One Ghost Per Serving

by Nina Post

  Willa wanted to spend the weekend planning for the job she was considering, look at some real estate on the web, and develop the scholarship fund she was creating in her father’s name at Jamesville Tech. Taffy would be working in her room all weekend. Her daughter was low-maintenance to a fault; she liked to shut herself up in her room and work on a project, not that Willa ever knew what that was. She only ever knew when Taffy moved on to a new one.

  Willa had to coerce and bribe and blackmail to get Taffy to do any kind of activity with her, and even then it always wound up being a place her daughter was willing to go, or where she preferred to go, like a glassmaker’s studio or a tour of a Civil War battle site. There was no dropping her off at the mall or a roller rink or a ballet lesson. Willa had learned that lesson the hard way. So when Mark Bollworm tried to arrange an activity for the upcoming weekend, Willa knew he was in for a difficult time. She prepared dinner, a stir fry, while Mark attempted to persuade Taffy at the dining room table. Willa thought he may as well try to talk the ficus tree into the same thing.

  “How about the petting zoo out by Daily Farm?” Mark pointed to a brochure. “They have chickens, roosters, baby goats,” he said brightly to Taffy. “And a cafe. Wouldn’t it be great to have lunch there, then go pet the animals?”

  Taffy gave him a hard stare, the kind that normally preceded a shiv between the ribs. Willa glanced over her shoulder at the dining room from the kitchen. “You couldn’t have a worse start, Mark,” she said in a voice low enough for no one to hear.

  “A petting zoo?” Taffy’s tone was viperous. “You may not be aware, Mark, that animals can be sick yet not exhibit symptoms. They can transmit salmonella and E. coli, to name just two potentially dangerous parasites. You mentioned baby goats? You can get Mycobacterium bovis from goats, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t have time for all the diarrhea and vomiting or the potential hospitalization from kidney failure or prions. Also, I’m twelve, not five. But thanks for thinking of me.”

  Willa brought a bowl of stir fry with a large spoon to the table.

  “And domestic poultry can be an intermediate host for a virus,” Taffy said.

  Mark tried again. “They have free elephant rides this weekend only.”

  “I guess you think I also have time for tuberculosis or Staphylococcus,” Taffy said in a bored tone. She popped a piece of broccoli in her mouth. “I really don’t.”

  Willa figured that Mark was regretting that he was a contracts attorney, not a trial lawyer. But even a trial lawyer would probably give up at this point. She considered rescuing him, but was kind of enjoying it. On one hand, she secretly wished Taffy were more open, more happy, less secretive, not so intense. More … expressive. Sometimes it hurt like hell to not have her baby anymore, which was when she considered conceiving again, if she even could. Willa knew how her daughter could come off to other people – prickly, hostile, rude – but Taffy was her hero.

  “Okay, Taffy. Why don’t you suggest something?” Mark said.

  “My suggestion is, I stay in my room and work on my project.”

  Mark smiled and leaned forward. “Oh? What kind of project?” Willa put a big bowl of rice on the table. She knew Mark was expecting an answer like, ‘book report,’ or ‘diorama.’

  “I don’t talk about my projects.” Taffy stabbed some chicken and pepper on her fork. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You can tell me,” Mark said, working his charm, sure to be under the impression that Taffy just wasn’t used to being listened to by adults.

  Taffy cocked her head and looked at Mark the way a maximum-security prisoner would look at the new guy who served him a scoop of mashed potatoes from the cafeteria line. “Sorry.” She was firm. “You’re not an expert in the field.”

  Mark’s smile faltered. Willa wondered if Mark was perhaps gaining a new respect for Eric. And Taffy. “I was hoping that we could all go out and do something fun,” he said.

  “As a family?” Taffy’s tone was like a klaxon to Willa, but Mark didn’t notice.

  “Yes, as a family!” Mark said, enthused.

  Taffy didn’t respond right away, and Willa could tell her daughter was vividly picturing laying waste to Mark’s entire neighborhood and the neighborhoods of his extended family. Time to intervene. “I have dessert. Taffy, why don’t you take it in your room so you can get some more work done.” She winked at her daughter when Mark was getting up and looking away.

