It's A Wonderful Midlife Crisis (Good To The Last Death #1) - Robyn Peterman Page 0,12

“A bad joke. I’m just going to leave now before I say something, you know… really stupid. So have a nice coffee and life,” I finished lamely and wondered if I could erase the last eight minutes and start over.

Sadly, life didn’t have a remote and I was stuck having to live with mortifying myself. I squinted my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. The smartest thing to do was quit my job now before I complimented his ass. However, I needed the salary so I did the second-best thing.

I ran.

I heard the Greek god call my name as I sprinted through the office toward the exit, but I didn’t look back. Today needed to be over, and I was wildly grateful to be working from home this week.

Maybe Clarissa would get her claws into… I suddenly realized I didn’t know his name. Whatever.

Hopefully Clarissa would nail him this week and he’d be damaged goods. No one wanted anything to do with Clarissa’s sloppy seconds.

Just as I expected, there were eight new ghosts sitting on my porch swing when I got home. Several looked familiar and had definitely been at the church this morning. I was curious how they knew where I lived, but figured there must be some kind of dead people hotline. Otherwise, how in the heck did they find me? I lived in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of town.

“Dead people hotline?” I muttered as I closed my eyes and groaned. Not only had I gone insane, I was rationalizing my crazy.

There were several partially skeletal faces peeking out of the windows of my house. Along with the dead group on the wraparound porch, I’d become a regular morgue.

Planting my hands on my hips and surveying the situation, I tried to figure out how to handle it. Maybe I’d call a meeting. It was my house after all and they were here uninvited. The very least they could do was to follow some damn rules.

“Okay, umm… people. We’re having a meeting. You have two minutes to show yourselves and bring your dead selves outside. Whoever decides not to join us is no longer welcome to squat on my property,” I said, using my outdoor voice so the inside interlopers would be sure to hear the invitation.

Slowly but surely, semi-transparent dead people began to gather on the porch and in the front yard. Holy hell, how many were there? I lost count after forty-two—mostly because they kind of faded in and out of each other. After I realized I’d counted the laughing dude from the Stan debacle three times, I gave up. It didn’t really matter how many had taken up residence at my house. They were here and it seemed I didn’t have much of a say about it.

“Can anyone here speak English… or umm… Spanish? I speak a tiny bit of Spanish and I know a few phrases in French. I took it in high school, but that was a while ago,” I called out and almost burst into hysterical laughter.

What was I doing? These people were dead. Sharing my skill—or lack thereof—of foreign languages from when I was in high school over twenty years ago with dead people meant I was crazier than Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch on national television.

I still wasn’t sure they were real. True insanity had taken over. It didn’t really matter at this point if they were real or I was imagining them. I could see them and I had glued a freaking hand back on this morning. They were real enough.

No one uttered a word. Fine. If they couldn’t speak English, they most certainly could understand it. I hoped.

“Okay,” I said, pacing the grass and keeping a lookout for anyone who might drive up. It wouldn’t do to let the cat out of the bag that I’d lost my mind. “Today’s my birthday.”

I was interrupted by what I could only interpret as some kind of garbled grunting congratulations. Pretty sure a few tried to clap, but their hands went right through each other. The sentiment was nice even if the reality was alarming. I decided to go with my gut here.

“Umm… thank you.” My need to be polite bordered on absurd and definitely embarrassing. “None of you are actually invited to the party. So I think it would be a great idea if you went to the movies or maybe took a walk this evening—a three- to four-hour walk. You know, to the graveyard