darn straight, I do!”
Darcy grabbed her and rolled across the mattress, tickling Colby’s sides unmercifully until they were both laughing so hard that Darcy’s sides ached. Colby squealed, and pretended to try and get away, but slow enough that Darcy could catch her again and pull her back up onto the bed.
Someone else joined them. Tiptoe hopped gracefully up onto the mattress, her eyes bright and wide, her whiskers twitching as she watched them playing.
Then she leaned back on her hind paws, her tail twitching, her ears laid back.
Her eyes narrowed.
And then Colby squealed with delight as Tiptoe jumped on her, licking her cheek over and over and prancing away whenever Colby tried to grab her.
When things settled down, Colby rolled over and rubbed Tiptoe’s belly. The cat grabbed her hand, playfully holding on without claws. Tiptoe knew how to play. She might be as melancholy as a teenager, but even teenagers liked to roughhouse sometimes.
Beside Darcy, on her dresser, she heard a noise over the baby monitor.
Thump.
Darcy had been expecting that sound. That would be her son getting out of bed with his elephant feet.
“Hey, Colby? I’m going to get your brother and then we can all go down for some lunch. How’s that sound?”
“Okay, Mom.”
She winced as she said it, her eyes blinking hard.
“You okay, baby girl?” Darcy asked her.
“Uh-huh. Just got a bit of a headache. Too much tickling. It’ll go away, I guess. Just need to stay here for a minute.”
She was gently stroking Tiptoe’s back now, head to tail, over and over. It did look restful. Darcy had spent many hours in a chair with her cats herself, reading a book, stroking their fur while they slept, or just sitting with them. Tiptoe was enjoying every second of Colby’s attention, even as she tried to act like she was only allowing this to happen under extreme protest. She wasn’t fooling anyone, but then again, she didn’t care.
Like Colby said, it was a cat thing.
Darcy had developed a special relationship with Tiptoe’s father. Smudge and her could understand each other with just a look. She knew what each of his meows meant, and he knew exactly when she was going to need his help. Which, in her life, had happened quite a bit.
She stopped at the bedroom door and looked back at Smudge’s daughter lying there with her own daughter. Tiptoe twisted her head around in Darcy’s direction. They looked at each other for a long moment, neither of them saying anything.
Then Tiptoe blinked, and Darcy caught just a hint of her father in that glance.
I trust you, Tiptoe was saying, but you’ll never replace my dad.
Fair enough.
Zane was already jogging his way down the hall when she stepped out. He broke into a wide grin, lifting his hands up to her and flexing his fingers for her to pick him up. She obliged him, even though he was getting very big, and heavy. Not quite an elephant, but for her it was a lot. It wouldn’t be too much longer before she couldn’t carry him in the crook of her arm like this anymore.
Which was all the more reason to do it now.
“Mingof?” he asked. “We go mingoffin’ now?”
“Mi-ni-golf later,” she said, emphasizing each syllable so he could see how it was supposed to be said. “Lunch now. How does that sound?”
“Pancakes?” he asked.
“Well, we did promise you. Okay. Pancakes it is.”
“Yay!”
Darcy balanced him against her hip and with her opposite hand so she could undo the latch on the gate across the top of the stairs. There was one down at the bottom, too, and another on the doorway leading to the kitchen, and the entire living room was kid-proof. Foam strips around the edges of the coffee table and any other sharp corners. Plastic outlet plugs. Anything that could possibly be mistaken as candy or juice had been removed, including the decorative glass beads that had been in the flower pot. The bottle of essential oil air deodorizer was up on the top shelf of the bookcase where it would be out of the reach of little hands.
For Zane to hurt himself in this room, all of the bad luck in the entire world would have to come together in a concentrated, roiling mass of evil intent centered in the Tinker-Sweet home. It would have to be a series of mishaps of Biblical proportions. Something worthy of a Rube Goldberg machine.
And yet, Darcy still worried about it. Izzy McIntosh, her partner at the bookstore and her next-door neighbor, had laughed when Darcy told her about it, using exactly those words. That’s what being a mother is all about, she’d explained. Expecting the worst, preparing for the best, and settling for the stuff in between.
Izzy’s daughter Lily was just about to graduate college, after changing her major twice and finally deciding her future was in graphic design. She had a couple of jobs lined up for after graduation. Her whole life was on track, and Izzy still worried about her. That’s what mothers do, she told Darcy over and over. The day you stop worrying about your kids is the day they put you in the cold, hard ground.
If only Izzy knew, Darcy had thought to herself. There were ghosts all around them, still worrying about the people they left behind.
