Unfinished Business An Angela Panther Novel (A Chick-lit Paranormal book) (The Angela Panther Series) (23 page)

Oh.

“So I’m guessing you’re ready to talk about your gift?”

I sighed heavily, something I’ve been doing a lot lately, and I’m sure she heard it. “I’m not really sure I’d call it a gift, but yes, I’d like to talk about what’s happening. Do you have any time available this week?”

“Absolutely. I’ve actually got this afternoon free. I kept my calendar open for a possible seminar but the deal fell through. Can you come by at about one o’clock?”

“Sure. That’d be great. Did you want me to bring Mel?”
Please say yes. Please say yes.

“Not this time. I think it’s better if we talk on our own, if that’s okay with you.”

Crapola. “Great. Not a problem. I’ll see you at one then.”

“Wonderful. Looking forward to it, Angela. Bye.”

I called Mel right away.

“Do you want me to come?”

“Yeah, but psychic Linda says you can’t. She said it’s best we talk on our own.”

“Well that bites, but it makes sense, Ang. I think it’s great you’re finally going. You really need to talk to someone who understands what’s going on and can help you. Oh, and make sure you record it.”

“Why should I record it?”

“So I can listen to it later. Duh. And so if you have any questions you can refer back to it.”

“I’m not going to tape it, Mel. That wouldn’t be appropriate.”

“What? Are you kidding me? Of course it would be appropriate. People do it all the time. You know you’re going to have questions, so if you record it, you’ll have it to go back to when you do have a question, silly. I’m sure Linda will understand.”

“I’m not sure I’m comfortable doing that. Besides, what if she doesn’t want me to?”

“Just put your phone face down on the table and she’ll never know.”

“Mel, she’ll know. She’s psychic.”

“Oh, yeah. Good point. Well, so what. Do it anyway. I’m sure she’ll be fine with it.”

“I really, really want you to come.”

“I really, really want to come too, but you can do this. You’re not going to spontaneously combust or anything without me there.”

“You sure?”

She laughed. “Yes, I’m sure. Just make sure you call me the second you’re done.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“Of course not.”

###

S
urprisingly, Emily was up when I got home. “Hey, you’re up early."

“Yeah." She bounced through the kitchen, her mood clearly improved after the last, oh, I don’t know...lifetime. “I’m going to hang out with Taylor for the day. Can you take me to her house?”

“Oh yeah? You haven’t talked about her much lately. I thought maybe something was going on. Is everything okay?” Score one for the mom who acts all calm and collected when trying to get information from her kid.

“Yeah, we’re cool. We had a fight but it’s all good now. So, like, can you run me over there? We want to lay out when the sun is hottest.”

Normally I’m not a suspicious person. Okay, normally, I am a suspicious person, but in this case I felt justified, knowing what I knew about the parties and Taylor’s involvement. The problem was, I didn’t feel like I could stop Em from going over to Taylor’s without a good reason, and I couldn’t mention what I knew without explaining how I knew.
Your dead grandmother’s ghost told me,
probably wouldn’t work as an explanation, so I felt stuck. I knew if I said no, she’d get all moody and depressed and a serious drama fest would start, something I was never in the mood for, but if I let her go, there was the possibility of something I didn’t want to happen, happening. I hated making decisions when I couldn’t use all of the information I knew to do so.

I realized I had no choice but to trust my daughter. She hadn’t given me a reason not to, and if I analyzed the situation based only on what I knew she had and hadn’t done, I could trust her to do the right thing. This wasn’t about what Taylor might or might not do. It was about me trusting my daughter, so I said yes.

“Yes, I can take you. I’d like you home by dinner, please. Your dad or I will pick you up around six o’clock.”

“Mom. I want to stay later. We’ll just be done tanning by then,” she whined.

“You’re going to tan for over eight hours? You’re going to get skin cancer. Which reminds me, do you have sunscreen?”

“We’re not going to be at the pool all day, Mom. We’ll go back and forth, but please, can I stay till ten o’clock? Come on, Mom. I haven’t seen Taylor in days.”

I sighed, resigned to the fact that I needed to trust my kid even if I felt the situation was iffy. If needed, I could always send Ma to do a little spying and find an excuse to pick her up early if things got out of hand. “Okay, fine. Just let me know if you go anywhere or if things get freaky.”

“Freaky? Why?”

