“She’s cutting back on sugar, remember?” booms Bulan from deep in the shelving. “Now focus on me again, Sabby. I hate this room. Hate it! Remind me why I can’t sleep in the corner anymore?”
I place my hands on my hips. “Because I’ve seen your whole body. It’s too creepy sharing a room now.”
“Well, I’m not bringing him out of storage,” Bulan replies, his miffed tone muffled. “Every minute I have to wear that torso and legs, I lose a minute of immortality.”
“And I lose the opportunity for an extra pair of hands at my weddings. But you don’t see me complaining, do you?”
Bulan emerges from the back of the cupboard, nosing forward a tiny key chain with a house key and a whale. This is at least the second whale we’ve unearthed today.
Grandma Rose, did they mean something to you? Please,pleasedon’t force me into asking Matilda. Just because I’m living here, it doesn’t mean I want your friends. I’ll choose my own weirdos, thanks.
“Fine,” says Bulan. “My one request is this: if I must share a wall with Mandy, I request you install soundproofing. Lest I hear unspeakable things.”
“You won’t,” I promise. “Rochester is not sleeping over, ever.”
Mandy gasps. “But Sabby! You let Hanry stay over!”
“On the couch, for one night. Before he left for his cross-continentalEat Pray Lovetrip. I’m not a monster.”
“You made out with him!”
“So what?”
Popping her pinkened hands out from behind her back and shaking them with distress, Mandy cries, “Rochie will just linger outside all night, then! It’ll be TRAGIC!”
“He isn’t a stray dog. He can get an apartment of his own if he’s goingto keep acting so besotted with you. Now, listen, Serious Mandy—” The nickname gets her attention. She catches her breath and makes her back go ramrod straight as I remind her: “We have over twenty weddings booked over the next twelve months, and after the show we put on in Fairy, we’ve got a reputation. We’ve got to stay on our game. No more winging it.”
“Right,” says Serious Mandy.
“Also, no more running cheap,” Bulan adds. Since I’ve given up on accounting, I’ve been cross-training Bulan to handle our shop bookkeeping. It turns out he has a knack for keeping track of things. Which is ironic for someone missing 80 percent of their body composition, unless you think about it: he has more reason than most to understand how every little bit matters.
That said, I’m not ready to give up full ownership of our financial records. Old habits die hard.
Speaking of expenses: I’ve been in touch with Baldy about how to make my paranormal business quasi-legal. Thanks to his questionable lack of integrity, and a solid start-up investment from Queen Mab, Spüktacular Weddings, LLC seems set to straddle both the human and the paranormal worlds with success.
“Did Baldy seem distracted yesterday?” I ask Mandy as she peruses the kitchen in a transparent search for sugar. I’m clearing out the pantry, which puts the two of us in a favorably symbiotic state. “When we went to his office to close the estate, did he seem frazzled to you?”
“He did! I think it’s the gnomes.”
Ohhh. Shit. “I forgot to take those off him again, didn’t I.”
“I thought you left them on purpose,” says Mandy. She unpops a cork from a jar and sniffs it. “Oh, look, another whale key chain.”
As the three of us begin removing Grandma’s crap in earnest, making a competition of who can find the most inexplicably hidden whales, I mentally rummage through the last two weeks. It was a small ordeal moving out of Jane’s apartment and getting my room sublet. What else might I have missed on my set-life-back-to-rights-in-Salem to-do list? For one thing, I need to apply for my sale license at the countyoffice and call the floral wholesaler for the mermaids’ wedding. Since there’s been a change to the brides’ budget, I have to adjust my specialty orders. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll meet some elves for a forager-themed wedding food tasting. Do I need to follow up with their caterer? Or their arborist? No, it’s something else…
Finally, it strikes me: Mom. I need to call Mom. Because it’s Friday, and although we haven’t managed to talk for two months now, I can’t bring myself to stop trying. It’s a daughter’s duty and all that.
It takes her ages to pick up.
“Sabby, I’m kind of busy,” she says before I can get a word in edgewise. “Can you call me back?”
Who knows how long it’ll take before we connect again? I’ll have to get right into it.
“Mom,” I say. “I’ve resigned from EFG.”
She barely misses a beat. “Really?”
“Yes. I’ve decided I don’t want the 2.5 kids, the suburbs house, the normal life.”
