He whispers in my ear, “The only reason you’re sayin’ that is because you know there’s no room for your belly in that car.”
I smack him and he laughs. “I’m teasin’. I don’t care if your belly blows up like the side of a barn. But seriously, we can’t get busy in Albert’s ride. That was your Meemaw’s job.”
I playfully smack him again at the naughty reference to my Meemaw’s wild youth, but I’m glad he’s restored Albert’s old car.
I can imagine him riding around in it with Trudy when she’s in town. She bought one of the big houses on the same street as Lia’s Granana’s house. She said she wants to make Applebarrow her part-time home.
“Come on, you wild Jenkins woman. Let’s get out of here.”
I let the girls know I’m leaving and tell them to have fun with their dad. Magnolia is hanging on her boyfriend’s words, and Zinnia is holding one of her baby cousins.
Tucker and I walk hand in hand to the parking lot and get in his truck. It’s so hot and he cranks up the AC. My internal furnace is already making me warm, as is the proximity of the man I love, and also…the girl in the backseat of the truck with her hand to her lips.
What the hell?
I’m about to ask Tucker why there’s a teenaged cheerleader in his backseat when I see the faded edges of her ghostly glow.
I take a deep breath, look forward so Tucker doesn’t think I’m acting weird, and in my head, I say, “Meemaw, is that you?”
“Yep. Don’t I look cute?”
Tucker holds my hand and puts the truck into gear.
“Yes, but what are you doin’ in that form?” I didn’t even know she could change form. She is becoming quite the advanced ghost.
“Well, remember how when you visited Albert, he said he wished he could see me one more time as he knew me?”
I turn around and remember that as far as Tucker knows the backseat is empty.
Tucker says, “You lookin’ for somethin’ back there? Did you drop your phone?”
“No, I was just lookin’ back at the party. It was such a great day.”
He squeezes my hand and I look in my sideview mirror at Meemaw.
At least this way I can pretend to be admiring the flowers on the side of the road.
“Meemaw, are you gonnna appear to that man lookin’ like that?”
“Yes, I am, but I’m gonna wait until he’s alone. His wife goes to bed early.”
“Meemaw!!”
If she’s gonna tell me about some ghost striptease I am gonna throw up, and my morning sickness just went away recently.
“What kind of girl do you think I am? Sheesh. I heard Gladys tellin’ your mama that she likes to turn in early, so I am just gonna let Albert see me. Just for a moment. He can handle it. And I owe it to him. We could have had a life together.”
I sigh and think of all the regrets I could have had if I stayed with Ray, or if I let my stubborn jealousy and pride keep me from Tucker.
Or worse yet, if I had an Aunt Jenny instead of an Aunt Trudy!
I look in the mirror again and she waves goodbye to me and I can’t stop her.
I just hope that heaven has an unlimited supply of hummus, or else Meemaw is gonna go hungry. I see a lot of incarceration in her future.
Who would have thought my Meemaw would be the rebel ghost?
I smile and Tucker catches the warmth of my happiness. I know he thinks it’s because of him and the baby, and it is. Nothing could make me happier than knowing that we are starting our own family, and that with my girls we will all be together forever.
The babysitter and the boy who has loved her his whole life.
When I think of all I’ve been through, I think that’s about as miraculous as being visited by your deceased grandmother, and meeting your long-lost aunt, who’s a famous country star!
How many people can say any of that?
I lean back into my seat in the cool truck and squeeze Tucker’s hand.
Maybe one day I’ll be able to visit our grandchild after death, and this circle of life will continue in magical ways.
However, I can promise one thing to my future kin.
I will not be caught eatin’ fried chicken on a toilet.
THE END
Click HERE to read Nobody Tells Lia Anything, Book 1 in the Spooky Matchmaker series!
JOIN ME ON THE EDGE
Click here to become an Edgy Reader and receive a FREE BOOK as my thank you for joining!
The fun doesn’t stop with the FREE DOWNLOAD!
As a member of my “Edgy Readers Group,” you will receive:
More free books!
News on upcoming releases!
Exclusive contests and giveaways!
Cover reveals!
Updates on projects and new series in the works!
Polls asking for your opinion!
Shenanigans!
Wiener dog pictures!
Excerpts!
Members only sneak previews and exclusive content!
I can’t wait for YOU to join the party!
