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“Thank you,” I said, wondering how my Zeb, my sweet, Doctor Who-watching Zeb, would react to memories of touchdowns and Budweiser.
“I will see you soon,” Gabriel said, taking a step closer to me. I stepped back. He let a frisson of disappointment pass over his features and hefted Zeb off the couch.
“Wait, I thought you had to be invited before you could go into someone’s house,” I said as Gabriel moved effortlessly to the door.
He shifted, jiggling Zeb. “It’s a common misconception. And under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t. It’s just rude.”
I closed the front door behind Gabriel and locked it. Then I unlocked it. What the hell could an intruder do to me, really?
Then again, I didn’t want some Buffy wannabe sneaking into my house and staking me. So I turned the lock again. Irritated with myself, I sank to the floor and scrubbed my hand over my face. “Three days ago, I was a law-abiding librarian. I had a dental plan and baking soda in my fridge. Now I’m unemployed, undead, and apparently kind of skanky.”
“Rough day, pumpkin?”
“Yeah,” I said, pressing the heels of my hands over my eyes to ward off a gathering headache.
My great-aunt Jettie appeared at my left and pushed my hair back from my face. “Don’t worry, honey, things will work out.
They always do.”
“Yeah.” I said, willing myself not to cry. Vampires, surely, didn’t blubber like little girls.
Aunt Jettie patted my head fondly. “There’s my girl.” I smiled up at her through watery eyes.
Wait. My great-aunt was dead. The permanent kind of dead.
“Aunt Jettie?” I yelped, sitting up and whacking my head against the wall behind me.
Note to self: Try to stop reacting to surprises like a cartoon character.
“Hey, baby doll,” my recently deceased great-aunt murmured, patting me on the leg—or, at least, through my leg. My first skin-to-ectoplasm contact with the noncorporeal dead was an uncomfortable, cold-water sensation that jolted my nerves. Blargh. I shuddered as subtly as possible so as not to offend my favorite deceased relative.
Aunt Jettie looked great, vaguely transparent but great. Her luxuriant salt -and-pepper hair was twisted into its usual long braid over one shoulder. She was wearing her favorite UK T -shirt that read, “I Bleed Blue.” The sentiment was horribly appropriate, all things considered. It also happened to be the shirt she died in, struck by a massive coronary while fixing a flat on her ten-speed. She looked nothing like the last time I saw her, all primped up in one of my grandmother’s castoff suits and a rhinestone brooch the size of a Buick.
Jettie Belle Early died at age eighty-one, still mowing her own lawn, making her own apple wine, and able to rattle off the stats for every starting Wildcats basketball player since 1975. She took me under her wing around age six, when her sister, my grandma Ruthie, took me to my first Junior League Tiny Tea and then washed her hands of me. There was a regrettable incident with sugar-cube tongs. Grandma Ruthie and I came to an understanding on the drive home from that tea —the understanding that we would never understand each other.
Grandma Ruthie and her sister Jettie hadn’t spoken a civil word in about fifteen years. Their last exchange was Ruthie ’s leaning over Jettie’s coffin and whispering, “If you’d married and had children, there would be more people at your funeral.” Of course, at the reading of Aunt Jettie’s will, Grandma Ruthie was handed an envelope containing a carefully folded high -resolution picture of a baboon’s butt. That pretty much summed up their relationship.
Aunt Jettie, who never saw the point in getting married, was all too happy to have me for entire summers at River Oaks.
We’d spend all day fishing in the stagnant little pasture pond if we felt like it, or I’d read as she puttered around her garden. (It was better if I didn’t help. I have what’s known as a black thumb.) We ate s’mores for dinner if we wanted them. Or we’d spend evenings going through the attic, searching for treasures among the camphor-scented trunks of clothes and broken furniture.
Don’t get the wrong idea. My family isn’t rich, just able to hold on to real estate for an incredibly long time.
While Daddy took care of my classical education, Jettie introduced me to Matilda, Nancy Drew, and Little Men. ( Little Women irritated me. I just wanted to punch Amy in the face.) Jettie took me to museums, UK basketball games, overnight camping trips. Jettie was included in every major event in my life. Jettie was the one who undid some of the damage from my mother’s “birds and bees” talk, entitled “Nice Girls Don’t Do That. Ever.” She helped me move into my first apartment. Anyone can show up for stuff like graduations and birthdays. Only the people who truly love you will help you move.
Despite her age and affection for fried food, I was knocked flat by Jettie ’s death. It was months before I could move her hairbrush and Oil of Olay from the bathroom. Months before I could admit that as the owner of River Oaks, I should probably move out of my little bedroom with the peppermint-striped wallpaper and into the master suite. So, seeing her, crouching next to me, with that “Tell me your troubles” expression was enough to push me over the mental-health borderline.
“Oh, good, it’s psychotic-delusion time,” I moaned.
Jettie chuckled. “I’m not delusion, Jane, I’m a ghost.”
I squinted as she became less translucent. “I would say that’s impossible. But given my evening, why don’t you explain it to me in very small words?”
It was good to see that Jettie’s deeply etched laugh lines could not be defeated by death. “I’m a ghost, a spirit, a phantom, a noncorporeal entity. I’ve been hanging around here since the funeral.”
“So you’ve seen everything?”
She nodded.