Darcy smiled, remembering how terrified she’d been to ev
en let Colby out of her sight back when she’d been the new baby in the family. By that standard, she was much more relaxed with Zane. Even so, Izzy was right. Mothers never stopped worrying.
“Zane, honey?” she said as she set the gate at the bottom of the stairs in place again. “If I put cartoons on for you, can you stay here in the living room and play while I make lunch for us?”
“Toons!” he said with great enthusiasm. Television time was pretty relaxed on the weekends, but hearing his mother offer screen time over reading a nice book, or playing with blocks, was cause for excitement. “Yes. Toons, please. Toons please, Momma.”
Darcy turned to one of the two kids channels in their service package, the one that wasn’t just flashy colors and characters who were idiotic even by cartoon standards, and then double checked the safety gates were latched before stepping over the one into the kitchen. She got out the flat frying pan, and a ceramic bowl, and the box of pancake mix. The kitchen space in their home wasn’t very big. The round dinner table sat four, snugged up close to the window, and the fridge and sink and counters took up most of the rest of the space, with cupboards in a row up above from corner to corner. They’d made it work, her and Jon and the two kids, but sometimes she wondered if maybe they needed to upsize to a bigger home.
Maybe they would, she told herself, when Zane grew up. A teenage boy could eat you out of house and home. At least, that’s what their friend Ellen Gless had told her. She’d raised a son all on her own, for various reasons, and considering the old life that Darcy and Jon had helped get her away from—including a name change to protect her identity—Darcy thought Ellen had done a great job.
So, anyway. They didn’t need to decide on moving until both of the kids were much older. She would hate to say goodbye to this house. It had been Aunt Millie’s, and she intended to keep it as long as she could.
She didn’t know when she started humming, but she was into the final verse of an ABBA tune and flipping golden brown pancakes from the pan to a plate when she heard Jon’s car in the driveway. Oh, good. He would be home for lunch with them, and they could go to mini golf after all, and before that she would find some time away from the kids so he could tell her everything that had happened.
She set her lips in a thin line. She’d been able to put the thought of Helen’s death out of her mind for a while. Now she didn’t feel like humming anymore. Hearing the details of, well, everything certainly wasn’t going to be pleasant, but she knew that she needed it. For the sake of closure.
Oh, Helen…
Choking back tears she didn’t know she had left, she got out the plates, and set the table, wondering what was taking Jon so long. Usually he was out of the car and in the house in just a matter of seconds. He’d probably had a rough morning, dealing with the emotions of the people who knew Helen, and the politics of it all. She wouldn’t blame him if he was dragging a little.
Still, what was keeping him?
She was putting Zane’s booster seat in place at the table when the door opened. She looked up to tell him welcome home with a smile. He probably needed a smile.
“Bark.”
Her smile evaporated.
Padding its way into the house at Jon’s feet, was a dog. A puppy. Short and portly, with a wagging tail and floppy ears that came down almost to the floor, it stopped in the middle of the kitchen. It sat down, twisted its head to one side, and scratched at its neck until an ear got in the way and it fell over growling and yipping, and trying to unwrap from both ears that were now covering its eyes.
“Jon? What is this—?”
“Doggie!” Zane called out from the living room side of the safety gate. “Doggie in the house.”
Yeah, Darcy thought. No kidding. She tried to catch Jon’s eyes, but now his attention was on Zane.
“Hey buddy,” Jon said with a big smile. “See what your dad brought home? Do you like him?”
Zane was too excited to speak. He stood at the gate, reaching his hands up above the top, his fingers flexing over and over while making little gasping sounds. Obviously, he liked the puppy just fine.
“So it’s a he?” Darcy asked cautiously. “The puppy? It’s a boy?”
“Yeah, actually.” Jon scrubbed the back of his neck with one hand, looking sheepish. “I think I have some explaining to do. See…”
“Holy crap, it is a dog!” Colby exclaimed. She’d flown down the stairs, rushing over to stand next to her brother. “I heard the barking and then Zane said… and Dad said… but I had to see it for myself.”
“Honey, we don’t say crap,” Darcy reminded her daughter absently.
“Sorry. But there’s a dog. Right there!”
“Yes, I know.” Jon seemed to be enjoying the excitement of the kids. “He’s going to be staying with us for a while. Just look at that cute face. Isn’t he awesome?”
Darcy felt like she’d just been dropped into the middle of someone else’s house. “Back up, Jon. Slow down. What do you mean, he’s going to be staying with us for a while?”
