Page 37 of A Midsummer Night's Ghost

“You can tell him.” I was feeling a little deflated and weird about basically seeing Mary’s soul leave her body. That doesn’t happen every day, nor should it.

“Tell me what?”

“Mary is dead and Clifford got stabbed. So we need a new Thisbe for the play. I told Sara we needed an understudy but she didn’t listen.” Grandma settled down onto a kitchen chair.

Jake added more salt to his sauce and glanced over at me. “We’re talking metaphorically, right? Like that’s part of the play?”

“Nope. Clifford got stabbed by Sara Murphy and it made Mary have a heart attack and drop dead. Clifford is fine though.”

“Someone gotstabbedat the senior center? What the f—” Jake started to say but Grandma cut him off.

“Don’t you use that kind of language, young man.”

Apparently, snarking about Mary’s makeup was okay but swearing wasn’t. Grandma’s moral standards had some gray areas.

Jake clapped his mouth shut. “Sorry. But I don’t understand how that happened. Or honestly, what happened.”

“I was in the hallway so I didn’t see it happen but from what I was told, Sara thought the knife was a prop knife and she was demonstrating how Clifford could kill himself on stage as part of the play with real gusto. Only it either wasn’t a prop knife or even prop knives aren’t meant to be so enthusiastically jabbed into someone’s stomach.”

“Clifford’s got a beer gut, so I think that saved him,” Grandma said. “The knife couldn’t get through all that fat to hit anything important.”

“Saved by beer,” Jake said, shaking his head. “That’s a first. Is he going to be okay?”

“It seemed like it, but he was distraught about Mary, obviously.” I went to the sink to wash my hands yet again. It was then that I noticed there was blood on the sleeve of my blouse. I blanched. So much for my cute outfit.

“Bailey was a real trooper,” Grandma said. “She jumped right in and put pressure on Clifford’s wound. Sara Murphy passed out and then threw up. She was totally useless.”

“Well, she was in shock,” I said, running water under my bloody cuff. “She accidentally stabbed Clifford.”

Grandma made a “pff” sound. “She’ll make a lousy wife and mother if she can’t handle a little blood.”

“There’s blood in marriage?” Jake asked, looking amused by that thought. He dropped his spoon into the sink.

The new old house had a dishwasher but I was starting to notice he always did that. He put dirty dishes and cutlery into the sink instead of directly into the dishwasher, which meant later he had to put up disgusting wet dirty dishes and transfer them to the dishwasher. It made no sense to me. But living with another person was full of little puzzles like that. Maybe it was how you were raised. Though Mrs. Marner seemed very anti dishes-in-the-sink.

“What do you know about marriage?” Grandma asked Jake, sounding offended that he was amused.

“Nothing, that’s why I’m asking.”

Grandma sniffed. “Just take your garlic bread out of the oven. It smells like it’s burning.”

It didn’t. She was just miffed.

“I feel terrible for Mary’s family. Poor Clifford. Stabbed and then had to see his girlfriend die a few feet away from him.”

Grandma nodded. “Terrible. I hope Sara can pull it together for practice tomorrow. We need to reassign the roles.”

That didn’t sound overly sympathetic.

Jake and I exchanged a glance. “Hey, is Sara really the director because she has to do community service?” I asked Grandma.

“I have no idea.”

“Is that a thing?” I asked Jake. “Teaching seniors as restitution for a crime.”

“No. That is not a thing.”

“So why would she say that?” I mused.

---