Frank kept tormenting himself, over and over again, with the words his now-dead partner Alex used to use: How could I? How could he have let his own hurt feelings allow him to abandon Karen when she’d needed him most, only oozing his green-ghost-mist self back into the storage space in time to see Karen off some fuckin’ guy by smashing his skull wide open.
“It’s okay. It was understandable. You’re forgiven.”
Fuckin’ stereo? Frank would have shuddered if only a ghost could… Where did that thought come from? And why did he feel like he’d been forgiven in harmony, by both a…building…and Karen?
Karen… Frank was afraid to look at her after the way she’d been acting toward him, but…fuhgettaboudit…he finally looked down.
She was looking up at him. She smiled.
Something slithered. Vaguely Frank thought he overheard how nobody played their cards right and how fuckin’ with the naked girls in the gym two blocks away was more fun than this before the slithering went away.
Karen went back to caressing the contents of a box in her storage unit. It included the broken friends-forever plague from Marie that Karen was gently attempting to reassemble.
The pregnant teenager, cuddled up in Karen’s unit with her, looked up from her phone.
“How’s saving the world from domestic violence going?” Karen asked.
“Like it’s effin’ hard work!” answered the teenager, going back to her phone.
Something clattered in the hall just outside. “Clumsy, Hank, clumsy.”
The blond kid scooped up a bottle rolling across the floor. “Here you go, buddy.”
“Thanks, Tommy.”
The blond ducked his head into Karen’s storage unit, grinning at Imogene. “Imogene? Karen? Wall’s all sealed up again. What’s left of your father, Imogene…not to mention a few other ‘loose ends’ left around here, all those data sticks, and even that phone of Jennifer’s you gave me, Karen…will never be found.”
THE END