  Taffy came to collect her dessert, pumpkin cake, from the counter. She kissed her mother on the cheek as a thank you. Willa gave her a pat on the butt as she left.

  “Seriously, what kind of project is she working on?” Mark asked Willa when Taffy had closed her door.

  “I have no idea,” Willa said.

  After a long shift at Sammy’s, and even though Sammy had organized a ‘yogurt drive’ to get all of the employees to donate Quantal Organic Yogurt, Eric stopped at Mrowman’s grocery for another haul.

  It was nearing the last stretch of the game period. Eric had devoted almost all of his time outside of work to buying an insane amount of yogurt. He was tired. His feet hurt, his legs muscles ached. He was fearful that this wouldn’t work in the end, that he wouldn’t get Willa and Taffy back on his side, and that his efforts were separating them all even more, but that was a risk he had to take. He brought one cooler bag full of yogurt and another cooler bag full of a few other things to the check-out and put the bag on the counter.

  “Hey Oscar,” Eric said to the short, dark-haired man working the check-out line. “How’s Jessica?”

  “Eric! Nice to see you. She’s doing great, thanks for asking. Okay, how many you got here?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Not too bad.” Oscar ran Eric’s credit card through. “Hey, I saw some of your videos.” Oscar flashed a smile. “They were pretty cool. ‘Truffaut-esque,’ Jessica said.”

  Eric laughed.

  Oscar ran Eric’s store discount card, and his smile faltered. He chewed his bottom lip.

  “What’s wrong?” Eric said. “I reach my discount limit?”

  The cashier looked pale. “I’m sure it’s some kind of mistake. I know what you buy, buddy, and this isn’t it. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Oscar left, and Eric watched him go into the manager’s office and shut the door. He didn’t know what Oscar meant, but it wasn’t good. It couldn’t be a credit card problem – Eric stayed obsessively on top of his finances, as wretched as they were. And Oscar’s expression changed after he ran his discount card, not his credit card.

  Eric sneaked a glance at the manager’s door, then leaned over the counter to look at the screen, which informed Eric that his buying patterns had flagged him as a potential terrorist. “Oh, crap.” He forced himself to thoroughly look at everything on the screen while his stomach plummeted. Those weren’t even his purchases. He had never bought any of that stuff.

  The system instructed the cashier to detain the customer and wait for the authorities to arrive.

  Eric wasn’t going to wait around. Maybe Oscar was buying him time by going into the manager’s office. Eric grabbed his bags – he had already paid, after all – and hurried out the front. He race-walked as casually as someone can race-walk, then ran to the Princess and got out of that parking lot as fast as possible, an action he was more than familiar with. This was why he needed new pants.

  In the morning, Eric borrowed Willa’s car to take into the city, telling her he had a job interview, which of course he didn’t. She was wary, but handed over her keys after she set up a carpool with a colleague whom, she stated, was definitely not ‘that invertebrate David Midthunder’.

  Eric loved being in Willa’s car: a 1977 Datsun 280Z Sunshine Yellow “Zap” edition. It smelled like her balsam shampoo and her glycerin soap and the natural cleaner she used for the interior. There was some kind of HVAC-related manual in the backseat, an empty iced coffee in the cup holder, and a Duran Duran CD (Eric guessed Rio) in the CD playe
r.

  In the city, Eric scoped out the building where Cynosure Promotions was located. This took a number of walks up and down the block, because all of the branding reflected the building’s anchor tenant, a ‘Parasitic Extraction’ company. Once he determined the building was, in fact, the right one, Eric waited across the street in the alley next to a grilled cheese sandwich restaurant. More than forty minutes later, a sleek silver Aston Martin pulled up to a spot in front, then a man who matched the photo of DZ from the Cynosure web site got out of the car and walked into the building.

  An Aston freaking Martin, he thought.

  So it wasn’t in the shop.

  Eric held his location until lunch, entertaining himself by obsessively re-imagining every interaction he had with Willa and Taffy during the past few days. DZ came out and walked a few city blocks to a department store. Eric followed him into a restaurant on the top floor, where DZ took a booth seat by himself. Then DZ made a few calls, and soon he had two women and one man sitting with him at the table.

