I felt Lucy come up behind me and hug me.  Both of her arms wrapped tight around my abdomen as she squeezed.  Warmth suffused me.  I loved Lucy’s hugs.  So much better than her rage. 

Lucy was usually all hugs and gentle caresses.  A curtain billowing on a still summer day.  The sofa cushions plumped when I came downstair after a night of good sleep. But she hated men.  Every man.  If I had a repair person in the house, she was all slamming doors and breaking glass.  Gusts of ice cold.

Lucy was a ghost.  She came with the house.

There wasn’t anything of Lucy to see.  She was nothing but a change in the quality of the air.  An occasional fragrance now and again.  She wears Tabu which I hate, but I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for anything in the world.  She is my ghost and I had wanted one since watching the Ghost and Mrs. Muir as a child. 

Would I have preferred a good-looking sea captain?  Maybe.  But instead, I ended up with Lucy.  I researched my deed one time.  Unusual for a house the age of mine, it had only been deeded to women ever.  The first one being Miss Lucy Adams. I assume that is who watches over me.

I don’t know anything about her other than the 1850 census lists her as a spinster school teacher.  She is the first owner of the house and presumably, she had it built.  The deed just appears as a transfer from The First Huntington Bank.

I had a roommate for a short while.  A gay gentleman who was quite lovely to me, but scornful of his lovers.  He could do a wicked impersonation of his then-current paramour.  Robbie needed to vent his spleen to love.  I often felt sorry for his conquests.  Not Lucy.  She hated Robbie and would trash his room.  Over and over.  Each day he returned home from work I could hear the sound of “Damn it, Lucy!  I’ve done nothing to you.”  After six months or so of Lucy’s bad behavior, he moved out.  He was an otherwise ideal roommate.  Gone most of the time, on time with the rent, and handy with a hammer, and taking out the trash.

I got lots of hugs when the cab came and carried him off for the last time.

Lucy was pleased.  I found the couch cushions continuously plumped with a soft indentation where Lucy had sat waiting for me to get home.

Things were idyllic at home until I met Roger. 

We worked together at the university—he was new to the English Dept.  I was in Classical Languages.  Our paths crossed now and again.  Then it was lunch together.  Then he asked me out.  I thought of Lucy before saying yes but arranged to meet him somewhere.  We went out for a while.  When I would come home with the smell of him on me, Lucy would slam doors and rage.  She broke my favorite vase the night I finally invited him over for dinner. 

Roger saw the vase rise from the center of the foyer table and land on the African sculpture hung over the fireplace.  The hearth was littered with jagged cobalt blue glass and ebony.

What the hell was that?  He exclaimed.

I replied, “That was Lucy.  My ghost.  She doesn’t like men and I don’t  know why.”

Roger looked at me with a visage I couldn’t read…