Bert arched his eyebrows, tossed the frankfurter package into the trash and washed his hands again. Time to rake the sawdust. I took comfort in Bert’s unvarying rituals, maybe because I had so few of my own. Most of the time, I felt as insubstantial as Nick’s ghost; I’d been living a lie for so long, I couldn’t recall the truth, if I’d ever known it in the first place. “Like what?” he prompted.

I turned on the bar stool as he reached for the rake leaning against the weathered board wall. “Like I saw my dead ex-husband last night,” I stumbled. There was no graceful way to say it.

Bert paused, rake in hand, and gave a low whistle. “Dude,” he said.

Since some people would have tested my forehead for a fever, I was mildly encouraged. “Maybe I’m going crazy.” That was the thought that had kept me awake, too agitated to engage in my usual insomnia cure, which was to sit at my computer and work my way through one of the piles of medical billings that paid my bills. That and the fear that Nick would get a recharge and show up again if I lay down on the bed.

Bert began to rake noxious things into a pile between two massive pool tables. Anybody might think they were losing their mind if they’d seen what I had, but I had more reason than most. My parents were shot to death in our rented double-wide, down in Cactus Bend, when I was five years old. I knew I must have witnessed the murders, since I was found hiding in the clothes dryer off the kitchen, covered with their blood, but I had no memory of the incident, or of the next few months, for that matter. The first thing I could recall was waking up in a cheap motel, and Lillian dabbing at my face with a cold washcloth.

“I seen you do some strange things,” Bert said. “Like the way you can make a slot machine pay off pretty much whenever you want. You come by your name honestly, but you ain’t crazy, Mojo. Not you.”

My heart warmed. Actually, I didn’t come by my name honestly—or much of anything else, either. Like Lillian, I’d been using an alias for years—one I’d chosen myself, out of a library book—and some dead child’s social security number. As close as Bert and I were, though, I’d never told him the whole story. Even Nick hadn’t known, though maybe he did now. He’d seen his battered body after the accident, and he knew I’d cried at his funeral, so maybe being dead gave him a broader perspective.

Now there was a disturbing thought.

“He looked—real,” I went on. “Except that he glowed in the dark.”