Novels by Carol Maloney Scott
Fun Feminine Fiction
Laughing in Love
Romantic Comedy/Chick Lit
Rom-Com on the Edge Series
Dazed & Divorced (Book 1)
There Are No Men (Book 2)
Afraid of Her Shadow (Book 3)
The Juggling Act (Book 4)
Accidental Makeovers (Book 5)
Valentines on the Edge (A Short Story Collection)
Let’s Hear it From the Boys (A Short Story Collection)
Flirting with Fantasy
Paranormal Rom Com/Chick Lit
Love Pixies Series
Love Pixies (Book 1)
Spooky Matchmakers Series
Nobody Tells Lia Anything (Book 1)
Something Molly Can’t See (Book 2)
COMING SOON!
Laughing in Love
Romantic Comedy/Chick Lit
Happy Campers (Wanderlust Women Book 1)
Flirting with Fantasy
Paranormal Rom Com/Chick Lit
Everything Olivia is Hiding (Spooky Matchmakers Book 3)
NOBODY TELLS LIA ANYTHING
FREE EXCERPT!
CHAPTER ONE
“It may be crass to speak of the…deceased…this way, but I swear, your mother was a fruit loop.”
Mom cringes at her own words and jangles her many silver bracelets, while my father smiles, and nervously glances around the office of Edward Franklin, Esquire, located in the quiet, bucolic mountain town of Applebarrow, Virginia.
Only Paul DeLuca, Professor of Experimental Philosophy, would be okay with his wife making snarky comments at such a serious time. But after all, he is known to his students and colleagues at Langworth College as the ‘Happiness Teacher.’
No one really knows what ‘Experimental Philosophy’ is. I triple majored in foreign languages, and even my degree is more marketable.
I don’t like to think of my father as a ‘Cult Leader’ (my late maternal Grandpa’s words), but I think ‘Guru’ sums it up.
I bite my lower lip as Mr. Franklin clears his throat. Clearly this appointment with the middle-aged hippies from Vermont (and their daughter), is cutting into his Saturday fishing.
The whole office is decorated in lures, reels, and plaques with sayings about fishing. There is even a cute embroidered pillow urging us to ‘get out and reel ‘em in.’
They were probably gifts from local clients. Sensible people who don’t argue quite as much at Will readings.
Although, only my mother argues, since any negativity makes my father’s ‘chi’ go out of alignment.
You would think being married to a noted authority on happiness would improve my mother’s mood, but the giddier Dad gets, the more she looks like she wants to knock him in…
“Mrs. DeLuca, I understand that—”
“Ed, it’s Mrs. Edelman-DeLuca, but since that’s a mouthful, I wish you’d call
me Sarah.”
She smiles at us and continues, earning an encouraging nod from Dad, since she seems to have employed one of his ten ‘Happiness Tenets’ to take her tension down a peg or two.
“It’s not that I don’t think my mother-in-law has…had…the right to leave her estate to anyone she wanted, and Paul and I are perfectly happy with our share of the settlement.”
Dad chimes in with the expected, “Perfectly happy!”
Mom’s smile is now drooping under the strain of remaining in a Zen state, and I know she wants to yell curse words in Yiddish. That was the first foreign language I picked up as a child. Not Yiddish. Curse words in Yiddish.
Mr. Franklin stares longingly at his fishing rods and tackle box, with a stolen glance at the beautiful day outside his stuffy, conflict-ridden office.
If only Granana could have left a simpler Will, but the same brain that concocted this bizarre scheme was the same one that produced my father. She was an odd bird, as I once heard Grandma Edelman call her.
Whatever. At least Granana didn’t keep plastic on her couches, so your legs got stuck when you visited on summer vacation.
Before our weary attorney can open his mouth, Mom says, “I’m just worried about Lia. She’s a young woman with her own life in Richmond. She has a job and an apartment and a boyfriend. She’s supposed to uproot herself, and give all that up, to do what again?”
Since my paternal grandmother, Allegra DeLuca, passed away a week ago of natural causes, my parents have been a little weird. Weirder than usual. They aren’t into small town Virginia, Catholicism, or leaving Vermont.
And they are dealing with all three this week.
Of course, Dad is beaming like the Dalai Lama no matter what, but I have a sneaking suspicion my ‘holistic medicine’ mother is itching for a prescription of her mother’s ‘nerve pills’.
Granana was ninety years old, and I’m guessing she would have lived even longer if she had eaten better and exercised, but her mind was sharp. We spent most of our visits speaking Italian, doing mind teasing puzzles, and baking.
