Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(84)

"Gary, I don't—"

"Please, Rose? Can you do that for me?"

I worry my lip between my teeth before finally, inevitably, nodding. "I can do that."

"Thank you." Gary tightens his hands around mine as he sits up in the bed and kisses me deeply, kisses me with all the longing of sixty years spent apart. He takes me by surprise, and I don't realize what's just happened until I feel his lips smoothing under mine, his hands growing young and strong and sure again. He—the essential Gary, the one that fell in love with a girl from the wrong side of town—sat up to kiss me. The body he spent all those years wearing...

...didn't. He pulls back, smiling that old devil-may-care smile, and says, "Remember, Rosie. You promised."

Then he's gone, winking out like a candle flame, and I'm the only ghost in the room. Just me, sitting alone with a slowly cooling corpse that no one has any use for anymore. I stay where I am for a moment more, and then fall back into the twilight, sinking down until there's no hand under mine, until I'm just a ghost among ghosts once more.

***

Please, Rosie. Please, keep your word...

***

I don't head straight for Dearborn.

Let me rephrase that: I can't head straight for Dearborn. If Gary wants me interacting with something in the world of the living, I have to follow the rules in getting there. It takes me three days and five coats to hitchhike my way from Buckley to the Dearborn city limits. Once I'm past them, I can walk the rest of the way, and so that's what I do, ignoring the cat-calls and the shouts from passing vehicles. As long as none of them offers me a ride, I can go where I need to go.

None of them offers me a ride. After an hour of walking down increasingly broken and glass-spattered sidewalks, I find myself in front of a rusty converted warehouse with a sign in the window that reads, simply, CARL'S. This has to be the place.

The coat I'm wearing gives me the substance necessary to open the door and step into the cramped office, which smells like motor oil and stale beer. "Hello?" I call. "Is anyone here?"

I'm beginning to think this errand ends with me standing in an empty room forever when a man with a handlebar moustache of impressive size—almost as impressive as the beer-belly that strains against his coveralls—emerges from the door behind the counter, jaws busily working a wad of incongruously pink gum. "Yeah?"

"Um." I blink once, and then ask, "Are you Carl?"

"Who wants ta know?"

"Rose." His face remains blank, not a trace of recognition in his eyes. I try adding a little more information: "Gary sent me?"

"Aw, shit." True regret wipes away the blankness as he shakes his head, one hand coming up to tweak at the end of his moustache. "Old bastard finally died on us, huh? And you must be the dead little girlfriend. Guess you got his messages after all. Good for him. I mean, he coulda done better in the rack department, but hey, who am I to judge? The course of true love never did run smooth, and alla that shit. I guess you'd better come with me."

"I...wait...what?" The rapid-fire delivery of so many different sentiments leaves me reeling, although I'm pretty sure that I was just insulted. "Come with you where?"

Now Carl smiles, although the regret remains, tucked around the edges. "He didn't tell you, huh? Ain't that just like him? Wanted to surprise his girl. Guess I can't blame him for that. Come on, girlie. It's not my place to say, but I'm the only one who can show you."

I frown, but in the end, we both know that I'm going to give in. It's not like he can hurt me, after all, and Gary sent me here. "Okay," I say, and follow Carl out of the office, into the garage.

***

The garage is connected to a small junkyard—not all that surprising, really. It's a good place for old cars to go to die. There's even a crusher, big enough for most single-family cars. A car sits next to it, shrouded in a plain gray canvas.

Carl starts talking as soon as we're outside. "I just want you ta know that this goes against everything I stand for as a mechanic," he says, jaws still working at the gum. "But it makes sense to everything I stand for as a routewitch, so I guess I'm doin' the right thing whether I do it or not. You better appreciate this, girlie, that's all I have to say."

"Appreciate what?" I ask.

Carl gives me a withering look and walks over to the shrouded car. When he yanks the cover away, I gasp. I can't stop myself.

The unshrouded car is a cherry 1946 Ford Super De Luxe, painted a deep sea green that looks just as good on a car as it did, once upon a time, on a prom dress. The sunlight caresses the paint like a lover. I understand the impulse. This is a car to be courted.