tried to take him away from my parents after work but he got too upset. I figured I’d feed you and Jess first and get him on the way home.”
John patted Jessica’s head and grabbed his plate, filling it with sesame chicken and noodles. The broccoli was gone from Jessica’s plate and now she was working on the rice.
Eve tied her straight blonde hair into a ponytail so it wouldn’t fall into her food while she ate. Just one of the minor hazards to having long hair but it was easily remedied.
For the next few minutes, the only sounds in the dining room were the clink of forks on plates and labored chewing, followed by the occasional, “Mmmm, that’s good.” Jessica eyed a fat piece of broccoli on John’s plate and managed to spear it with her fork when he went to grab the water pitcher.
“So, what were you so engrossed in before?” Eve asked after she had finished most of her food.
“Some terrible so-called Bible on ghost tracking. It was put together by a team of ghost hunters associated with the Southern Paranormal Society and when I tell you it’s boring, I speak the truth.”
“Then why read it?”
“Unfortunately, I agreed to review it for the spirit-dot-com website. It just came in the mail this morning and now I wish it was lost in transport.” He emptied the remaining sesame chicken on his plate and munched on a forkful. “I mean, they take something as intriguing as hunting for ghosts and turn it into the driest scientific diatribe imaginable.”
Eve looked confused. “But isn’t the goal of ghost hunters to take the study of paranormal spirits and break it down scientifically so you can prove without a doubt their validity?”
“That’s their goal, no doubt about it.”
“What Daddy is saying is, they suck.”
“Jessica,” Eve scolded.
“You got that right,” John said, pinching her cheek.
“Language of little girls aside,” Eve said. Jessica smiled. “Wouldn’t it make belief in the supernatural that much easier if science was on your side?”
Eve had been around John for many years and she was pretty confident in her working knowledge of the paranormal. It was important to be able to hold her own in conversation with anyone, especially John, and she knew he respected her that much more because of it.
After Anne’s death of natural causes, a tragedy that devastated everyone around them, John had tried to go back to his job with the phone company but it was just too much. He couldn’t bear to leave Jessica’s side and his fear of losing her to crib death became all consuming. It wasn’t until months later that he even cashed in his winning lottery ticket. What should have been the windfall of a lifetime turned out to be a painful reminder of the most horrific day of his life. All of the money in the world couldn’t bring Anne or his prior mental health back. In an instant, he had come face to face with mortality and he still hadn’t recovered from the shock.
When all was said and done and Uncle Sam had taken his share, John was left with close to fifteen million dollars. For almost a year, he was beset by so-called friends and never-heard-of relatives who swarmed around him like locusts. Eve had married Anne’s brother, Patrick, just a few months before her untimely death. Though she was new to the family, she took it upon herself to deflect the money hungry, field the innumerable calls from accountants, brokers, credit companies and the like, and help take care of John and Jessica. His grief was unlike any she had ever seen. The first year was awful, made all the more difficult by the money. When she had asked him why he didn’t just take his money and move away, he’d replied, “This is Anne’s house. How can I leave it?”
Since then, she had taken John and Jessica under her wing, adding Liam and losing her husband along the way. She was aware of their unusual relationship and how it appeared to others but she didn’t care. Real life was more