I was almost sad when Leta came back a week later to fetch him.
“We never settled on a price,” she said.
I waved my hand at her. “I was happy to do it.”
She shook her head, curls bouncing around her young girl’s shoulders.
“You shouldn’t give away your time, or you won’t be a good businesswoman. That’s what my manager always used to say, and I took it to heart.”
No kidding. I’d looked her up on the internet. Leta James had died in her sleep at the age of sixty-eight. She’d stopped acting in her twenties, when she’d used a bunch of the money she’d earned to start a nonprofit organization that helped former child stars who’d fallen on hard times. She’d helped a whole lot of people during her lifetime.
“You expanded my world,” I said. “We can call it even, okay?”
Besides, I got to have a pet for a week that didn’t make Sammy sneeze or make my mom threaten me with mushroom soup.
I thought that was the end of my pet sitting business, but Leta really did know a lot of former child stars who were now ghosts, and they all seemed to have pets who needed temporary companionship. She passed my business card on to each and every one of them.
Over the next few weeks I pet-sat ghostly dogs, rabbits, rats, mice, hamsters (complete with cages with squeaky wheels), and one tarantula while their owners went on walkabout to do whatever things ghostly kids did when they needed to be ghostly adults. I almost said no to the tarantula—spiders squick me out—but it stayed in its glass cage and didn’t do much of anything until I played U2 on my cell. It danced to U2.
Stacy came over a few times while I was pet sitting, but other than feeling a slight chill, she never noticed that I had a ghostly animal in my room. Neither did my mom or dad or Sammy.
Until Howie Love showed up with his Siamese cat.
That cat ruined the whole thing.
By this time I’d figured out where I’d made my mistake.
I’d wished on a shooting star. The one on my business card.
I’d said that I really wished it had worked.
Of course, by “it” I’d meant attracting Zach’s attention, but whoever was in charge of granting wishes apparently wanted to teach me a lesson about using “it” instead of a more definite noun. So the “it” that had worked was my business—pet sitting for the stars.
Whoever was in charge of granting wishes also had a wicked sense of humor, since all the stars I was pet sitting for were dead. At least they were all nice and their pets were well-behaved, even the dogs. The most annoying was a Saint Bernard who wanted to sleep on the bed with me. Thank goodness ghostly Saint Bernards don’t weigh what real life Saint Bernards weigh, or it might have broken my bed. I’m not sure I could have explained that.
My streak of good, if weird, luck ran out when Howie Love showed up one morning before the crack of dawn. My alarm hadn’t even gone off yet.
“Hello, beautiful!” he said. “How’s it shaking?”
I grunted and opened one eye. Thanks to the glow from my cell phone charger, I could sort of see the ghostly kid’s outline.
“It should still be sleeping,” I said.
“Well, it’s morning somewhere. I’ve kind of lost track since I’ve been...well, you know.”
“Dead?” I asked.
I’m not normally that blunt with the ghosts, but most of them show up at reasonable hours, not at...
I thumbed on my cell and peered at the time. Good lord, it was four in the morning! No wonder I was cranky.
“Got it in one.” He put his hands on his hips and struck a Peter Pan pose. “Let me introduce myself, since you’re obviously too young to recognize me. I’m Howie Love, the star of—”
“Love’s Parade,” I said. I’d been studying up on child stars of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. “Aired from 1963 to 1966, when it went off the air due to your untimely death in a plane crash.”
He winced at that, and I felt a little bad. After all, Howie Love had still been a child when he died. He’d never even gone to high school, much less gotten the chance to live an adult life.
“I need you to watch my cat, Adeline,” he said.
I lifted my head up high enough to see a cat rubbing up against his ankles.
“I don’t do cats,” I said. “My brother’s allergic.”
I didn’t know for sure if ghost cats would make Sammy sneeze like real cats did, but I wasn’t about to chance it.
“You’ll be fine,” Howie said. “She’s a sweetheart. She’ll stay in here, your brother will stay out there, and everything will be hunky dory. See you in a week, beautiful!”
He gave me a jaunty salute with one hand and vanished, leaving the cat behind.
I stared at Adeline. She stared at me, the very tip of her tail twitching.
Well, I’d always wanted a cat. “Come here, sweetie,” I said, holding out a hand to her.
My fingers were getting cold by the time Adeline decided to come see me. She sniffed my fingers, rubbed into my hand—and bit me.
“Crap!”
I jerked my hand away and inspected my fingers. No blood, but they sure hurt.
Adeline, meanwhile, had jumped on top of my desk where she sat gazing at me with a very self-satisfied expression.
I turned on my cell phone to get a little more light, and that’s when I noticed she was a Siamese. Stacy’s aunt had a Siamese, which Stacy said wasn’t really a cat at all but a bad-tempered diva in disguise.
I sighed. This was going to be a very long week.
I’d underestimated exactly how bad pet sitting a ghostly Siamese cat would be. You know the bad gremlins in that old movie? The ones who wreak havoc at Christmastime? Well, imagine a ghostly cat doing that kind of damage, and you’ll begin to get an idea of what Adeline did to my house.
