It's A Wonderful Midlife Crisis (Good To The Last Death #1) - Robyn Peterman Page 0,15

the other half translucent. Handless woman’s hand felt real to me, yet laughing dude couldn’t use his to remove a piece of bread.

Wait. Maybe he was gluten intolerant and needed me to take the bread off. Would the bread make him sick? Could dead people even freaking get sick? I could offer him a ham salad lettuce wrap instead. Or even better, I could skip my party and check myself into the psych ward at the hospital.

Or should I simply remove the top piece of bread so he would quit hissing and freaking out?

I chose the easiest path and removed the bread. I could swear laughing dude sighed with relief. However, he didn’t stop hissing. Now pointing frantically at the ham salad, his hissing grew louder. The game was getting weird.

Standing up and grabbing a spoon, I prepared to remove the ham salad from the bottom piece of bread—and then I froze. Laughing dude glanced up at me with a hopeful expression on his skeletal face.

Sitting down with a thud, I gripped the edge of the table and felt my entire body tingle.

“You’re trying to tell me something important,” I whispered.

Laughing dude nodded. Pointing at the ham salad, he continued to hiss. Maybe I didn’t need the Ouija board after all.

“Sssssssssssssssss.”

“Charades,” I suggested, feeling like an idiot and excited at the same time. “Do you know charades?”

He nodded.

Charades wouldn’t work. His motions were stilted and odd. Honestly, I was worried with all the frantic pointing at the ham that his entire arm might detach from his body. I didn’t have much superglue left after the hand surgery from earlier—certainly not enough to glue an arm back on.

“It’s the ham salad. Right?” I asked him.

Again, he nodded.

“You like ham salad?” I asked.

Laughing dude shook his head no and scrunched what was left of his nose.

“Neither do I,” I told him. “But it’s important?”

He nodded and hissed.

Breathing in slowly through my nose and blowing it out through my mouth, I closed my eyes and waited for some kind of divine intervention to help me figure out what the heck he wanted me to know.

What would laughing dude want me to know about him? What would be important to dead person?

His name. A person was no one without a name… simply a faceless entity.

“Your name is Ham?” I asked, confused. I suppose it could be a nickname. Unusual, but we were in the South. I’d heard far worse.

“Ssssssssss,” he hissed slowly, still pointing at the ham.

He was less frantic now. I was close.

“S. Ham?” I tried again. I figured the hissing meant S. Maybe.

Laughing dude shook his head no, but his smile grew so wide part of his jaw dropped off and hit the floor.

“I’m going to have to invest in some superglue,” I muttered as I picked up his jaw and handed it to him. “Keep this with you and don’t lose it. I’ll get some glue in the morning and fix you back…”

I stopped and slapped my hand to my forehead. I wasn’t great at games, but I was pretty sure I knew what he was trying to tell me.

“Sam,” I said. “Your name is Sam?”

He floated up to the ceiling and then shot across the room like a bullet, making sounds of joy—garbled and weird joy, but definitely joy.

He was no longer laughing dude who had my back when Stan was talking smack. He was Sam. Sam who just wanted to be known to someone.

“Sam,” I said as he flitted around the kitchen, floating in and out of furniture and cabinets with excitement. “I see you, Sam. You’re not invisible to me.”

Sam stopped and floated down in front of me. He had to be in his late eighties when he died. I vaguely remembered attending a funeral in town of someone named Sam about six months ago. He’d died of a heart attack and left behind a heartbroken, cute little-old-lady wife.

Turning away from Sam, I leaned on the refrigerator and pressed my cheek against the cold stainless steel. Abnormal didn’t even begin to describe what my life had become. I’d be hard-pressed to find a word that fit other than something wildly profane. Had I attended Sam’s funeral? Was that why he’d come to me?

It couldn’t be. I had at least fifty ghosts in residence as far as I could tell. I had not gone to that many funerals of people I didn’t know… at least I didn’t think I had.

Stop. I needed to stop. This thinking was all kinds