Let me in.

Kamp pulled his blanket up to his nose. The Goblin Marauders tank top felt like scant protection against whatever was coming.

Something was.

He looked out across his rooms, down the lit path to the kitchen. His heart beat heavy and he pressed the blanket to his chest.

He tried to think good thoughts. Good things. Goblin. Chess. History. Mom.

But Mom had died and so thoughts of Mom led to thoughts of ghosts once again.

“Don’t show yourself!” he suddenly called out. And across his rooms, through the far kitchen wall, he believed he heard Mrs. Doris get out of bed. He thought he heard her in her own kitchen, adjacent to his, where the unmistakable sound of a glass against the wall could be heard.

As if listening to him. Listening to see if he was okay. Or, Kamp worried, listening to be able to say one day, excitedly, at a party, that she had a ghost story of her own, one that topped all the others, yes yes, the time she heard a man die through her kitchen wall, the time she heard a man scared to death.

5

Kamp, still awake, still sitting up on his transparent bed, was still thinking.

His mother and father made it forty-six years together before Harrison (sixty-eight) died of cancer. Judy (also dead at sixty-eight, but four years after her husband) went for no reason at all. Died in her sleep. Kamp, coming to take her to a movie, found her sitting up on the couch, eyes open, unmoving. He shook her once, then twice, then sat down beside her on the couch with his hand to his chin, wondering what might happen to her soul, how long she’d actually been dead, and if maybe she wasn’t still in the room with him.

If I didn’t see a ghost that day…

His relationship with his mother was a fantastic one, underscored somehow by the fact that he was the one to find her. Of the three Kamp kids, Walter was most like her in physique and spirit.

Judy Kamp was a big woman with a bright light inside.

Halfway through her pregnancy with Walter, she knew she was carrying a big boy. And through the grit and grind of labor, she knew he would be her boy.

And in a way, he was. Growing up, there could be no argument that Kamp was his mother’s son. They shared the same mannerisms, the same gestures, the same predilection to eat the leftovers on the next plate over when their own plate was eaten clean.

They shared the same laugh, too. The hallmark bellowing of the heavier set.

To all, Judy Kamp was a riot. Friends and visitors felt safe in her sphere, knew they were in good hands; Judy could hold court at any table and made society simple and exciting. She had opinions, ideas, sayings, and phrases that stretched not only to all the laughing guests, but well beyond, all the way to the classroom Kamp would briefly teach in years down the road.