Every other ghost pet I’d watched while their owners were off doing ghostly stuff at least stayed in my room. Adeline apparently didn’t acknowledge boundaries. She bounded around the living room, bouncing from floor to sofa to the top of the flat screen TV on legs that must have been made from springs not ectoplasm, or whatever makes up ghosts. She knocked over water glasses and pawed coffee mugs off the dining room table. She pulled books off bookcases and swatted the mail off the kitchen counter.
I caught what I could and took the blame for what I couldn’t. My parents must have thought their semi-graceful daughter had turned into a total klutz, and I wouldn’t have blamed them if they’d banished me to my room.
At least she didn’t make Sammy sneeze. But after three days of trying to cover for Howie’s cat, I was about ready to pull my hair out. At least I only had four more days until Howie came back and claimed the cat from hell. If this was the worst it would get, I could handle it.
You’d think I’d have learned never to tempt fate like that.
On the morning of the fourth day, Adeline woke me up by yowling.
Loudly.
I heard a crash in my parents’ bedroom, and then my mom ask, “Did you hear something?”
They could hear her!
“Quiet,” I said to Adeline.
She yowled louder. I could almost swear she was smiling.
My parents’ door squeaked open. I buried my head under my blankets and pretended to be asleep.
Sure enough, my mom opened the door to my room a minute later.
“Perri?” she asked. “Do you have a cat in here?”
I crossed my fingers beneath the blankets before I poked my head out. Silly superstition, but considering the fact that ghosts are real and I was about to lie to my mom, I figured it wouldn’t hurt.
“Huh?” I asked, doing my best impersonation of a sleepy teenager.
“A cat. I heard a cat. Your dad heard it too.”
“Probably outside,” I said.
Mom gave my room the once over. She’d turned on the light in the hall, and I could see Adeline sitting regally on my desk in her favorite spot. Thankfully Mom didn’t see her, and for
once, Adeline kept her mouth shut.
“You’re probably right,” mom said. “But you know the rule about cats.”
“I do,” I said. “No cats unless I want to kill my brother.”
“Funny girl,” she said, but at least she was smiling. No mushroom soup for me. Not yet, anyway.
“Sorry I bothered you,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
She shut my bedroom door and the light in the hallway went out. I listened until I heard the door to my parents’ room click shut, then I looked at Adeline.
“I’m sorry Howie left you with me. I know you don’t like it, but can you do me a favor and be a good kitty for just a few more days?”
To my amazement, Adeline curled up on my desk, stretched out her front legs, paws crossed at the ankle, and started to purr.
I went back to sleep thinking things might actually work out.
I should have known better.
The next day I got home from school and found a strange woman sitting on the living room sofa next to my mom.
“There’s a ghost in our house,” Mom said. “I know what you’re going to say, that there’s no such things as ghosts, but I’m telling you, Perri, we have a ghost.”
Oh, crap.
I almost asked her what Adeline did now, but I stopped myself just in time. I wasn’t supposed to know about ghosts, after all, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to know the ghost causing all the problems.
“What happened?” I asked instead.
Mom just shook her head at me—she was as pale as a ghost herself—and looked toward the woman sitting next to her.
“She heard the cat again, only this time it was right next to her but nothing was there,” the woman said. “Then her coffee cup slid off the table all by itself.”
Double crap.
I suppose I should have counted myself lucky that Adeline hadn’t acted up before now while I was at school. I just hoped she wouldn’t do anything while my mom’s friend was here.
The woman patted my mom’s hand. “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Take care of it? That didn’t sound good. “How?” I asked.
“With magic, of course,” the woman said.
“Magic?”
The word came out a little strangled. I was about to say I didn’t believe in magic, but then again, I’d been pet sitting ghosts because I’d wished on a shooting star, and if that wasn’t magic, I didn’t know what was.
Wait a minute.
I’d wished on the shooting star on my business card. The logo that Grady had designed “with a little magic.”
“You don’t happen to have a son named Grady, do you?” I asked the woman.
“Yes.” The woman smiled, and it was the same smile I’d seen on Grady’s face after he’d helped me with my logo. “That’s how we met, your mother and I. At a PTA function back when you kids were little.”
I didn’t remember Grady from back then, but when I was younger, boys were mostly annoying.
Unlike now? When they put a spell on your business cards without you knowing?
“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to make a call.”
I left my mom and Grady’s mother in the living room while I went to my room to call a certain meddlesome boy who’d saddled me with the weirdest job ever.
Adeline was curled up on my desk sound asleep. She actually looked cute when she was sleeping.
Grady answered my call on the second ring.
“How could you!” I said before he even finished saying hello. “Do you have any idea what your little ‘design magic’ has turned my life into?”
“Um...”
“I have ghosts, Grady. They leave their pets with me, which hasn’t turned out too badly, except for the cat. But now your mother’s over here telling my mother she can get rid of the ghosts. And while that doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, it shouldn’t be a thing at all because things like that aren’t supposed to exist. Except they do. And I’ll miss it if it all goes away.”