  “Doesn’t like to be alone,” Eric said under his breath. He had been alone a lot lately. Even when he had been with people, or non-people like Rex, he still felt alone, except for the sponsor meetings at the school. For some crazy reason, even thinking about the meetings reassured him.

  DZ left the table. Eric waited a moment before following him through the store. He pulled his cap down lower and pushed up his fake glasses. Eric had dressed in madras pants, a green polo shirt, and a ridiculous green fabric belt with whales on it. He had thought, what would be the very last thing he would ever put on, then he hit the thrift stores to get it. Jamesville turned into a modest resort town during the ski season, and somehow he found at least one of what he needed. Some visitor’s crazy fashion phase was his advantage.

  Eric wasn’t accustomed to wearing disguises, but people recognized him now, from the articles, from the web videos. If anyone saw him and made a thing out of it, then DZ could notice. And this was probably the person who sent a helicopter after him at the Moo-ateria, who hacked his store discount card history, and who almost had him sent to a suspected terrorist containment center. Who sent mailers containing disconcertingly targeted personal information about his family to his family. The person who sent a spy plane to circle his bus.

  Eric needed to know if this DZ was actually responsible for all that, and why it was that important to him to screw with him so much. The man was a danger to Willa and Taffy – that much was clear by the mailers and the way he had Willa’s grocery delivery interrupted.

  He followed DZ into the SkyBoutique store and lingered in the corner of the store while DZ was greeted with a gauntlet of employees, who welcomed him with handshakes, high-fives, or slaps on the back. It was like Stan Lee wandering into a comic book store. He probably had an epic credit line with them, and used the hell out of it.

  Eric’s phone rang and he jammed his hand in his pocket to open the phone and make it shut up.

  “I need you to talk me down,” Rex said over the phone.

  “This is not a good time.” Eric spoke in a very low voice.

  One of the employees practically dragged DZ over to a robot on display. Eric moved closer and feigned interest in some kind of electronic golf thingamabob. He was glad there were no spare employees to bother him.

  “I’m close to possessing someone,” Rex said. “You’re my sponsor; talk me out of it.”

  “Since when do you adhere to the sponsor thing?” Eric whispered.

  “I thought I’d give it a try.”

  Eric had to quickly look in another direction when DZ raised his head and focused on something next to Eric. The employee pointed and they started to come over.

  “Crap,” Eric said.

  “I know,” Rex said. “I shouldn’t, but he’s perfect. He’s fit, he’s attractive to women, he’s got this great lifestyle. He wouldn’t be easy like you were –”

  “Excuse me?” Eric ducked at his own loud voice. He covered his mouth and the phone with his hand to muffle the sound even more. “I am not easy.” He tried to be nonchalant as he headed off to the back of the store toward a garage thing he found incredibly intriguing.

  “Oh, you were easy, all right,” Rex said.

  “Why the hell would you say that?” Eric said in a jaw-clenched whisper.

  “You stubborn son of a bitch,” Rex said. “You were fired, humiliated, and blacklisted. Even Willa began to doubt you, so yeah, you were easy. But damn, it’s not like I picked you out, said, ‘That’s the guy.’“

  “So?”

  “So you didn’t fight me at all.” Rex chuckled. “Your self-esteem was a joke.”

  DZ went up to the register, even though he wasn’t carrying anything. He gave them a credit card, signed, then left. The store probably delivered DZ’s purchases on a regular basis.

  “It’s always a mood lifter to talk to you, Rex, but I gotta go.” Eric shut the phone and put it back in his pocket.

  DZ stopped in another store similar to the one he just left and repeated almost exactly the same process. Eric worried; what if DZ noticed that the same guy was at the same store at the same times as he was? All Eric could do was throw himself into the role of independently wealthy gadget enthusiast. But then he was anxious about doing too good a job. What if rich gadget enthusiasts liked to talk shop in stores? What if DZ started a conversation with him? He couldn’t be Befuddled Gift-Buying Guy, because then DZ would want to play the expert and help him. Eric settled on Bored Guy, familiar with gadgets, comfortable financially, potentially annoying, capable of purchasing, but just browsing.

