Free A Minister's Ghost by Phillip Depoy

occupied us well into the early part of the evening.
    Only once, when the horizon turned the same gold as the pastry, did Lucinda stop her work. She looked out at the setting sun and spoke to me without turning.
    â€œThe girls used to love these apple tarts.”
    â€œYou can do this if you want to,” I said as gently as I could manage, “but I can’t see that it does you any good.”
    â€œDo what?” she asked, still staring at the sunset.

    â€œPick at the sore place, needle yourself with thoughts about Tess and Rory. I’ve been doing it too, a little, but it doesn’t help them, and it’s certainly not improving your spirits.”
    â€œListen.” She turned. “If you have to try not to grieve about this so you can concentrate, I understand that. But I have to grieve or mourn or whatever you’d call it. I have to do it in my own way and let it wash over me. If I deny it now, it’ll only come back to bite me sometime later.”
    Her eyes were red, her hair uncombed. She sniffed. Her apron was spotless, a deep blue that would soon match the night sky. She had completely given herself over to her spirit, and she was beautiful.
    I envied everything about her in that moment.
    â€œI wish I could do that,” I confessed softly. “I can’t, but I would really like to be able to let feelings take me over that way and have done with them. My style is more in the way of holding on to pain, pushing it deeper down until it’s a block of granite that dynamite wouldn’t budge.”
    â€œYou’re a deeply troubled individual,” she answered, the whisper of a smile on her face for the first time all day.
    â€œExactly what makes me so fascinating.”
    â€œIs that it?” She returned to her work. “I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.”
    â€œI’m going to talk to their parents first thing tomorrow,” I said, trying to return to business, “and then to the movie theater to show their picture to a person who was working there.”
    â€œWhy?” She crimped the crust of the tarts to an artful frill.
    â€œMake sure they actually went to the movies.”
    Lucinda stopped what she was doing, didn’t look at me.
    â€œTeenaged girls,” I began before she could object to my plan, “you may be amazed to hear, sometimes tell their parents one thing and do another. It doesn’t make them bad people, it makes them teenaged girls.”
    â€œSo you’ve got to check up on them.” She took a breath to say something stronger, but settled on “I’m too tired to argue. You do what you think’s best.”

    There was proof of just how sad she was. Any other day of her life she would have debated the merits of her nieces until I ran screaming from the house.
    â€œI’ll stay here again tonight if you like,” I went on, scrupulously avoiding eye contact, “or go on home. Whichever you prefer. Do you want company or peace and quiet?”
    She went back to her work, about to put the tarts into the oven.
    â€œI don’t like to ask,” she said hoarsely, “but I surely would appreciate it if you’d stay again tonight. I know you don’t have clothes or your things here—”
    â€œLucy,” I said, stopping her. “I’m happy to stay.”
    She scooped up the apple tarts, swung open the oven door. It creaked, a pleasant, warm sound.
    â€œWe wouldn’t have to sleep on the sofa again, you know.” She slid the pastries into the oven and closed the door. “You’ve never seen it, but I’ve got a perfectly nice bed upstairs in my room.”

Four
    Lucinda’s husband had been dead seven years, and my last relationship, with a graduate student at the university where I’d been teaching, had been gone for more than three. Incredible as it might have been to admit, neither of us had slept with anyone since. Lucinda always