“Extra pie for you tonight,” she says. “When you fill your hair with dust and mice for your neighbor, you get a big slice and as much ice cream on the side as you want.”

Shelly can’t help hoping that maybe this means her mom’s coming around to seeing things her way—seeing that Shelly isn’t just a kid and should be allowed to work with Grandma in the field. She smiles back at her mom. “Really?”

“Really,” Mom says, reaching out to give the ends of Shelly’s hair a playful tug. “You do have to wash your hair when we get home, though. I can see cat hair in it from here.”

4

Grandma doesn’t get rid of every ghost she comes across. She says sometimes ghosts deserve to do their haunting. And sometimes people deserve to be haunted.

“You don’t take ghosts from a graveyard,” Grandma says, braiding Shelly’s hair so she won’t catch any ghosts she doesn’t want. “Not unless they want to go, and then you can let them out. Most of those ghosts will leave if they really want to. Same with sacred places, churches and temples. Any ghosts doing their haunting there deserve to stay.”

Shelly rolls her eyes. “I know,” she says. “Sometimes it’s the living who make trouble for the dead.”

Grandma snorts, tugging playfully on the end of Shelly’s braid. “It’s good to know you’ve been listening.”

One of the first places Grandma took Shelly for ghost lessons was a graveyard—an old one where nobody had been buried for years. It was tucked in a small lot between a strip mall and a block of townhouses and kept tidy by the city. There was a ghost there, a faint shade of a person slowly transitioning from ghost to gone.

“Not everyone can see the dead,” Grandma said, pointing to the blurry shape propped up against the chain-link fence. “We can, and that means we’ve got responsibilities.”

Shelly was six and so excited about seeing the ghost she could hardly sleep. Mom decided that meant she was scared, but she wasn’t. Even then, she liked the dead.

The graveyard Grandma takes Shelly to this time is a 27-minute bus ride away. It’s a modern one—big, with tidy rows of tasteful headstones and brass plaques set in the ground. Shelly keeps to the path so she doesn’t walk on anybody’s grave.

“This kind of graveyard, you aren’t going to find a lot of ghosts,” Grandma says, leading Shelly toward the outer limits of the graveyard to the cheaper graves. “Lots of old ladies like me with nothing left to haunt about.”