Whoops, that was a mother fail. “Well, because you said you two had a fight, and if that comes up again or something, I want to be able to come and get you. Okay?”

“Oh, whatever. We’re fine now.”

Nice save, Angela. Nice save.

“When do you want to go?”

“Now.”

Why didn’t my child have this sense of urgency when I asked her to clean her room or do something for me?

“Give me a few minutes and we’ll go.”

She huffed, but agreed. I spent the next few minutes pretending to busy myself in the kitchen when really I was fighting my impulse to lock her in her room until these parties were a thing of the past.

###

I
dropped Em off and on the short drive back to the house tried to summon my mother. I didn’t know if it would work, but just in case, I gave it a shot. “Ma? Ma. I need to talk to you. Can you hear me?”

Ma appeared next to me. Startled, I jerked the steering wheel, causing the car to veer onto the side of the road. “Holy crap, Ma. You have
got
to stop appearing out of nowhere like that, geez.”

She was perplexed. “But you called me. You asked me to come here, so I did. Oh, for crying out loud. Hold on.” She disappeared.

“Ma? Seriously, come back.”

“Booo." She slowly shimmered in. “That what you want? I’ve been practicing just for you.”

I laughed. “Actually, yeah. That’s much better. Except the boo was pretty pathetic.”

Ma giggled and raised her hands in the air. They poked through the ceiling of my car, which was sort of creepy.

“Ew, doesn’t that feel strange?”

“Not anymore. It did when I first tried but I’m used to it now. It’s the people that feel strange. Ya know, when someone walks through me? That gives me the heebie geebies.”

“I can only imagine.” I realized then that Ma was sitting in the seat next to me, like the ghost at the soccer field did a few weeks back. “Are you actually sitting now, Ma?”

She checked “Well I’ll be damned. Will you look at that? I’m sitting and I didn’t even try. My spirit guides told me this would happen but I guess I never thought to check. Wonder what else I can do?”

“Spirit guides? But you’re a ghost, why would you need a spirit guide?” There are some people who believe everyone has spirit guides to help them through life, but I always thought they helped the living, not those who had already died and that they were a bunch of poppycock, too.

“Ah, Madone, Angela. We all have spirit guides. You need to read up on this stuff. There’s a lot you got to learn since you’re a medium and all. And I’m not a ghost. I’m a spirit. Ghosts are in books. They’re not real. Spirits, we’re real. We’re
celestrial
beings.”

I corrected my mother. “I think you mean a celestial being. Now
that
makes me laugh.”

“Go ahead and laugh at your mother, but you just wait. One day you’re gonna see things for what they really are and you’ll be sorry you laughed.”

I gave her the dog head tilt and asked what she meant.

“I mean, one day you’re gonna see things for what they really are and you’ll be sorry you laughed. That’s what I mean.”

“Ma, you just repeated yourself.”

“Well, of course I did. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. Isn’t that the saying?”

“Actually, I think the saying is something like,
no question is stupid
, Ma.”

She flung her hands in the air. “Well, that’s actually stupid. There are a lot of stupid questions. Just talk to a teenager for five minutes and you’ll hear twenty stupid questions, so whoever made up that stupid saying is stupid.”

Ma seemed a little frustrated so I backed off from giving her a hard time and tried to maintain my patience, which wasn’t always easy. “Okay, Ma. Let’s try this. What are you trying to say? Is that better?”

She thought about it for a second. “Nope. Not really.”

I sighed.

“Ah, all right. You see, Ang, like I’ve said, things are different for me now. Things in the afterlife, they’re not the same as they are here. The things that matter for you, they don’t matter where I come from. And one day, when you’re dead – a long, long time from now – you’ll see that, and you’ll feel bad that you gave me a hard time about it. Me, a celestial being. You should always be nice to your celestial beings, Angela. We’re helpful, ya know.”

I nodded. “Yeah, Ma. I know.” Suddenly the lyrics to the Prince song
Let’s Go Crazy
ran through my brain. “Things are much harder in the afterworld.”

She didn’t get the ’80s pop music reference. “Not harder. Different. So,” she said, smirked as if she’d won some sort of battle. “Wha’dya call me for? You got something you need help with? Need a little celestial assistance, maybe?”

My mother was enjoying this far too much. “Actually, yeah, Ma, I do.”