“Doggie in the house!” Zane repeated.
“Yeah, Mom,” Colby said, rolling her eyes dramatically. “There’s a dog in the house. Obviously he’s here to stay. Keep up.”
Darcy very deliberately kept from giving her daughter one of those looks that said now was not the time for jokes. She saved it for her husband instead. “Jon. Why is there a dog in our kitchen?”
Jon had taken off his coat, the lightweight blue one that went down to his knees and was hanging it up. He took his time settling it on the hook before he turned back around and almost met Darcy’s questioning gaze. “It was Helen’s dog. He’s got nowhere else to go.”
That struck a chord in Darcy’s heart. Helen’s dog. Darcy didn’t even know that her friend had gotten a dog, but this puppy couldn’t be more than two months old, which was right around the age when you were supposed to take a dog away from its mother. Helen must have only just taken the little thing in. They’d been so busy yesterday talking about the campaign that they hadn’t spared time for anything else.
“Okay,” Darcy said slowly, “so this is Helen’s dog. That explains some of it, but not why he’s standing in our kitchen.”
“Cha-Cha,” Jon told her. “That’s his name.”
Darcy thought she must have misheard him. “Cha-Cha?”
“Yeah, I kind of chuckled at that. Apparently, Helen was very into those ballroom dancing shows. You know, like the waltz. Or the tango.”
“Or the Cha-Cha?”
“Exactly.
“Uh-huh. I see.” Darcy pinched the bridge of her nose between her finger and her thumb because the conversation was going around in circles. “So what about Helen’s husband? Is he allergic or something?”
“No. Bruce is upset. Very, very upset.” Jon shrugged, then bent down low to pick Cha-Cha up and set him back on his paws again, unwrapping the ears from around his face. The dog looked surprised to be able to see again. “This little guy was hiding in the house when I got there. Bruce hadn’t seen him all morning. It was like he knew what had happened and didn’t want to face it. I had to search nearly every room until I found him.”
The dog walked around in a circle now, as if he was wondering how in the world he’d gotten to this strange new house. Then he sat down and lolled his tongue out of the side of his mouth, apparently just happy to be here.
Darcy frowned at the little furball. She could only imagine what Bruce Turner must be feeling, having come home to find Helen passed away like that. Those two had been amazing together. They loved each other so much. After a long string of bad men in Helen’s life—bad, evil men—she had finally found a good match in Bruce. He was her soulmate. She was his. The few years they’d shared together were now over. He must be devastated.
She sighed, finding it harder and harder to say no to taking in a puppy. “Jon, we already have a cat, remember? How do you think Tiptoe’s going to feel about us bringing in a dog?”
“Cats and do
gs live in harmony all the time,” he said. “There’s no reason to think that won’t be the case with these two.”
She crossed her arms and gave him a look.
He sighed. “Okay, sure, I know what you mean. It wouldn’t be fair to force Tiptoe into sharing her house. So, why don’t we try it, and I promise that if Tiptoe is bothered by Cha-Cha being here, I’ll find some other place for him to stay.”
Darcy touched her fingers to the ring on her right hand. What would her Aunt Millie do? It was hard to say, because Millie had always been a cat person, too. Not that Darcy had anything against dogs. They could be loveable, caring creatures just like cats. Smudge hadn’t been a fan of them, to be sure. Tiptoe had never really been around that many but she certainly didn’t love them. What would she think about this?
“Come on, Darcy,” Jon whispered into her ear as he held her close. “Tiptoe is more Colby’s cat than anyone else’s. I figured Zane needed a pet of his own. A boy and his dog, you know? What could be more iconic than that? Besides, he’s already housebroken.”
“Sure, but…”
“Don’t you miss having that close connection with Smudge?”
She frowned. “You know I do.”
“Okay. So, don’t you want Zane to have that sort of bond with a pet, too?”
He was making a good argument, although Smudge had been less of a pet and more of a friend. The pup would need somewhere to go, however, and besides. It was for Helen. How could she say no to that?
“Yes!” she heard Colby exclaim. She had seen the resignation on Darcy’s face, clear as day. “We’re keeping the dog. Zane, we’re keeping the dog!”
Her brother danced from foot to foot. “Doggie in the house! Doggie in the house!”
Darcy rolled her eyes, and finally gave in with a laugh. “I guess that settles it, then. We’ll have to go and get some things for him, I suppose. Dogfood, for one. A bed to sleep in. Stuff like that.”
Jon cleared his throat. “It’s already in the trunk. Bruce gave me everything they had for him. Even a couple of chew toys.”