Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“Do not start crying, Chuck!” said Jane. “Do not!”

Audrey looked down, veiled her eyes with her hand.

“You either, booty nun.” Jane elbowed Audrey.

“Are you a nun?” asked Sophie.

“Different kind,” said Jane.

“Flying?”

“Yes,” said Jane.

“Sweet,” said Sophie.

“Sophie has nun issues,” Jane explained to Audrey.

“Flying?” asked Charlie.

“It’s a show on TV Land,” Cassie said.

“Right,” Charlie said. “So, can I take my daughter out for ice cream?”

“That would be great,” Jane said, “except everybody in the neighborhood knows Sophie, and knows that Cassie and I are raising her. All of a sudden she shows up with a strange man—”

“Wearing Auntie Jane’s suit,” added Sophie.

“It’s my suit,” Charlie said.

Jane said, “Maybe we can say we brought you in so she would have a male influence on her, like Big Brothers of America or something.”

Cassie said, “Or, we could say that we are thinking of having a kid of our own and we’re auditioning you as a sperm donor. See how you are with kids first.”

“That seems kind of dubious,” Charlie said. “Not that easy to explain casually on the street.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” said Cassie. “I’ve got it, you’re Uncle Mike from Seattle. Rachel’s estranged brother. And you’re staying with us because you can’t hold a job due to your drug problem and some run-ins with the law.”

“Yeah, so we’ve let you work as our manny, until you get on your feet,” Jane said.

“Except that money keeps disappearing from our purses,” Cassie said.

“And local dogs have started to go missing,” Jane said.

“So we made Sophie show us where you touched her on a My Little Pony,” said Cassie.

“On my horn,” said Sophie.

“She’s an alicorn ,” Jane explained.

“A unicorn, a Pegasus, and a princess at the same time,” Sophie clarified.

“Of course,” said Charlie, thinking they were enjoying this family meeting way, way too much. To Jane he said, “You have broken my daughter.”

“Everybody thought you were fine,” said Jane, completely ignoring him.

“But then,” said Cassie, “I went to your apartment to borrow a cup of sugar, and you weren’t there, but the door was open, so I went in—”

“And discovered the secret room full of your mummified victims,” said Jane.

“We have one of those at the Buddhist Center,” Audrey said cheerfully. “Under the porch.”

“Audrey, please stop helping,” Charlie said.

“What? It’s nice to be included.”

Cassie hugged Audrey and kissed her on the cheek, which Charlie found both disturbing and slightly arousing at the same time.

“So, if anyone asks, that’s the story,” said Jane.

“It’ll be great!” said Cassie.

“Sure, good.” Charlie stood and held his hand out to his daughter. “Come on, Soph, let’s go get ice cream.”

They walked a few blocks through North Beach, down Grant Avenue past Café Trieste, where Francis Ford Coppola supposedly wrote the script for The Godfather; past Savoy Tivoli, the bright yellow-and-maroon-painted bar and café with booths open to the street, where Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti dined; past North Beach Pizza, two galleries, two leather boutiques, and a lingerie store, then up Union Street, headed toward Coit Tower, to a gelato place that had been there as long as Charlie could remember, and whose seating consisted of one teak garden bench outside and one against the wall inside across from the counter. They ordered scoops in sugar cones and took their cones to the bench outside.

“Your Nana used to love this place,” Charlie said.

“Jewish Nana or dead Nana?”

“Dead Nana.”

“Your mom, right?”

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt when you think about your dead mother?” A serious question coming from a small child with a corona of bubble-gum gelato around her mouth.

“A little, maybe, but a good hurt. I wish I would have paid better attention when I was little.”

“Yeah; me, too,” said Sophie, who had never known her mother as anything but pictures and stories. She sighed, licked her gelato, painting a dot of pink on her nose. “We’re not going to be able to tell Jewish Nana about you being back, huh?”

“No, probably not.”

“She’d plotz, huh?”

“I don’t know what that means, punkin.”

“You couldn’t find a Jewish body?”

“Been spending a lot of time with Jewish Nana, then?”

“It feels like it.”

“Oh, I know, honey.”

She patted his arm in solidarity.

“After this, we need to find the goggies, Daddy.”

For the next two days Charlie tried to get used to the idea of living his life as someone else. He walked around the neighborhood, running errands and adjusting to being outdoors again, among people and traffic and sunshine. He went to the courthouse and applied to change Mike Sullivan’s name to Charles Michael Sullivan, so he’d have a quick explanation for why everyone in his life would be calling him Charlie. He accepted sympathy about his accident from the people at Mike’s bank, and made sure everyone he encountered knew that he was suffering from mild amnesia and asked them to be understanding if he seemed a bit sketchy on the basic details of his life. Mercifully, most of the people who he encountered seemed to think Mike Sullivan was a pretty decent guy, although no one seemed to know him very well, which worked out great for Charlie.

“This amnesia thing is great,” he said to Audrey as she sat bent over a sewing machine, making one of dozens of costumes for the Squirrel People. “You just say, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t remember your name, I fell off the Golden Gate Bridge and hit my head and I’m having a few memory issues.’ Everyone’s so nice about it.”

“They’re probably envious they can’t use the same excuse,” said Audrey. “This is ridiculous!” She snapped the needle up out of the fabric and snipped the thread. “I can’t make all the Squirrel People ornate costumes. This list Bob gave me is impossible. I made their original costumes from fabric scraps I’d collected over months. This would be a full-time job, even if all I was doing was collecting material, let alone making a unique costume for each of them.”

“Maybe I can help,” said Charlie.

“That’s sweet of you to offer, but you have plenty to do already. I’m just going to get a couple of bolts of cotton in different colors and make them basic outfits from it, with drawstring trousers, like hospital scrubs. They can cinch them up to fit.”

“Sounds good,” said Charlie. “You can use Wiggly Charlie for the pattern.”

Charlie had gotten used to Wiggly Charlie following him around the big house that comprised the Buddhist Center, the little monster imitating his movements. When Charlie went to the bathroom, W.C. followed him and peed in a plastic mixing bowl that Charlie had used for the same purpose when he had been a little monster. When Charlie sat down to practice Mike Sullivan’s signature, W.C. sat on his mixed nut can, using a stack of books as a little desk, and practiced his penmanship as well, which consisted mostly of tearing stationery and licking the pen, then putting inky tongue prints on the paper. Charlie hung some of the more interesting ones on the fridge.

Wiggly Charlie was learning skills, but didn’t seem to be getting any more vocabulary, picking up only the odd word here and there and working them into some syntax around the phrase “need a cheez.” He also alternated between making an excited, happy noise and a disappointed sigh sound, which he only seemed to make when a cheez was not forthcoming or when Charlie left the house and did not take him. Charlie felt for the little guy, having been imprisoned in that improbable body himself, but W.C. seemed strangely untroubled.