Chapter 31 All’s Well That Ends Whale?
NO. WE ARE NOT ADDING an extra bedroom.”
Bulan, pretending not to hear, bounces around the inside of the cupboard. He’s all head and no self-control, so despite my efforts at shampooing him this morning, he’s progressively taking on lint and dust.
“It’s got a smell back here,” he complains. “Blech.”
“I don’t remember you complaining about the mildew before.”
“I had rhinitis. Don’t you remember my sniffling?”
“Would you at least stop rattling the shelves? Hanry isn’t around to fix them.”
Mandy clasps her hands, perplexed as Bulan and I work to determine the master bedroom closet’s destiny.
After visiting multiple apartments with a real estate broker, we agreed that Grandma Rose’s pink house was the clear winner for our shared future abode.
It has the most light, lower property taxes than we’d have to pay in rent, and an ambience of familiarity.
It will probably require the deepest cleaning, but I’m sure Mandy and I are up to the task.
If not, maybe Mandy can convince Rochester to loan us his fairy servant minions.
Or maybe she’ll continue wringing her hands until she’s whittled them down to nubs.
“Mandy, stop.”
Embarrassed, Mandy throws her hands behind her back. “Sorry! I just, umm, are you sure this is okay, Sabby? Us moving in!”
“I’m sure,” I say for at least the tenth time since returning from Fairyland, armored with a fresh plan for business success.
“I need my employees to have stable housing. I need to stay in the green myself, and to do that, I’ll need renters.
If anyone’s going to be in my space, I want it to be my friends. Why are you acting so nervous?”
“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, please don’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-continental Eat Pray Love trip. 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 going to 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 county office 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.”
“Well, that’s great, Sabby. It’s so important to know what you want.”
She doesn’t sound upset. In fact, she doesn’t sound like she’s listening. I click on my video, hoping that’ll wrangle slightly more attention.
“I want to be more like Grandma,” I tell Mom. “And like you.”
“Like me?” I swear I can hear her blinking in confusion.
“A true Spük,” I say, though obviously I’m just describing high-level similarities here. “I only need myself and my friends to be happy. I don’t need to play it safe and boring. I want to live a life worth living.”
Mom’s video connects. She’s sunbathing by the pool as usual, no hint of a job in sight. She waves up at me and picks up her margarita. And that’s when I see the engagement ring on her finger.
“You—you—” I stammer. “What’s that?”
“What is what?”
“Are you getting married, Mom?”
She rolls her eyes majestically. “I told you I’ve been busy!”
“To who?! The pool boy?”
“Well, it’s complicated.”
Complicated? Why would you get married to someone if it’s complicated? I mean… unless he’s a fairy prince changeling? And now I’m fighting a bittersweet pang of missing Hanry and being worried about my mom. Great.
Not wanting to spook Mom, who seems as innocent and unwary as a desert mouse, I force out a gentle, soothing voice. “Hey, so maybe… what do you think about coming home? To talk things through before your wedding. With some distance from Mexico. You know?”
Coming home helped me figure out my life, after all. Maybe it’ll help her too.
Mom laughs cannily. “Mi gordita, why would I do that? I love it here!”
I frown, watching her take a sip of her magenta drink. Something feels off. It’s just a gut feeling, but it’s one I’ve been slowly learning to trust.
“Mom, how long has it been since you left your hotel?”
“Only a few months,” she says casually. She taps her chin. “Maybe three? I’m planning to book a flight back before school starts, Sabby. I can’t leave you to muddle through senior year by yourself!”
Shit, shit, shit.
“Mom, it’s been five years since I graduated high school,” I say, horror dawning on me. “Let me call you right back.”
I hang up unceremoniously on Mom and poke my head around the corner.
“BULAN!” I shout.
He rolls in atop a Roomba he’s unearthed from a pile of decaying newspapers, circa 1980s.
“What is it?” asks the head. “Also, how do you correctly navigate this fair mechanical steed? As your knight-in-rolling-dustpan, I’m elated to divide and conqu—”
“There’s no time to clean,” I interrupt. “Remember how my mom’s in Mexico? In that place called Hotel California? Well, I think she’s in trouble.”
“Trouble?” Bulan asks, his bushy eyebrows furrowing. Mandy scoops him off the vacuum and squeezes him like a teddy bear for comfort.
“What’s happened!?” she asks worriedly into his hair.
“She’s getting married.”
“That’s all?” asks Mandy.
“And here I was worried,” pouts Bulan around Mandy’s forearm.
“Yes ‘that’s all.’ It’s a big deal,” I tell them.
“Mom isn’t the marrying kind. And she hasn’t been dating this guy for any length of time, as far as I can tell.
On top of all that, she seems… confused.
About where she is. What’s happening around her.
And how long she hasn’t been home. I think she might be in some kind of danger.
” Paranormal danger, I’d bet. Grave danger?
Well, if graves are involved, it wouldn’t be the first time.
In any case, this calls for an intervention.
Or at the very least: a vacation.