Free Past Perfect by Leila Sales Page B

around a little, read a couple headstones. “So this is where you work, huh?”
    “This is where the magic happens. Hope you’re not scared of ghosts,” I joked.
    He laughed. “No worries. I don’t believe in ghosts.” 79

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    Of course, Ezra didn’t believe in ghosts. I knew this.
    It made me sad to hear him tell me, like I didn’t already know. I remembered the exact brunch when we’d discussed this. I was eating French toast. He was eating an omelet.
    We’d seen an advertisement for some horror movie, and the next thing I knew we were discussing the afterlife, or lack thereof.
    “When you die, you just die,” Ezra had said that day in the diner. “No ghosts, no reincarnation, no heaven. People want to believe that their ‘souls’ live on or whatever, but that’s only because they can’t handle the idea of the world going on without them.”
    I didn’t share Ezra’s certainty. Not like I believed in a bunch of Caspers floating around and saying “boo.” But I also couldn’t believe that a person could live and then die, and suddenly it would be as if they’d never lived at all. An ending couldn’t be that abrupt. When I pictured ghosts, I mostly pictured memories.
    Aftereffects. Ezra didn’t get it, and told me I was being silly.
    “I like this place,” Ezra said now, glancing around the graveyard. “I can see why you wanted to work here.” My game plan for dealing with Ezra had been the same for the past two months: stony silence. Stoicism. Maybe the occasional death-glare, but mostly ignoring him to the point where he would wonder if he even existed at all.
    That was the game plan. But when it was a beautiful summer day, and I was riding on the high of a successful military 80

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    campaign against Reenactmentland, and Ezra was acting so nice , then I defaulted to plan B.
    In plan B, I just try to make him happy. In plan B, I turn into a one-woman Entertaining Ezra Gorman show.
    “You see this hill?” I asked him. “This is where the unbaptized babies are buried. Hundreds of them.”
    “Seriously? That’s awesome. It looks too small for that, though.”
    “Well, babies are small,” I pointed out. “That’s like what they’re known for. But this isn’t even the best grave. Come look over here.”
    He followed me to Elisabeth Connelly’s headstone. “See,” I said, “she has my name!”
    Ezra’s expression was as blank as Linda’s had been when I’d shared this with her. “I mean, my Colonial name,” I clari-fied for him. “But it’s the same thing. So random, right?”
    “Sure,” Ezra said, nodding.
    Hearing him say sure was like swallowing a weight. I knew there had been a time when Ezra would have been excited about this, if only because I was excited about it. When he would have gotten it, gotten me . I could remember that time so clearly. But it wasn’t now.
    That just about pulled the curtain on the Entertaining Ezra show. It’s a short show, and it doesn’t get any applause, these days. I turned and walked out of the graveyard, him falling into step beside me.
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    “I came over to congratulate you on the telephone thing,” he said. “The guys at the magazine can’t stop talking about it. It sounds awesome.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
    All I ever wanted was for Ezra to be like this, to choose to talk to me, to compliment me. But when he did, that made it even harder. Because I couldn’t hear him say just,
    “Nice job with the battle plan.” The ending I heard to that sentence was, “. . . and therefore I want to get back together.”
    I would take him back, if he asked me. I told Fiona I wouldn’t, I told myself I wouldn’t, but, walking side by side with him now, I knew that I would. Since we’d broken up, I’d constructed countless fantasies in which he asked me to give him one more chance, and in these fantasies I made him beg, or I lectured him on the despicable way he had treated me, or I gave him a