Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

Sadie asks, thinking she might need to make Toby last even though Toby is her very best customer.
    “Three.”
    Sadie asks them in and their requests are pretty simple and ones she can accept and work on later in the day. One wants to go back to the Ocean Forest Hotel at Myrtle Beach like she did as a child, which will require the assistance of Abby, who can print old things off the computer. She is pretty sure that the Ocean Forest got torn down ages ago, but they will find it or something very similar. Another wants to be in the family portrait of her husband’s family. “It was when his mama turned eighty,” she says, “And it was the best day of my life, but I volunteered to take the picture so it looks like I’m not there and I was there and I want to be back there on the back row between my husband and his brother, Buddy.”
    “That’s a tough angle,” Sadie tells her, “could you be on the other side?”
    “No. I never got along with his sister and don’t want to stand near her.”
    That poor child, Millie, is there, but all she wants is change so Sadie tells her to take what’s there in a little bowl by the door. That’s why the change is there in the first place, but of course she doesn’t tell her that or it would be a constant thing. She handled candy and colored paper clips this same way in her classroom. And then there’s Abby, who says she just wants to curl up in the chair or at the foot of her bed and talk. She loves that child dearly and she loves Benjamin and clearly things at home are getting worse. Clearly his illusions just are not working, and she plans to call him this very day to say that he needs to take better care of his child. You need to put her first, she plans to tell him and she plans to use poor Stanley Stone as an example of a father who did not do a good job and is lucky that Ned got through the trouble alive and is now a kind and prosperous man. She will tell Benjamin how one look on the girl’s face can tell you everything you need to know and she is even older than eight! She is twelve—almost a teenager—and old enough to start hiding behind makeup and music and acting silly and she is doing none of those things. She will tell him it might be now or never.
    “I’ll be quiet while you work,” Abby says. Her hair needs to be washed and is yanked back in a lopsided ponytail and the T-shirt she’s wearing is big enough for two people. She is carrying some of those flyers with her lost puppy.
    “Of course, sweetie,” she says, and motions over to her bed or the big velvet chair beside it—Horace’s chair. On a good day when she lets her room get a little too warm and humid, she can smell his pipe smoke in the fabric. There are some pistachio shells and an old ballpoint pen down under the cushion that she has not been able to throw away. If only she had found them when he was alive, she would have. But she found them late one night with Rudy on her lap and Johnny Carson on the television and she let them be—relics, touchstones, and even now she will reach and grip the pen or rub the smooth pink shells and the clickety clack of I think I can I think I can becomes Sadie? Sadie? Are you awake?
    “Sadie?” Toby waves her plump hand back and forth. “Yoo-hoo, Earth calling Sadie.” She looks over at Abby and they both start laughing. “I can come back later if you’re needing a nap.”
    “Heavens no!” she says. “I have never been a napper! I was just thinking about the best way to capture your wish.” She turns to the girl. “And actually I have some work for you if you’re up for it. I need a picture of the Ocean Forest Hotel if you can find it. And if you can’t, just find some big brick building, like in Charleston or Savannah, and we’ll make do. And I need a good picture of what was called the Old Man of the Mountain as a surprise for Joanna Lamb, who mentioned that not too long ago, I think she’s the one said it. It was somewhere way up north and