CHAPTER 10

WHEN ANNIE RETURNED TO THE KITCHEN TO POUR HERSELF A RESTORATIVE GLASS OF MERLOT, DINA WAS OUT WALKING CURLY. Before she got to the counter, however, the temperature dropped about twenty degrees. Annie shivered as the distinctive whorl of Marlboro smoke rose from the middle of the kitchen table and the ghost of her mother materialized before her, as she had been doing at will for a long time.

“Mom?” Annie said.

“Who else?” Brenda Flood was wearing a suit from the 1960s with an ice blue velvet Lily Dache hat that Annie knew for a fact was in a box somewhere in her closet. Whenever her mother’s spirit appeared from nowhere like this, her face and hair were never fully realized, but Annie could always tell her mood by the way she lifted her hand, dragged deeply on her phantom cigarette, and shook her head disapprovingly just the way she had in life.

“Annie, you look terrible,” she said now.

Coming from someone who’d been dead for almost eighteen years, it seemed a pretty harsh assessment.

“Mom,” Annie repeated, and tears came to her eyes because even now her mother was a constant irritation. The woman hadn’t mellowed one little bit in death.

Annie remembered the first time the spirit had visited her. Brenda had been dead a month, and baby Maggie was only two weeks old. Annie was breast-feeding the newborn in the middle of the night, watching the city lights out the window, and thinking—at that very moment—how terrible it was that her precious daughter would never know her grandmother. Suddenly it got chilly in the room, and Annie smelled smoke. Then her mother appeared in her nightgown. Annie had been so frightened that she almost dropped the suckling baby. When the ghost spoke to her, she stifled a scream because although it looked like the mother she’d known, the ghost sounded like someone else.

“Yo doing that all wrong, honey chile. That baby gonna suck the skin right off yo nipple, and yo gonna get a breast infection so bayad yo’ll wish you was dayed.”

Annie did not happen to be one of those people who believed that the dead could talk to the living, but if she had believed in such a thing, she would have planned the conversation to run along a different course. Instead of an unpleasant warning, her mother would have made a more positive comment, like: Nice baby, wish I were there. Or I love the way you’ve done the baby’s room. Or even, I miss you. Not You’re doing it wrong, you’re messing up. Again.

Annie would have changed a few other things about being haunted. She would have preferred a nonsmoking ghost, especially since cigarettes had been the cause of her mother’s death. Another thing she didn’t like was her ghost’s accent. It was dead wrong; her mother had been a New Yorker, and she hadn’t said things like honey chile. One of the first things Annie learned, however, was that you didn’t get any choices about this kind of thing. Visitations just occurred. If the spirit of her mother’s ghost was correct, but her accent wasn’t, so be it. You simply couldn’t object to something beyond your control.

In any case, Brenda had appeared—not scary or threatening or unhappy or wanting to send regards, just plain old annoying Brenda exactly as she used to be. Then, as suddenly as the apparition had appeared that very first time, it had wandered off into the other room and disappeared. And sure enough, that same night the soreness that had been steadily developing in Annie’s right nipple from the baby’s long sessions of enthusiastic feeding became a noticeable and painful blister. The next day, after two more feedings, the deadly blister burst and Annie got the worst fever of her life. The infection was so bad that a burning red stripe started traveling down her arm to her hand, and Annie did indeed wish she were dead. Penicillin, however, saved her from that awful fate. That was the beginning. After that, Annie knew that whenever her mother appeared, she had a message.

Tonight her message was, “The end is coming.”

“What? The end of the world?” Annie didn’t want an inside track on that one. “Don’t tell me.”

“No,” Brenda said impatiently. “The end of yo family. Yo work killing them.”

Wait a minute. Her mother didn’t know what she was talking about. Her work was saving her family. The last thing Annie needed right now was a conversation about feminism from a person who was stupid enough to smoke herself to death. “Look, I don’t have a choice here. Ben was in the World Trade Center collapse. He can’t work. He has PTSD. He almost died, okay?”

“Lordy me, that’s hardly the worst thing in the world,” Brenda shot back.

“It would have been for us!” Death was permanent. Annie was an orphan because of it.

“Lordy me, yo ignorant,” the ghost said.

“I am not ignorant,” Annie protested. That accent killed her. Had her mother just found a new way to drive her crazy, or had she gone to the other side and somehow landed in Mississippi instead? She wished she knew.

“Hush now and listen. That po woman gonna die. And yo gonna take the blame.”

“Huh? What woman?”

“I tole you, working’s no good for womens,” Brenda intoned ominously.

“Oh Jesus.”

Brenda blew smoke in her face. “I tole you. Husband no good.”

“Whose husband?” That was another difficult thing about the ghost. Annie couldn’t always tell which conversation they were having from which period of her life.

“It’s just plain murder, honey chile. Better do something before it’s too late.”

“Mom! Could you clarify a little?” She hated begging for help from an apparition, but sometimes her mother really did know her apples. “Come on, whose end is coming?”

Just then Annie heard the front door open and the sound of Curly howling his head off. The feisty toy poodle always went ballistic when the ghost was in the house. Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa. Let me at it.

Dina opened the door. “Que esta, Curlito?”

The Spanish irritated Annie. Why did Dina have to speak it for the dog and refuse to speak it for her? When she turned back to her mother, the dog was still howling, but the ghost was gone. Shit.