Chapter One
Other People's Goodbyes
The Henderson goodbye wrapped by midmorning, which is how I like them. I ran it the way I run all of them. I showed up, I helped everyone cry, and I was packing the camper before the casserole dishes needed returning.
“You’re not staying for lunch?” the daughter asked at the camper door, holding a foil pan I was never going to accept. She stopped crying somewhere back in the eulogies and hadn’t noticed yet. That’s the whole job, right there. By the time they notice, I’m a state away.
“I never do. You did the hard part this morning. Now go eat something. You’ll be hungry all week and you’ll think it’s grief, but it’s mostly that nobody eats at these things.”
She laughed, wet and surprised, then looked down at the pan like it belonged to someone else. “What do we owe you? For the...” She hunted for the word. They always hunt for the word.
“The goodbye. It’s paid. Your mother settled it in the spring, before she got sick. She haggled.”
Sunny rapped once on the windshield from inside the camper, which is crow for the meter is running. The daughter looked at him, then at me, with the question people always decide not to ask, and I got in and drove, because I have a strict policy against overstaying a welcome nobody technically issued.
At forty-eight, I have no fixed address, one elderly crow, and a camper with strong opinions about where I park it. People call me for memorials, mostly. House blessings for people who can’t sleep in a place until a stranger tells the old grief in the walls it’s allowed to leave. The occasional handfasting, which is really just a pretty goodbye to sleeping diagonally.
I do not do ghosts. Nobody at the Hendersons’ asked, but a cousin at the reception got close, leaning in with a sweating glass. People hear veil-work and get ideas, usually involving lace curtains and dead relatives with unfinished opinions. My work is quieter than that, more paperwork-adjacent. I told him what I tell everybody. I read thresholds. Doorways, edges, the second a room spends deciding whether to become a different room. I help the living say the thing they’re already ready to say. He looked disappointed. They always do. It is not a flashy way to be a witch. Nobody puts it on a candle.
Birchwood came up out of the pines all at once, a good six miles before the GPS swore it would. I did the thing I do at the edge of every town. I let off the gas, put the window down, and listened.
Sunny did not approve.
He was riding the dash like a small disreputable gargoyle, a gas-station receipt clamped in his beak that he lifted off the counter sixty miles back, for reasons known only to him and possibly the receipt. He cracked one eye at the welcome sign and produced the single most disgusted sound in his whole range. The meaning, in context, was no. Then he went back to guarding the receipt, and the glovebox under it, where the rest of his collection lived. Anything that caught the light, Sunny considered his by law.
Crows don’t talk. Sunny just radiates opinion at you until you give up and agree.
“Two weeks,” I told him. “We help Birdie, we do the vigil, we leave. You’ll barely have time to traumatize the local songbirds.”
He puffed up to twice his size, which is crow for we’ll see, and pretended to sleep.
“I mean it this time.”
He kept pretending, which is crow for you always mean it.
