Page 36 of The Dead Romantics

That struck a nerve. “Well,Ihave time, so I’ll do all of them.”

My younger sister rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to doallof them. I just meant—”

“You don’t have time, I get it.”

She threw up her hands. “Sure! Whatever! Do it yourself. Florence Day, always being the lone hero!”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it—”

“Girls,” Mom interrupted in her steady, soft voice. Alice and I both sank back into the booth. “Fighting about this won’t solve anything.”

No, but I wasn’t the one picking the fights. I began to say as much, when Carver checked his smart watch and said, “Karen’s supposed to come by with Dad’s finances in a few. Want to go ahead and head over there, Mom?”

“If we must,” Mom sighed. “Xavier could’ve at least given us ahinton how to go about the Elvis one...”

Yes, but I’d figure it out.

I wanted to ask about the lawyer, and the finances—I hadn’t heard anything about a meeting, but it seemed like my siblings had. Maybe they didn’t want me to be a part of it, or I’d missed the memo, or... I didn’t know. A myriad of things.

But whatever—I tried to brush off the feeling that I was missing out on something that I should’ve been a part of as I grabbed the ticket for the bill.

“Go on, I’ll pay,” I said. “I think it’s my turn, anyway.”

My family scooted out of the booth and started talking about the funeral and how widely to send out the invitations. To the relatives in the Lowcountry, and the poker club, and most of Mairmont (including the mayor, Fetch, a bubbly golden retriever who had won reelection three times).

Mom sighed as she followed Alice and Carver out of the WaHo. “I wonder if it would be frowned upon to dance with his portrait at the wake? You know the picture—him in the dovetail tuxedo? So dashing.”

“No,” Carver and Alice replied, and the door chime dinged as they left.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. I was still angry with Alice—she was hurting, we all were—but I missed them. I missed mornings like this, and bad soggy waffles, and I missed Dad.

I didn’t think missing him would feel so lonely, though.

I leaned on the counter, beside a guy muttering to himself—small towns, they always had at least one weird guy—and handed the cashier a twenty. She smiled and said, “You must be Florence!”

The man beside me went rigid.

“Your dad comes here every Saturday,” the cashier went on. “Always orders the same thing—the All-Star with extra hash browns. Scattered, smothered, and covered. Where is the old man today?”

“He passed away the other night,” I said, and the man glanced over. We locked eyes. Dark hair, brown eyes, an angular face. He didn’t have anything in front of him—no food or coffee—and no one seemed to pay him any attention. And that was a feat when you sat up at the counter at a Waffle House. You had to be either highly disliked or—

Or not really there.

And worse yet, I recognized his dark hair and navy trousers and the articulate way he had rolled up his sleeves tightly to his elbows. He looked like he could’ve been a painting of a forlorn businessman...

... of the slightly dead variety.

I paled.

“M-Miss Day?” Benji Andor asked.

The cashier’s smile faltered. “Oh, no. I’m so sorry to hear about your father—”

Suddenly, the jukebox gave a loud screech, and the lightsflickered with a start. It picked a random album and inserted it into the player. The neon lit up, and a song crackled from the forty-year-old speakers.

I winced. And whispered, “Stop it.”

His wide eyes darted to the jukebox, then back to me. “I—that’s not me.”

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