Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper 2)

Cassie hugged Audrey and kissed her on the cheek, which Charlie found both disturbing and slightly arousing at the same time.

“So, if anyone asks, that’s the story,” said Jane.

“It’ll be great!” said Cassie.

“Sure, good.” Charlie stood and held his hand out to his daughter. “Come on, Soph, let’s go get ice cream.”

They walked a few blocks through North Beach, down Grant Avenue past Café Trieste, where Francis Ford Coppola supposedly wrote the script for The Godfather; past Savoy Tivoli, the bright yellow-and-maroon-­painted bar and café with booths open to the street, where Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti dined; past North Beach Pizza, two galleries, two ­leather boutiques, and a lingerie store, then up Union Street, headed toward Coit ­Tower, to a gelato place that had been there as long as Charlie could remember, and whose seating consisted of one teak garden bench outside and one against the wall inside across from the counter. They ordered scoops in sugar cones and took their cones to the bench outside.

“Your Nana used to love this place,” Charlie said.

“Jewish Nana or dead Nana?”

“Dead Nana.”

“Your mom, right?”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt when you think about your dead mother?” A serious question coming from a small child with a corona of bubble-­gum gelato around her mouth.

“A l

ittle, maybe, but a good hurt. I wish I would have paid better attention when I was little.”

“Yeah; me, too,” said Sophie, who had never known her mother as anything but pictures and stories. She sighed, licked her gelato, painting a dot of pink on her nose. “We’re not going to be able to tell Jewish Nana about you being back, huh?”

“No, probably not.”

“She’d plotz, huh?”

“I don’t know what that means, punkin.”

“You couldn’t find a Jewish body?”

“Been spending a lot of time with Jewish Nana, then?”

“It feels like it.”

“Oh, I know, honey.”

She patted his arm in solidarity.

“After this, we need to find the goggies, Daddy.”

17

Come Lay My Body Down

For the next two days Charlie tried to get used to the idea of living his life as someone else. He walked around the neighborhood, running errands and adjusting to being outdoors again, among ­people and traffic and sunshine. He went to the courthouse and applied to change Mike Sullivan’s name to Charles Michael Sullivan, so he’d have a quick explanation for why everyone in his life would be calling him Charlie. He accepted sympathy about his accident from the ­people at Mike’s bank, and made sure everyone he encountered knew that he was suffering from mild amnesia and asked them to be understanding if he seemed a bit sketchy on the basic details of his life. Mercifully, most of the ­people who he encountered seemed to think Mike Sullivan was a pretty decent guy, although no one seemed to know him very well, which worked out great for Charlie.

“This amnesia thing is great,” he said to Audrey as she sat bent over a sewing machine, making one of dozens of costumes for the Squirrel ­People. “You just say, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name, I fell off the Golden Gate Bridge and hit my head and I’m having a few memory issues.’ Everyone’s so nice about it.”

“They’re probably envious they can’t use the same excuse,” said Audrey. “This is ridiculous!” She snapped the needle up out of the fabric and snipped the thread. “I can’t make all the Squirrel ­People ornate costumes. This list Bob gave me is impossible. I made their original costumes from fabric scraps I’d collected over months. This would be a full-­time job, even if all I was doing was collecting material, let alone making a unique costume for each of them.”

“Maybe I can help,” said Charlie.

“That’s sweet of you to offer, but you have plenty to do already. I’m just going to get a ­couple of bolts of cotton in different colors and make them basic outfits from it, with drawstring trousers, like hospital scrubs. They can cinch them up to fit.”