Page 138 of Wicked Hungry

“Sorry,” I say.

“No need to apologize,” she says. “I want to thank you, Stanley, for holding me at the end. It wasn’t easy to leave you. And now you seem to be stuck with me again.”

It takes me a moment to realize that she’s crying.

“It’s all right, Karen,” I say.

“What?” she asks. “What’s all right? That I’m dead? That I’m here in your room, instead of resting in peace? How can that be ‘all right?’”

“Is it terribly hard?” I ask.

“Is what hard?”

“Staying here,” I say. “Not moving on.”

“Are you trying to get rid of me?”

I shake my head. “I’m sorry, that’s all. You deserve to be at peace. That’s why I let them take you. The Sisters, I mean.”

“Stanley, that’s sweet,” she says. “You didn’t have to say that.”

I hear her get up then, but she doesn’t leave. Not just yet.

“Stanley, there’s something I need you to do for me.”

She tells me what it is. Her dead lips whisper secrets in my ear.

And then she’s gone. And I’m finally alone. And you know what? She even closes the window on the way out, yet somehow I’m still cold.

I figure now there will be a bunch of tossing and turning and eventually I will fall asleep. It would be nice to say my story finally ends here.

But it doesn’t.

Thinking about what she said, I’m afraid my story is just beginning.