slid under the covers, conscious of the house’s ever-present cold, and turned toward Angel, cuddling the kitten.
“What?” Angel asked, as Tucker fought to keep his eyes open.
“I’ve got nothing,” Tucker mumbled. “I mean, no reply to that. Just… don’t go anywhere when I sleep, okay? With the Greenaways in the house, stay here. It would suck if Andy decided to perform an exorcism or something because he wanted to get in my pants.”
“You two could perpetrate coitus right here, and I wouldn’t be able to stop you,” Angel said, his stiff voice indicating he didn’t think this was a wonderful idea.
“You totally just did,” Tucker said, laughing at the picture in his head. “It’ll never happen. Night, Angel.”
“Day, Tucker.”
Tucker’s lips twitched, but he was too tired for the comeback.
RAE WAS there with soup that evening, and a cribbage board. Her younger children—aged ten, fourteen, and seventeen—played three-fouls-out softball as the sun went down, and Tucker lay on his side and watched them moving in and among the spirits as they embarked upon their stately waltz on his lawn.
“What do you see?” Rae asked, pushing her perpetually fuzzy hair out of her eyes.
“Tilda should go into pro softball,” Tucker responded. The teenaged girl was sturdy, muscular, and determined. She could pop a fly ball gently up so her younger sister, Coral, could catch it, or level a haymaker at Murphy, her brother, to get him back for being a snot.
“That’s not what your face says,” Rae observed, shuffling the cards. “You look more concerned than that.”
Tucker closed his eyes as a gentleman ghost with a mustache and a leer walked through the oldest girl. Tilda shivered, looked around, and popped up another ball—but Tucker had seen it. She’d responded.
“This house is no place for children,” Tucker said bleakly.
“Bullshit,” Rae said, dealing. “Children are needed here to drive out the ghosts.”
Tucker shot a surprised look at her. “Andy thinks you don’t believe in the ghosts.”
“And that is absolutely stupid, since Andover got his witchiness from my side of the family,” Rae said calmly. “His father told him there was no such thing as ghosts and that Angel was a product of the old woman’s imagination. Ghosts scare Josh, you know.” Of course he knew.
“Ghosts scare me,” Tucker said, shuddering. On the lawn, Coral gave up on softball and went to play that game with the stick and the hoop. Except she was playing the game with little girls who had died over a century before. Tucker whimpered, and Rae looked over her shoulder.
“Coral’s the witchiest one of the four,” Rae told him sagely. “Andy is so damned jealous it’s not even funny. He kept trying to bring her over here when Ruth was alive so she could tell him what Angel looked like.”
Tucker grunted.
Rae gestured for him to make his play, one eyebrow cocked in amusement. “What?”
Tucker lay down his card and moved his peg and finally relented under her no-bullshit mom-gaze. “He probably thought Angel was hot and was trying to get supernaturally laid.”
Rae tilted back her head and laughed. “Well, I did try to pawn him off on you the first day we met.”
“He’s pretty persistent,” Tucker told her.
“He comes by it honestly.” Rae winked, and Tucker remembered her insistence that he leave so she and her husband could have their no-kids-in-the-house date. Well, the family wasn’t one for hiding, that was for sure. Rae sobered. “He really needs to get out of here,” she said softly. “He’s gotten accepted into Sac State, and I’m pretty sure he could get a job down there to feed himself, but it’s housing that’s killing us. I mean, if he was coming on to you when you could barely move, you know the boy needs to go have himself some adventures, right?”
Tucker nodded, thinking about his apartment.
And in spite of not having the gonna-get-laid “pull,” he felt a little pop in his chest.
“He could always take my apartment down in Sac,” Tucker said without thinking. “I was going to give up the lease, but it’s rent-controlled and sort of a steal. There’s no reason for me to give it up now.”
Rae frowned and then played her card. “Hon, you’re awfully tired. I’m not even sure we should let you up tomorrow—”
“You have to,” Tucker said weakly. “Tomorrow I get up and we go move me out and Andy in. The next day, I can start stripping the floors and the wallpaper, and the next day….”
Crap. He couldn’t tell her his plan about moving