It's A Wonderful Midlife Crisis (Good To The Last Death #1) - Robyn Peterman Page 0,43

could think of one… “When did you stop being a Death Counselor?”

Gram stared at the ceiling of her room for a long moment, then sighed. “A month ago. Been doin’ it from the nursing home. We have a little chapel here. Not a bad place to run the operation since so many croak at this place,” she said with a shrug. “And then one day, I stopped seeing the ghosts. I figured someone else had taken the job. I was relieved.” She laughed but it wasn’t joyful. “I shouldn’t have been. If I’d known they would come to you, I would have done something to stop it from happening.”

I cocked my head to the side and looked at her. The timing of her stopping and the ghosts stalking me was about right. “What in the world could you have done?”

“No clue,” she admitted. “Probably nothing. But I sure as heck would have told you about it. I’m just so dang sorry, Daisy girl.”

We both sat in silence for a few minutes. I was sorry too—sorry for her and sorry for me. All of this was so bizarre, it was difficult to wrap my head around it. If I hadn’t been living with dead people for the last month, I wouldn’t believe a word she’d just said and I’d think Gram had lost her mind.

“Did my mamma counsel the same way you did?” I asked. I knew it was hard for Gram to talk about my mom. I’d recognized her pain even when I’d been five. I hated even bringing it up, but I needed as much information as I could get as quickly as possible.

Gram sat silently for a few minutes and stared off into the distance. I wasn’t even sure if she’d heard my question. The fact that she seemed to be drifting away terrified me.

“Your mamma was not a good Death Counselor,” she said quietly, still staring at something I couldn’t see. “She got too involved.”

“She touched the dead too?” I asked.

Gram shook her head and brought her focus back to me. “No. Not as far as I know.”

“Can you define too involved?”

“I don’t rightly know,” she admitted. “I just felt it in my gut.”

“Okay,” I said, standing up and pacing her small room. “I’m not insane. The ghosts are real. I’m supposed to help them move on into the golden light that Sam went into.”

Gram cleared her throat and eyed me curiously. “You saw him go?”

“I did. Is that a no-no too?” I asked, feeling a headache coming on.

Gram shrugged and shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. “Never saw that once in my time as the Death Counselor. But Daisy…”

“Yes?”

“Not all people go into the light.”

I digested that information and sat back down. Sam had warned me not to go into the light or into the darkness. I wasn’t sure what I believed about the afterlife. As a small child after my mother’s death, I decided I believed in nothing. There was no sense whatsoever in my mom’s death. It wasn’t fair for a little girl to lose her mother. No loving God would have done that. I’d struggled with it for decades. Steve’s death brought it all roaring back.

The irony that I was helping people move on didn’t escape me at all. I had no real clue where they were going. I could only assume that the light was good and the darkness was not.

“So, I’m helping some people go to hell—if Hell even exists?” I questioned.

“You’re not helping people go to Heaven or Hell,” Gram explained. “The life they led has already determined that. You’re simply giving them peace before they move on.”

“Why?” I demanded, thinking all of this was ridiculously bizarre. “Why us?”

Gram shrugged but said nothing. She obviously didn’t know the answer. Not good. I didn’t think midlife crisis was supposed to hit until my fifties, but I’d have to say I definitely qualified right now.

“I’m going to go now, Gram,” I told her as I gently kissed her forehead. “I have to work and take Donna outside. This conversation isn’t over.”

Gram nodded and worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “Don’t try to save ’em, Daisy.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled.

Gram began to cry. She looked so small and fragile in her big bed that my heart literally lurched in my chest. I was upsetting her. It couldn’t be helped, but I felt awful.

“Don’t cry,” I whispered as I wrapped my arms around her and rocked her like