Page 4 of The Boo Next Door

"We're going to build something, Bee."

From the porch, through the window, Beetlejuice watches me talk to an empty yard, and doesn't judge me for it even a little.

That's a lie. He judges me enormously.

But he stays at the window while I stand out there in the cold, the two of us keeping an eye on the dark together, and honestly, in this family, that's what love looks like.

Chapter 2

Grady

She talked to the yard for ten minutes last night.

I wasn't watching. I was winterizing the compressor with the garage door open, and her porch light was on, and a man can't help what's in his sight lines. She stood in the cold in a jacket built for Florida, said something to nobody, and the big black cat supervised from the window like a foreman.

I knew her face before she said her name at the fence. Bee's fridge was covered in it. Bee's mantel. Bee's wallet, the cracked leather one, first photo in the sleeve — a gap-toothed kid holding a paintbrush like a sword. I spent six years hearing about Lila the way you hear about weather somewhere else. My granddaughter builds monsters for a living, she'd say, like other people say my granddaughter is a surgeon.

And now the granddaughter lives forty feet from my kitchen, and I looked her dead in the eye and said the compressor runs at six.

Smooth, Ellis.

My phone buzzes on the workbench. Ravi.

Heard the Merriweather girl entered. Town's already taking bets.

I set the phone down. Pick it back up.

Who's favored?

You, it says. Then, a second later: For now. Marge saw her paperwork. Says she wrote her name like she was signing a declaration of war.

I put the phone face-down, which has never once stopped a problem from existing, and I look at the far wall of the garage. At the tarp.

Under the tarp, on shelving I built to museum spec because I couldn't stand to do it worse, is Bee Merriweather's life's work. Forty-one props. The bride. The pirate cannon. The moon with the chipped smile, packed in moving blankets like a patient in intensive care.

And in the drawer of the workbench, in an envelope soft from handling, the letter.

I don't need to read it. I could recite it. But I open the drawer anyway, because apparently today is a day we handle everything gently and feel terrible.

Grady, it says, in that handwriting like barbed wire pulled straight.

The doctors talk to me now the way you talk to your fog machine when the pump's going, so let's not waste paper. Three things.

Keep the Fright alive. You know what I mean and you know why I can't ask anyone else. The town won't fund joy. Towns never do. Make them think it's tradition and they'll pay for it themselves — you've seen how I do it.

Look after my Lila when she comes home. She will come home. She'll come home mad at herself and calling it something else, and she will not want looking after, so you'll have to be smart about it, which worries me, because you're about as subtle as your dragon.

And Grady. This is the one that matters. Don't you dare let her win out of pity. She'll know. She always knows. If she takes that Gourd off you, she takes it square, or it'll poison the whole thing.

The props are yours to keep safe, not to keep. You'll know the difference when it matters.

— B.

You'll know the difference when it matters. Six years I fixed that woman's wiring, hauled her ladders, learned fog timing off her like an apprenticeship I didn't know I was in, and she still signed off with a riddle.

I fold the letter along its worn creases and put it back in the drawer, under the socket set, where nobody looks.

Then I go do the stupid thing.