Page 19 of Goose

He tidied his desk. “Did you tell your parents about Ghost?”

“Fuck no!” I seethed. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

“Sorry I mentioned it,” he said. “Didn’t know if something like this warranted patching things up.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d even ask me something like that.”

He shrugged. “You know how Ghost was about it. It always bothered him that you couldn’t forgive them. You were young. Hot-headed. We all were when we were young. It never was that big of a deal to him—”

It was a big deal to me. Enough of a big deal that I walked away and never looked back. “It comes down to respect. You know how I am about that. We’re done talking about it. End. Of. Discussion.”

He resituated the items on his desk that he’d rearranged moments before. Tidying up did for him what planting flowers did for me. After watching him for a moment, I broke the awkward silence.

“You find it funny that Ghost left that much money to a guy we didn’t even know?” I asked. “Some fella he met in a diner? Seems to me the last six months or so of his life was lived in secrecy.”

“I think him leaving that guy half his savings is a pretty solid endorsement of who that guy is,” he replied. “Ghost wasn’t secretive about everything, though. He’d been talking to me about some things. He was getting ready to propose to Abby when she died. He told me that much.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “He didn’t say anything to me.”

He picked up the letter, and then put it right back down. “I think he was talking to me because of when I proposed to Andy. He was curious about timeframes and what was acceptable.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “You an authority on relationships, now?”

“Guess so.”

“Got another one for you,” I said.

“Another what?”

“I don’t know. Story, I guess.”

He leaned away from the desk and relaxed in his chair. “I’m listening.”

“So, when I went to deliver the car yesterday, guess who’s sitting in there eating a double cheeseburger?”

“You want me to guess?”

I shrugged. “It was rhetorical but go ahead.”

“Bill Murray.”

“Bill Murray?” I looked at him like he was nuts. “Why the fuck would Bill goddamned Murray be in that fucking diner?”

He shrugged. “You told me to guess. He lives here, you know. I thought maybe you bumped into him.”

“No. I didn’t bump into Bill fucking Murray.”

I glanced around his office, trying to decide if I wanted to continue with my story or not. As Ghost suggested in his letter, I was the club’s voice of reason. Unless I wanted to talk to myself, I was going to get smart-assed responses and poorly thought out opinions.

“You going to enlighten me?” he asked. “Tell me who it was?”

“The chick who put her panties in my pocket,” I said. “From the funeral.”

His eyes thinned. “She was in the diner?”

“Sure was.”

“Did you find out what the hell she was thinking when she did that?”