“Yeah?”
“Bradley, do I ever have fun?”
There was a pause as he tried to figure out what I was getting at. He picked the dirty option. “Violet, I have the kids. We can’t do that tonight.”
“Not that kind of fun. Another kind. Any other kind.”
He sounded happy that he had an answer. “Oh. Sure you do. Remember when we took the kids to Tall Tale Gardens?”
We’d done that a few weeks ago, on the last weekend of summer. Bradley had his kids, and we had taken them to Tall Tale Gardens,a local children’s park that had playgrounds, cheerful music piped over speakers, a high school kid in a Winnie the Pooh costume, and climbable statues of storybook figures like Humpty Dumpty and the Big Bad Wolf. Lance was too old for it, but he’d had fun anyway, mostly because the younger kids had flocked to him and because we’d fed him junk food. Amy had had so much fun that she’d cried when we finally pried her off Humpty Dumpty at dinnertime. She’d fallen asleep sixty seconds later in the car. It had been a good day.
“I knew Dodie was wrong,” I said.
“Why,” Bradley asked with the logic that he was often capable of, “do you ever listen to Dodie?”
“I don’t know. Do you have the kids at Thanksgiving?”
“No. I’m going to see Dad in Fell.”
“Okay, I’ll go with Lisette to Vail’s.” I didn’t mind trips to the Fell house anymore. Vail’s renovations were nice. The ghosts were gone. On the last trip, I’d made time to visit Alice McMurtry’s grave and put flowers on it. Then I’d visited Martin Peabody’s grave and done the same. Finally, I’d located the grave of the unknown man Bradley and I had found in the storage unit. He’d been cremated and given a small plaque by the city. I had put flowers there, too.
I didn’t know how Sister had wielded power over them, how she’d made them do her bidding. I would never know. But none of them had appeared to me again in my visits to Fell. I could only hope that with Sister gone, they were forever at rest.
“I’m glad you’ll be in Fell,” Bradley said. “I need someone to talk to besides Dad.”
“You can stay with us if you’d rather get away from Gus.”
“Vail hates me,” Bradley pointed out.
“He does,” I agreed.
“If we get married, he’ll be mad.”
“Good thing we don’t have to worry about his feelings because we’re not getting married.”
Bradley made ahasound that said he didn’t believe it. “We’ll see.”
“Never,” I said.
“Next year,” he replied, confident.
This was how it was. I gave myself credit that I hadn’t given in right away. I made Bradley wait months, but I had my reasons. I needed to get my life together, and so did he. While I wrapped up my life in Long Island, Bradley had moved out of Gus’s; rented an apartment half an hour from his kids in Vermont, where he’d lived before the divorce; and gotten a job as a supervisor at a wool factory.
Still, Lisette came first for me, and if she didn’t like Bradley, I would have been done with him. But in a completely upside-down turn of events, Bradley Pine and my wild-child daughter got along just fine. They liked the same soapy TV shows and bad action movies. Bradley had taught her the basics of driving this summer, even though he wasn’t supposed to, and had let her practice in his car. Bradley knew about the ghosts, about what happened with Sister—things Lisette hadn’t been able to tell her own father—and it didn’t spook him.
Lisette hadn’t spent much time with Bradley’s kids yet, but to them, Lisette was the coolest person on the planet. She’d probably warm up, since they fed her ego.
Still, I wasn’t going to marry Bradley Pine. The idea was insane.
“Forget about that,” I told him. “Let’s do something fun tonight. Let’s take the kids for a movie and ice cream.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” Bradley said loudly. “Did you say a movie and ice cream?”
A chorus of shouts behind him said that they’d heard him.
“A movie with popcorn,” I said, matching his loud tone.
“What did you say?” He gave a dramatic pause. “Did you say a movie with popcorn?”