“Well, out with it, child. I’ve got stuff to do.”

I shook my head. One would think a
celestial being
would be a little more patient. “I just dropped Emily off at Taylor’s.”

“I know.”

“And I’m a little concerned so –”

I didn’t get to finish because Ma interrupted me. “So you’d like me to do some celestial spy work and keep an eye on things, huh?”

“I’m not asking you to be a spy, Ma.”

“Yeah, you are. You want me to go there and make sure Emily doesn’t do anything you don’t want her to do, right?”

“Yes, but that’s not spying. That’s keeping your granddaughter safe. There’s a difference.”

“You say tomato, I say tomato."

I couldn’t really argue with that.

“Okay. Lemme see if I got this straight. You want me to keep Emily safe, but you don’t want me to spy on her. So if she’s in danger, I can help her, but I shouldn’t tell you anything that’s going on since you don’t want me to spy on her? That’s what you’re saying.”

“Yes. No.” I shook my head in frustration. “Ma, yes, I want you to keep Emily safe, but I would like to know if something is going on that shouldn’t be.”

“So you do want me to spy on her?”

“Ma! It’s not spying, it’s...” It’s what? Work, brain...work. “It’s divine intervention-ing.”

Yeah, I could make up words in seconds, I was that good.

“Bahahaha. Divine interventioning? What a load of bull hockey. It’s spying, Angela, but if you gotta call it something else, then I’m good with it. If I’d had a celestial being around when you were a teen, you’d have been spied on many a time, and you probably wouldn’t have had your cherry popped so early.”

My mouth dropped open.

“Yeah, I know when it happened, Angela. If I know about the Hershey bars you stole from me, don’t you think I’d know when your cherry got popped?”

“Ma, no one uses that terminology and I was the oldest of my friends and in love with the boy.”

She flung her hands through the ceiling again. “In love with the boy. Ah Madone, you were eighteen. You didn’t know what love was. You were just horny.” She laughed.

I felt myself getting angry. “Ma, I wasn’t just horny and I was in love. We dated for two years, Ma. That’s a long time for someone that age.”

“So you were extra horny, but it wasn’t love, Angela, and it doesn’t matter anyway. What’s done is done. All I’m saying is that I woulda had a celestial being spy on you if I coulda.”

I felt like teenage Angela had just made a brief reappearance so I pushed her back and let mature adult Angela take her front and center spot again. I’d like to say I had a valid argument and proved to my mother that I was in fact, in love, but that would have been a lie. Did I think I was in love then? Yes, absolutely, but the kind of love I felt then was nothing like the kind of love I feel for Jake now. She was right though, the past was just that, the past and this was about my kid, not hers, so I forced myself to go back to the matter at hand.

“Okay, Ma. So you’re a celestial being and you’re going to spy on Emily and yes, I want to know if something’s going on. I’ve got it. But seriously, what’s up with this celestial being thing? You’ve said it about ten times in the past five minutes. You getting all new age on me or something?”

“Nah. I took a class yesterday and it’s the new buzzword. They don’t like the word ghost because it’s got negative connotations to it and spirit is over used, so they want us to refer to ourselves as celestial beings.”

She lost me at
I took a class yesterday
. “They have classes in Heaven?”

“Yup. You don’t have to take them, but it’s not like there’s much else goin’ on and the room was packed so I’m thinking most everyone does.”

I scratched my head. “What on God’s earth would you need to take a class in Heaven for?”

“Well, there ya go, Ang. It’s not on God’s earth, it’s in Heaven, and I’m telling you, they’re two very different places. Trust me, you gotta take the classes. They clear a lot of things up. Tomorrow I’m taking one called Electricity and the Celestial Connection. I’m hoping I’ll learn something good.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Yeah, I guess it kind of is. Okay, lemme go and do some celestial spying. God knows what those two are up to already. That Taylor, I’m telling you, she’s bad news.”

“Please, Ma, don’t do anything I wouldn’t want you to do, okay?”

She frowned. “That doesn’t leave me much to choose from, Angela.”

I giggled and she shimmered away.

###

B
ack home I poured myself a cup of coffee and added a splash of creamer and some cinnamon for flavor. After a sip, I added a few more splashes of creamer, but I looked the other way while doing it, so the calories didn’t count. Baby steps. I headed up to shower, saying hi to Josh on the way.