Page 28 of Potion Sickness

“I’d have a cat yelling at me in front of the whole town is what I’d have.” He shakes his head, but he’s smiling while he does it. “Besides, it’s not practical. I run a business where the clients arrive unscheduled. I can’t promise Vivian anything. She could put my name in the program and I could get a call Friday at five, and then what?”

“Vivian knows that.”

“And there’s Addie. Rehearsal is every night. She’d be shuttled around all week, and then she’d have to sit in an audience and watch her father forget his lines in a cape, and that’s the kind of trauma a kid carries into adulthood⁠—”

“I would NOT.”

The voice comes from the doorway to the back hall, where the stairs up to Gabe’s apartment come down. Addie is barefoot, holding a popsicle, and has clearly been standing there for quite some time.

“Addie,” Gabe says. “You were supposed to be reading your book upstairs.”

“I finished.” She stations herself directly in front of him. “Dad. You have to do it.”

“I don’t have to do anything. I’m an adult. That’s like the entire point of being one.”

“If there’s no Macbeth, there’s no play. It’s his whole name on it. Everybody else can be replaced but you can’t replace the main guy.” She takes a lick of the popsicle. “And you already know how to talk in front of people. That’s your whole job.”

“That’s—” Gabe starts, and stops.

“And you do voices when you read to me. Your Gandalf is good. Emma says her mom doesn’t do any voices at all.”

He picks the script up off the empty chair and turns it over and looks at the cover for a while.

“One condition,” he says. “And it’s not negotiable. If I need to prep for a funeral, or if I have to host a funeral, if any of that lands on opening night — if a family in this town needs me, then I’m in this room. The dead outrank Scotland.”

“The dead outrank Scotland,” I repeat. “She’ll take that deal. Her fallback is a man in Brattleboro who played Judas in Godspell.”

Addie lets out a small cheer. Gabe points at her with the rolled script. “Line runs happen after dinner. Popsicles are not dinner.”

“It’s not popsicle-s, plural,” she says. “This is my first one.”

“That’s what you said about the last one.”

He walks me out. Addie is skipping up the stairs, shouting something upward to the empty apartment about telling Emma.

“Table work is tomorrow at seven,” I say. “For the record, I knew you were going to say yes.”

“So did I,” Gabe says.

“And you let me flounder?”

“I wanted to keep you here longer.”

I’m most of the way to the car before I let myself smile at that. When I glance back from the driver’s seat, he raises the script to me like he’s giving a toast.

On the way home, I call Vivian, who says, quote, “Tell him the dead have always outranked Scotland. That’s practically the plot.”

* * *

The scene that greets me in the living room takes a minute to parse.

The furniture has been rearranged. The armchair has been dragged to the center of the rug, facing the couch, and the standing lamp has been repositioned behind it at a dramatic angle. On the chair, upright and motionless, sits Maude.

Englebert is on the couch, facing him.

“You’re home,” Englebert says, without breaking eye contact with Maude. “Well? Did he accept?”

“He accepted. One condition. If a funeral lands on opening night, the funeral wins.”