The only cassette player Shelly knows of is the one in her mom’s car. Every time they go shopping at the thrift store, Shelly’s mom makes a point of looking for tapes, searching for something good. It should be easy to convince her mom to play Joseph’s tape, except that Joseph is a ghost and Shelly knows how her mom feels about ghosts.

The next time they go out, just Shelly and her mother, Shelly takes the tape with her. It’s warm now—looks and feels just like any other tape, not like a gift from a ghost at all, but Shelly still doesn’t work up the courage to ask to play it before they reach the thrift store. Instead she stands there with the tape in her pocket and watches her mother sort through rows of Christmas albums and church music.

“When I was your age I used to sit with my tape deck and record songs off the radio one by one,” her mother says. “I used to call in and request my favorite songs and hover over the tape deck to catch what I wanted when it got played.” She squints down at a tape with a picture of a lute on the front of the box then puts it back among the Christmas albums.

“I might have to find a tape deck and start doing that again.” The thrift store keeps the box of tapes tucked away in the back corner of the shop and sells each tape for 25 cents. Cheap, because nobody wants them anymore. “Especially if your grandma keeps borrowing the good tapes and losing them.”

After meeting Joseph at the graveyard, Shelly knows Grandma isn’t losing the tapes at all, but she doesn’t say so. Grandma and Shelly have ghost secrets, which is only fair, since Mom and Shelly have secrets, too.

“Do you want to see if there’s any music you like?” Mom asks, stepping back from the box of tapes. “Or should we give up this week and go get lunch instead?”

Joseph’s tape is a heavy presence against Shelly’s hip. “I’m okay,” she says. “Lunch sounds better.”

“Thank God,” says her mom. “I’m starving.”

• • •

Lunch is Mom and Shelly’s secret because Grandma doesn’t believe in overcharging for ghosts or paying someone to make food for you. Zhou’s Family Restaurant—a Chinese restaurant that does burgers and fries as well as Szechuan American food—is beside the thrift store. When her mom’s having an especially good or an especially bad week, they’ll get milkshakes and split an order of french fries and sweet and sour pork.

Zhou’s is always loud and busy on the weekends—full of families getting lunch and people placing takeout orders—but Shelly and her mom get a two-person table in the back corner of restaurant.