Chapter 12 #2
Danny stood and gave me a look as though he might decline helping further, simply to get my dander up, but he quickly smiled and shrugged.
He fell in with Max and began the task of moving the cupboard into the house.
I followed behind them, staying out of the way, glad that both guys were putting up with my laziness.
Once we were in the living room, I indicated that they should put the cupboard along the bare wall leading into the kitchen.
“That’s good,” I said. “Right there. It’ll be out of the way until I can get to restoring it.”
After the cupboard was in place, I fetched some cash from my wallet while Danny and Max made more guy banter.
I couldn’t help but feel I’d spent fifty bucks that I could have used for better things, but the cupboard did look nice and solid.
Maybe, I thought to myself, if I restore it nicely enough, I could sell it for much more than fifty bucks.
Get my money back and put the profit into The Lunch Counter.
The possibility lifted my spirits about spending money I didn’t really have for something I really didn’t need.
“Want me to keep an eye out for a piece for over there?” Max asked, eyeing the corner behind my easy chair. “A bookcase would look great there. Maybe a hutch?”
I waved him off furiously.
“Stop trying to rob me!”
He laughed and stuffed my cash into his pocket as Danny squatted down, examining the cupboard some more.
“All right, all right,” Max relented. “But you let me know how it turns out for you. And let me know if you’re looking for anything else. That chair is looking a bit worn out.”
“Don’t insult the easy chair, dude.” I warned him playfully. “It has cradled my butt through many-a-television show.”
Amused at my statement, Max shook hands with both of us and said his goodbyes. Seconds later, I was shutting the front door as his truck growled down the driveway, away from the house. When I returned to the cupboard, Danny was standing before it, squinting at the paint job.
“Fifty bucks isn’t a bad deal,” Danny said nonchalantly.
“Yeah.”
“If you actually needed the cupboard,” he said, grinning, though he didn’t turn his head to look at me.
I said nothing.
“You may be a swindler, but you’re singlehandedly trying to keep every business in town afloat. Five-dollar milk? Fifty-dollar useless cupboard? The fraud with a heart of gold.”
I turned to give him an expressionless stare.
“I’m only kidding.”
“I know what you think of me,” I said. “And I also know you’re here every other night getting in my pants. Maybe you should worry what you think about yourself.”
“Si, I—”
“Or,” I stopped him, “maybe you should admit to yourself that you don’t really think I’m a fraud. You just can’t bring yourself to believe something you can’t prove.”
“Prove it to me, then.”
Instead of taking offense, growing red-faced, and blathering angrily at me, Danny simply crossed his arms over his chest and grinned.
I stared at him for a moment, peering into his eyes.
Finally, I reached out and grabbed his wrist with both hands.
He didn’t jerk away or look alarmed as I rolled his sleeve up his forearm and lay both hands against the flesh underneath.
Closing my arms, I squeezed his arm and concentrated. I could hear Danny’s breath as he watched me stand before him, acting as weird as one could imagine. Finally, after ten seconds, I opened my eyes and found him still staring back at me. I let my hands fall from his arm.
“At lunch you ate a tuna salad sandwich. You ate late because the work load was light and you figured you’d get everything done so you could knock off early.”
Danny squinted at me for a moment before responding.
“Touch psychic, eh?” he asked. “You hold onto my arm and that wacky little mind of yours gives you flashes of my past?”
“No,” I said. “But I smelled it on your breath when you kissed me. And you never get to your mom’s house before I leave. Lucky guess. Maybe I simply pick up clues from people and I am a fraud.”
I shrugged. Danny groaned angrily.
“Why do you do this?” He huffed. “I’ve been calling you a fraud for years! And every time you have a chance to prove it to me, you make a joke out of it! Tell me, Si! Why?”
I shrugged again. “Maybe because I know there’s nothing I could tell you that would make you believe me?”
Danny, angry as I’d ever seen him, his face growing red, reached into his back pocket and whipped out his wallet. A second later, I was staring at three twenty-dollar bills. He shoved the money into my chest and held it there.
“There,” he said. “The money you spent on this piece of crap and ten to spare. I’m hiring you. Summon my dad. You can’t do it for my mom, do it for me.”
I shook my head.