It wasn’t until I said it that I realized it was true. I would miss the ghosts if Grady’s mother managed to get rid of them.
There was a long silence before Grady finally responded. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to give you a chance to get what you wanted.”
“Why in the world would you ever think I wanted ghosts?”
“I didn’t.” He paused, and then he sighed. “I wanted to give you a chance with Zach.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m just learning the stuff my mom’s side of the family can do,” he said. “I probably blew it.”
“No, it’s my fault. I wasn’t exactly specific with my wish. Not that I knew I was making one.” I bit my lip and looked at the sleeping ghost cat. “I’ll do better next time, but for now, can we please not send the ghosts away? I promise to tell you all about it later, but I need you to tell your mom the ghost isn’t a bad one. It won’t hurt anyone, and it’ll be leaving on its own really soon so she doesn’t need to do anything.”
“Sure. Absolutely. Let me call her and I’ll call you back.”
I hung up. I thought about Howie Love and tried to remember what he looked like.
“I need you to come get your cat,” I said. “She misses you.”
I wasn’t sure I could reach him. It wasn’t like the ghosts had cell phones I could call.
“My mom’s going to try to send her away, and if she’s not with you, I’m not sure where she’ll end up. Please, Howie. You need to come get her.”
I heard an unfamiliar ring tone sound from the living room. Grady calling his mother, or at least I hoped so.
An odd tension crept into the air, and Adeline raised her head. Her ears flattened back against her skull and she hissed.
Oh, no. Grady’s mom’s magic must be beginning to work. He must not have gotten to her in time.
“C’mon, Howie,” I said.
Adeline yowled, and then Howie materialized in my room.
Or he tried to. Whatever magic Grady’s mom was using, it was preventing Howie from coming in my room, too.
He looked scared. And sad. Right then he wasn’t the ghost of a spoiled Hollywood child star. He was just a little boy who was about to lose the only companion he had in the afterlife.
I needed to do something. Come clean to my mom and tell her what I’d been up to. Beg her to stop long enough for Howie to get his cat. I was ready to tell her I’d eat mushroom soup for a month to make that happen.
And then the tension was gone. Just like that. It snapped out of existence like it had never happened.
“Adeline!” Howie cried.
He finished materializing and grabbed his cat off my desk. He hugged her tight, and she rubbed her face against his. I’d never seen two ghosts so happy in my life.
“Thank you for calling me,” he said. “You’re the best, beautiful.”
And with that, they were gone.
When I went back into the living room, Mom was smiling and some of the color had come back to her face.
“It worked,” she said. “The ghost is gone.”
Grady’s mom gave me a knowing smile before she turned her attention to my mom. “Yes, it did. But you can always call me if it happens again.”
“It won’t,” I said.
My mom gave me a funny look.
“I mean, it probably won’t. Right? One and done?”
“I certainly hope so,” Mom said. “Once was definitely enough.”
Grady and I had a long talk about wishes and magic and ghosts, and then we went to Starbucks for mocha frappuccinos.
That turned out to be our first date.
It’s kind of trippy dating someone who’s learning magic from his mom’s side of the family. So far he’s lit candles without a match and lifted a pencil off the table without touching it, but he’s promised not to do any more wishing spells. Those things can be dangerous if you’re not careful.
As for me, I
’m still pet sitting ghostly pets for ghostly child stars. Grady’s mom stopped whatever she was doing before it banned all ghosts from our house. None of my customers since Howie have tried to bring me a cat to watch, so I guess Howie spread the word that my house is a cat-free zone. I’m learning how to communicate better with my clients. Incorporated it into my business plan, as Zach would say.
When he’s not dating one of the other guys in the Young Entrepreneurs Club, that is. Guess that’s why he never seemed to notice me.
I’m not sure where my relationship with Grady is headed, but I did learn one important thing.
Make that two.
He can see ghosts, and he likes pets.
Sounds just about perfect to me.
Family, Fair and True
Dayle A. Dermatis
“Family, Fair and True,” marks Dayle A. Dermatis’s thirteenth appearance in Fiction River. She’ll have even more stories in upcoming issues, and she will add her editing skills to our roster with the Doorways to Enchantment volume, which will appear later this year. She is the mastermind behind the Uncollected Anthology project. Her latest novel is a snarky urban fantasy Ghosted. For a free story every month, sign up for her newsletter at DayleDermatis.com.
Dayle reached into her own life for this family-oriented tale. Best to let her tell it:
“Growing up, I felt different from my family—I was the only avid reader, the only one interested in fantasy and science fiction, the only one passionate about music—and long believed I was a changeling. (The clear family resemblance had to have been a coincidence.) I’ve since met others who felt the same way back then. But who doesn’t want to believe they’re special—a princess in exile, perhaps, or an untrained wizard waiting for that owl with a message?”
“Family, Fair and True,” combines changelings and wishes into something quite unexpected.
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