“Well. She said I can’t listen to my music in it.”
“That’s . . . not the same thing. At all.”
“It is to me,” said Larry solemnly.
“Don’t whine, Larry,” Glenda said in a voice all warbly and choppy. She probably had him on speakerphone. She couldn’t just sit and take a phone call; she had to be doing something else at the same time. “She left you a house.”
“I’m not whining, and she didn’t leave me a house. A house, you can live in—comfortably. You can listen to whatever you want in it. You can decorate it how you want and go into all the rooms. When you’re done with it, you can sell it. She basically left me a really, really big box I can’t get rid of. A box that people died in. A two-thousand-square-foot casket.”
“Why don’t you rent it out?”
Larry leaned against his car. Why hadn’t that occurred to him? The upside of such specific rules was that there wasn’t a lot of guesswork to be done. The rules did not state that someone else couldn’t live in the house. It was a big house; lots of people could live in it. He could stay where he was and collect enough rent to cover his living expenses and then some. He could even quit his job. Huh.
“I could maybe do that,” he mumbled.
“It’s a big house,” Glenda said. She liked to read his mind and repeat his thoughts out loud like a psychic parrot. “You could fit lots of people in it. You could stay in your crappy little apartment and collect enough rent to quit your job.” He couldn’t be sure, but he thought his sister sounded mad now. “She always did like you and Jim best.”
“Why, what did she leave to Jim?”
“She gave him those paintings of Uncle Garnet’s—the landscapes. I mean, they’re not going to make anyone rich, but they’re nice. They’ll look nice in his house. Meanwhile, I will drive my newly acquired boat straight to the dump because Aunt Rebecca, apparently, didn’t like me.”
“Glenda . . .”
“Larry . . .”
“Well at least the Lincoln isn’t haunted.”
“Larry.”
“Glenda.”
But Larry was right. The Lincoln didn’t have ghosts in the glove box. The house, however, was widely known to have at least two—one being, presumably, the ghost of his uncle Garnet, who’d dragged a chest into the middle of the attic floor, climbed up onto it, and hanged himself over two decades ago. The second being his business partner, who’d done the same right next to Uncle Garnet.
Over the years, Aunt Rebecca had gotten used to the ghosts. She was always telling people what they wanted and what they didn’t want, who they didn’t want around, what kind of music they wanted to listen to, etcetera. They didn’t like Larry’s uncle Ronny, for example, so Ronny was not allowed to visit. They were picky ghosts, she said, always shrugging apologetically. “I like you, Ronny,” she said when she told him the bad news, “but they make the rules in this house.”
Larry hadn’t believed in the ghosts until the fall of ’93. All the Finleys had been gathered around the dining room table, and someone had turned on the radio, and Celine Dion had started caterwauling like a banshee. Aunt Rebecca shook her head disapprovingly and said, “That woman is caterwauling like a banshee. The ghosts won’t like that,” but no one turned the radio off. Then the door to the attic started to open and close, and open and close: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Aunt Rebecca made a face at her peas like, I told you so. “AM 1190,” she said, looking bored with their insolence.
So someone turned the radio to AM 1190, where the Blue Jays were playing the Phillies. The banging stopped. The ghosts, it would seem, liked baseball. Sports ghosts.
Aunt Rebecca sat back in her chair, smug and knowing, and said, “The ghosts hate Celine Dion.” From that point, all the Finleys believed in the ghosts. Larry believed in the ghosts, and he presumed now that the suicides and the subsequent ghosts were the reason he wasn’t allowed in the attic, and they probably also had something to do with him not being allowed to sell the house or plant the flowers, if he were the kind of person who wanted to plant flowers. And they were the reason he would obey the orders in the will to the letter, even though the average person might choose to ignore them if they legally could.
But the ghosts had not said he couldn’t rent the house out.
So Larry hired some contractors and turned the house into three separate suites. Basement, main, second floor. The ghosts left everyone alone during the process, though one worker claimed to have heard singing when everyone else had gone for their lunch break and he’d been there by himself. Larry took this to mean that they were happy with him for obeying the rules, and though Larry liked to give the impression that he disliked authority, he was actually an incurable people pleaser. (In this case, an ex–people pleaser.)
On the last day of renovations, he checked the door to the attic, which was accessible from the second-floor suite. It was locked, and the one key he’d been given—the key to the front door—didn’t fit the lock. That was that, and it was fine with Larry. In fact, now that he was face to face with that door, remembering that day in 1993 and all the other incidents that had happened since, he only felt relief. He couldn’t have slept in the house, even if he was allowed.
He knew he wouldn’t have a hard time renting the suites out. The neighborhood was established, safe, well located. A short walk northwest to the downtown area, a shorter walk in the opposite direction to Wascana Lake. Montreal Street was quiet and wide and lined with old trees, and the house itself was pretty: light blue with white trim, a big wooden porch, an enclosed widow’s walk on the roof, and a fifty-foot Manchurian ash in the front yard, the roots of which were beginning to break up through the city sidewalk. No flowers, just like the ghosts wanted.
As he hammered a For Rent sign into the lawn, Larry thought about the woman from the grocery store. Maybe she needed a place to live? Just as quickly, though, he remembered her laughter. As though the mere thought of someone like her giving someone like him a phone number was so ludicrous it didn’t even warrant an actual response, and they both knew it.
The first renter called within a day and wanted to move in immediately. She was not the grocery store woman; her name was Maude. She was crispy and angular and partially obscured beneath a big floofy hat. She took the suite upstairs, 2139A. She looked old enough—but not sweet enough—to be his grandmother and brought with her a cat and a couch (she called it a chesterfield). She seemed fragile and weepy and said these were the only possessions she could still look at without crying, that she’d finally just sold everything else. Larry didn’t ask why, even though this statement seemed a bit leading, especially the way she whispered it into the air and then looked sideways at him to gauge his response.
Before he left, she complimented him on his Hogan’s Heroes T-shirt and said something about “TV back when it was good,” and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’d purchased the shirt at a punk show, that the Heroes were a band he liked, that he had never seen a single episode of the ancient sitcom.
A week later, a university student named Mackenzie moved into the basement suite, 2139C. Mackenzie was tall and bold and athletic and she had purple-black hair and a colorful, fine-line tattoo that ran from her elbow up her arm and into the sleeve of her T-shirt like dyed spider veins. She almost—but not quite—looked like someone who could’ve belonged to the beloved punk scene of his youth, though her tattoo sleeve was too delicate, her whole aesthetic too clean and polished and new looking. (It was a shame, what had happened to punk. He tried not to be that guy who constantly thought about it, but he was.)