“Do it!” Danny insisted. “Right now. Summon my dad. I don’t even care that you’re swindling my mom to help fund your little charity! Fair enough. She’s got the money and it may as well go to a good cause. But prove to me that you’re not lying to me. Right now!”
I grabbed his handful of money and pushed it away.
“No.”
“No?” Danny barked the question. “Because you can’t and you really are a fraud, or you want to be cruel? Maybe you’re dragging things out with Mom to keep reeling in the dough you need for The Lunch Counter. Fine. I won’t tell her. But I need to know. Right now.”
“Just no,” I said, simply.
“Why?” Danny was no longer angry.
He was pleading. The look in his eyes having changed from the accusatory look of someone encountering a fraud to that of a wounded boy who desperately wanted proof his father was safe in the afterlife nearly had me losing my resolve.
“Ghosts can’t come in my house anyway,” I said, then continued before he could suggest alternative locations. “And talking to your dad won’t bring you the closure you think it will.”
“But—”
“It never does, Danny,” I shook my head slowly at him. “I’ve done this enough to know that there’s no such thing as closure.”
“What does that even mean?” Danny pleaded, though the anger was seeping back into his voice as he loomed before me.
“People find out grandpa really was murdered. Then they become obsessed with finding the murderer, even though it happened fifty years ago. People find out their best friend did kill themselves and wonder if they could have said or done something differently. Reached out more often. Gotten them help. They find out that Mom hid the jewels at a relative’s house to keep them from getting them and they begin to question their entire relationship with Mom before she died.
Knowing what goes on over there on the other side only brings up more questions.
Sometimes it’s best to let the dead rest.”
Danny was glowering at me.
“One day, hopefully far in the future, you can ask him all your questions yourself,” I said quietly. “I promise you it’s highly possible.”
“But you won’t summon him and ask him one question, right now, to prove I’m not sleeping with a fraud who’s swindling my mother?”
I shook my head, lowering my eyes to look at the floor.
Danny breathed out slowly, heatedly, and glowered down at me a moment longer.
Then, he stepped around me and headed to the front door.
I waited for the inevitable opening of the door, the slamming, the sound of angry footsteps out to his truck.
Instead, Danny suddenly stopped behind me.
“You know what?” he asked angrily. “Here’s the money.”
His hand was suddenly in my hip pocket, stuffing the twenties into it.
“You’re going to need it,” he said, cryptically.
“Screw this cupboard,” Danny growled.
I looked up to see Danny stomping towards the cupboard and I immediately realized what he had in mind.
My head whipped around to the cupboard, mourning its impending destruction.
However, in those few moments I had to stare at it, dreading the destruction that was to come, my eyes landed on the weird raised numbs at the corners of all of the doors and drawers.
Something at the corner of each had been painted over when the cupboard had been redone.
Danny was already swinging his fist at the top cupboard door when I realized what I had spotted.
Attempting to put myself between Danny and the cupboard was an exercise in futility.
My brain had been too slow for me to stop the inevitable.
Opening my mouth to shout at Danny to stop, I watched in terror as his fist seemed to fly through the air in slow motion towards the top doors of the cabinet.
“STOOOOOOOOP!” I heard myself scream as Danny’s fist connected with the wood.
Desperately, in the split second I had to pray, I hoped that Danny’s fist would be no match for the solid wood.
Unfortunately, a lifetime of sports and construction work had given Danny the strength he needed to achieve his goal in one try.
As his fist went solidly through the right door of the cabinet, my eyes went wide.
All time seemed to stop as I stared at his fist sticking through the splintered wood of the cabinet.
Danny, red-faced and huffing, was readying to pull his fist back to deliver a blow to the other door.
Before he could extract his arm from the interior of the cabinet, the shimmery white fog peeked out from the hole his arm had created.
Staring into the eyes of the ghost in the cupboard, I started to scream again.
However, before my mouth could open, the ghost, in a wintry gust of cold air, zipped out of the cupboard, whirled around Danny, and disappeared around the wall into the kitchen.
Danny’s arm came out of the cupboard and he stumbled backwards, landing in a heap on the floor. With wide eyes, I looked down at the tangle of arms and legs on the floor before me. My eyes darted from the wrecked cupboard door, towards the kitchen, then down at Danny, over and over again.
On the floor, Danny shivered.
“What in the heck was that?” Danny asked, his face nearly as pale as the ghost that now had unfettered access to my home.