The Haunting of James Hastings Read Online Free PDF Page B

maybe. It’s cool. I haven’t slept well for a few days.’ I looked at the couch. ‘Thanks for coming by, though.’
     
    She stood, not meeting my gaze. I followed her to the front door. Why did I feel like I was disappointing her again?
     
    ‘Hey.’ I touched her shoulder. She flinched, then regarded me with her mistrusting deer eyes. ‘This weekend. Maybe we can go drink some bad Chianti and have a sing-along at Cheese & Olive’s.’
     
    She smiled. ‘I’d like that.’
     
    I nodded. ‘Cool.’
     
    ‘Yeah, cool.’ She tensed up, debated it, then awkwardly kissed me on the corner of my mouth.
     
    I watched her scuttle across the lawn. She glanced back as she met up with the sidewalk and waved.
     
    I waved back. ‘What do you make of that one, Stace?’
     
    In the silence that followed, I regretted addressing my wife aloud.
     
     
    Four days after Mr Ennis was wheeled out of his home, two men dressed in gray work pants and shirts emptied his belongings into a moving truck. The commercial cleaning crew - six Hispanic women and an Asian guy with a clipboard - swept through after the movers. A forty-something white man who may have been Mr Ennis’s son appeared, pounding a For Rent sign into the lawn with a rubber mallet. As he was doing this, his cellphone went off. He removed it from his pocket and spoke to someone for fifteen minutes. He clamped his phone shut and slipped it into his pocket, shaking his head and smiling ever so slightly. He then removed the For Rent sign and hucked it into his truck bed, not bothering to wipe the dirt clods from its legs.
     
    I slept in late the next morning and missed a phone call from Lucy. Her message said, ‘Hey, James, I know you’re sleeping but I just wanted to let you know I spoke to the ME. Our friend died of a heart attack. He had a history of heart disease, so . . . yeah. No flowers, either, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring me some. Just kidding. I don’t need flowers.’ Snorts and snickers of embarrassment. ‘Okay, looking forward to Saturday, so I hope you’re warming up your vocal chords. Call me.’
     
    I meant to. I really did. But other developments averted my attention, and I did not call Lucy Arnold back.
     
    This turned out to be another mistake, one of the bigger ones.
     

4
     
    The era of the balcony was over. I began to wonder how much I could get for the house. I guessed I had about seventy thousand in home equity, and half as much in my checking account, where it was earning all of one point in annual interest and shrinking by five thousand a month. Three thousand went to the mortgage, the other two to bills and beer. I had enough to start over somewhere decent, and I decided I would call our realtor, David, the next morning.
     
    I was on the covered front porch, having a smoke and a beer, when I noticed a small silver and orange U-Haul van parked in front of Mr Ennis’s house. The cargo hold was bare save for a pile of gray moving blankets and a wooden rocking chair resting on its side. The metal gangplank was up, jutting from the truck’s tail like a bladed tongue, suggesting the movers were done for the day. Or the new owner, since U-Haul implied you were not sipping martinis while a paid crew took another year off their backs. The sun was setting tiredly. There were no lights on inside the house. If the new residents were unpacking boxes or hooking up the television and dialing for that moving day pizza, I couldn’t see them.
     
    I blew a stream of blue smoke at a fly and swallowed the last of my beer. I was turning to go spend the rest of the night on the couch when I heard a screen door creak and then spring back into place with an obnoxious clang. On the heels of this racket, a woman’s voice -
     
    ‘Ow, watch it. For fuck’s sake.’
     
    Ooh, an angry one.
     
    I waited, expecting her husband or some kid in tow to trot back to the truck and retrieve her rocking chair. But the woman who materialized on the