Page 28 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

“I have it for you now.” He brushed a kiss over my ear then pulled back and held up his phone. “Autopsy report. I sent it to your email.”

Well. Not what I was thinking. “You say the most romantic things.”

“I try.”

SEVEN

It was amazingwhat I could accomplish when I was actively avoiding something unpleasant.

What had been a vague conversation between me and Jake about low cost ways to update our hall bathroom in our new house suddenly became a trip to the big box hardware store and ordering peel and stick wallpaper and bath towels for overnight delivery.

All because I didn’t want to read James Kwaitkowski’s autopsy report that Jake had given me.

I wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe it had to do with talking to Patricia Jackson’s bagged ghost earlier that day. Maybe because I was tired of the changing rules from the afterlife (like seriously, what the heck was a Class A spirit?) or the fact that James couldn’t even see me.

But whatever the reason, every time I thought about opening my email my stomach tightened and I got restless.

So I was dressed in one of Jake’s old T-shirts that had grease stains on it and a pair of my ancient leggings. I was dipping a rag into a bucket of hot water to wash the bathroom walls in preparation for paint and wallpaper.

I had no idea what I was doing.

But I was armed with creative avoidance, YouTube videos, and a vision of what our burgundy and pink bathroom could become.

Jake’s first reaction to the square pink tiles, pink toilet and sink, and pink and ivory floor was “we’ll have to rip this out at some point” but I had immediately protested. This was an original nineteen-fifties “Mamie Pink” bathroom, inspired by President Eisenhower’s wife Mamie and her pink White House bathroom. The heavy burgundy paint in full gloss on the walls above it was competing with the soft warmth of the pink and the wallpaper border at the ceiling was a nineties paisley clash, but otherwise I loved the actual tile. There was a built-in toothbrush holder that deserved to exist another seventy years.

In my opinion, anyway, and I dared anyone to fight me on it.

I just had to clean eighteen miles of grout and remove the wallpaper border.

In my previous house I had painted my kitchen and tackled some basic home maintenance but otherwise I had bought it fully renovated.

In my impatience to take on the bathroom project with next to no planning and zero experience, I had taken a bold and risky move—I’d called my mother over.

She had wallpapered and stenciled every single inch of my massive childhood home in her energetic thirties. She had faux painted and lime washed and schmeared brick and rag rolled her way from room to room until there was nothing left.

Then she’d moved on to handcrafted dried floral arrangements and tiling a backsplash and using a peacock feather and gold metallic spray paint to turn the powder room into a teal and gold wonder. Finally, my father had said enough when she had tried to do a full floor-to-ceiling wall of chintz drapery in our windowless basement.

It was his one last bastion of floral-free safety and he put his foot down at chintz.

The no-florals-in-the-man-cave rule hadn’t extended to the laundry room though and she’d done a mosaic tile on the utility tub in the shape of orchids.

I figured I was in good hands.

“We could paint a stencil pattern on this tile,” she said to me as she used an old toothbrush and cleaner to scrub the grout. “Since you can’t tear it out.”

I was a little surprised. Lately, since her divorce from my father, she’d been in a minimalist era, with a very beige on beige condo and eighties inspired sherpa barrel chairs.

“Hmm,” I said, noncommittally because my answer was no. But you didn’t just say no to my mother unless you were prepared to be cross-examined.

“Did I mention Alyssa got married?” I asked my mom, striving for casual as I scrubbed the walls and worked up a sweat.

“Married? To who? Not that jackass the two of you went to high school with that she was seeing for awhile, I hope.”

“No, fortunately it’s not Michael.” Alyssa had briefly dated her high school bully after he’d expressed shock and awe at her adult transformation from chubby teen to pin up siren. My mother was right—definitely a jackass.

“No, it’s Lawson Hill. He’s the sheriff in Ashtabula County. It was, uh, a very quick courtship and Jake said you might know him. I’m just curious if I should suggest Alyssa get a quickie divorce or if I should let her ride this out.”

Mom paused in her scrubbing and eyed the bristles of the toothbrush. She gingerly picked a loose bristle off and tossed it in the sink. “I’ve met him a few times. He’s normal enough, as far as normal goes. I mean, what is really normal anymore? Goodlooking, well spoken. She could definitely do worse. It’s a mess out there.”

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