  DZ bought some things then left the second store, to Eric’s relief. DZ then stopped in a shop by the food court that stocked what seemed like every magazine and journal published on the planet. DZ bought three boxes of licorice candy, enough gum for a girl’s summer camp, and two of the sort of magazines that Taffy would read: Food Business Today and Modern Food Packaging. Eric’s heart clutched thinking of Taffy, and how she was growing up, disconnecting from him even more. His wife and daughter were both prickly, complicated people, which he wouldn’t change. But it made it harder to have an idea what they were thinking.

  DZ went into the food court and Eric followed closely. DZ stopped at a sandwich place and ordered an egg salad wrap. Taffy would be horrified. Taffy wouldn’t even want to be acquaintances with someone who would have anyone but their most trusted circle make that for them, especially at a mall food court. Eric had Taffy’s voice in his head: ‘Is he trying to kill himself?’

  He overheard the girl at the sandwich shop ask DZ if he wanted a Quantal Organic Yogurt with his sandwich.

  DZ said no, and recoiled with a grimace.

  Eric’s eyes widened and his breath caught. DZ recoiled. He wouldn’t eat his own client’s product, which indicated that DZ knew what was making Quantal Organic Yogurt customers act so strange. Maybe he was even responsible for it.

  Eric almost didn’t notice that DZ had sat down with his tray. While DZ ate his sandwich, Eric sat as far away in the court as possible while still staying within visual range.

  His phone rang again. “You’re not being a very good sponsor,” Rex said over the phone. “I’m going to tell the group during the next meeting.”

  “This notion plummets me into despair,” Eric said, not taking his eyes away from DZ.

  “You committed to being my sponsor.” Rex was petulant.

  “I did no such –”

  “And this is how it works,” Rex said. “I make the extraordinary effort of calling you when I want to engage in a behavior I know I shouldn’t be engaging in –”

  “First of all, I didn’t commit to being your sponsor. Second, how are you using the phone?”

  Rex sounded offended. “I can use your laptop. Why not the phone? Anyway, you’re supposed to tell me sponsor-type things that persuade me to disengage from said behavior,” Rex said. “Everyone wins.”

  DZ ate and read his magazine alone, in mark
ed contrast to his group meal earlier that day. Maybe buying all the stuff at the gadget stores took the edge off enough that DZ could eat by himself. It was nice to be the one watching for once. Eric felt like a research scientist observing a new species.

  “Fine. Don’t possess him. I forbid you.” Eric hung up again.

  DZ finished his sandwich and crumpled the wax paper. He took a sip of his drink, then stood and left, leaving the tray. Eric frowned. You were supposed to take your tray to the trash and leave it there. Asshole.

  Eric kept his head down but his eyes looking straight as DZ walked out of the food court. In front of Boomer Explosion, someone yelled “Eric!” and he froze, paralyzed with fear. Not an uncommon feeling. He pretended to window shop there, but glanced over his shoulder. DZ paused and looked around. The Eric someone had called to was across the walkway by the Clown Box. DZ kept walking and Eric wanted to throw up from anxiety.

  Finally, to Eric’s massive relief, but also dread at where he’d have to go next, DZ left the mall. He walked a couple of blocks, then entered an unnamed shop that Eric and Willa had walked by before. They had never seen anyone there, and wondered what the hell it sold and how it stayed open.

  Eric lingered by the front after DZ went in. His phone rang again, but this time it was set to vibrate. He took a few steps away from the shop.

  Rex began speaking in a hushed tone. “The call is coming from inside mysterious unnamed storefront!”

  “You were messing with me this whole time?” Eric said. “You were talking about the guy I’m –” he lowered his voice. “The guy I’m following?”

  “Uh, if you’re referring to a tall, hyperkinetic blond guy with a Black card, then yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in possessing him. He has a lot of toys, he took out three gorgeous women in the past seven days, and you should see his garage. I mean, wow. Does the Defense Department know about this dude?”

  Eric couldn’t see DZ inside and didn’t want to press his face up against the glass.

  “Can you see him right now?” Eric said.