Her husband, Grandpa Joseph, died three years ago, and I’d like to think they are reunited now (even though he was kind of a grump), however I don’t like to presume such things.
We held the funeral last Thursday, the day before St. Patrick’s Day. I didn’t want to go out with my boyfriend and our friends, but my parents insisted that Granana would want me to enjoy myself. ‘She lived a good, long life, and it was her time…blah, blah, blah…’
So, I went. I hate to be alone when I’m feeling sad. Or mad. Or even happy.
Okay, I really don’t like being alone.
Jason (my boyfriend) attended the wake and funeral with me, and he provided so much comfort. This is the first real loss of my life, and when I told him Granana had passed away, he left work and rushed home to be with me.
And Jason is quite the workaholic.
However, on St. Patrick’s Day, while sipping a green beer, he whispered in my ear, “So, the Will reading is tomorrow, huh?”
Suddenly I was worried that he now saw me as the heiress to the DeLuca Delicious Delights fortune.
When I didn’t respond right away, he backpedaled and said, “I mean, I’m sorry she’s gone, but don’t you wonder what’s going to happen to all that money? Your dad doesn’t seem to be interested.”
Jason isn’t an insensitive prick (really, he’s not). He’s practical, not sentimental.
Therefore my mother loves him, and my father thinks ‘that boy needs to slow down’.
Mom is a reluctant hippy at best, and she appreciates a go-getter, while Dad is smelling the roses.
Literally. He grows roses.
When Jason brought up the Will, I laughed at the thought of my father inheriting millions of dollars. He would probably start a Happiness Foundation. I hoped that my grandmother left him the money, and that he wouldn’t be too stubborn to accept it. People like my dad can do a lot of good with the proper resources.
And I can’t say that I didn’t want anything. Who would say that? Well, other than people like my dad.
I never had an awareness of the wealth growing up. I knew my grandparents made a lot of money from the business (DeLuca’s Delicious Delights was a household name), but I never saw much evidence of the money in their lifestyle.
My grandparents did have a big house in Applebarrow, but no servants. They had nice cars, but nothing extravagant. They vacationed in Italy, and a few other places in Europe, but they weren’t jet setters.
I guessed that their minimalist lifestyle led Jason to assume that I was an heiress of a large untouched fortune, and that if he stuck with me, he’d be an heir.
But I still wasn’t too upset with him. He loves me, and I know he hasn’t spent the past five years with me so he could get his hands on the DeLuca fortune. And unlike my father, most people are quite happy to come into unexpected money. It’s human nature.
And who knew where it would end up at that point? She could have left it all to a charity. The Church, maybe? And Jason had never mentioned it once before last week.
My grandparents started the giant snack cake company many years before, when they were first married, and moved to rural Virginia. Already in their thirties when they married, they had both done some traveling, and when they were looking for a place to settle, Grandpa Joseph remembered a trip to the Virginia mountains from his youth, and how ‘those poor bastards didn’t have a decent bakery.’
What started out as an adventure with two ‘fish out of water’ Italian New Yorkers moving to the small southern town and opening a bakery, ended up growing into a huge company with factory operations in Applebarrow, creating jobs and growth for the region.
My father was born in the early days of their marriage, and as he grew, he showed no interest in the family business, much to my grandfather’s distress.
Only in very late life did he finally accept his son’s choice to pursue a career in academia, a world that was completely foreign to his working-class Italian immigrant sensibilities.
Paul DeLuca met Sarah Edelman at college in New York, and my dad convinced my mom to give up nursing to become a massage therapist.
My Jewish, New Yorker maternal grandparents thought Paul DeLuca was a fruit loop.
Grandpa DeLuca closed the business right before he died because due to the ‘health nut bullshit’, the demand for unhealthy snack cakes was diminishing, along with Grandpa’s health. No one in the family wanted to take over the business.
I was a senior in college and obviously was in no position to step in and run a factory, and my dad…well, I’ve already explained that problem.
Therefore, when it came time to read the Will, I honestly wondered how much money was left for any of us to inherit.
At the funeral, I heard talk of the factory building still sitting empty in Applebarrow, and speculations of my grandmother’s net worth (such appropriate funeral conversation!), but as for Granana’s actual finances, the only one who really knew was Edward Franklin, attorney, fisherman, and confidante of my grandparents for many years, taking over after his father and uncle retired from the law practice.
I fidget in my seat, and cross and uncross my legs, uncomfortable in the skirt I’ve chosen for this somber occasion.
My usually hippy-attired parents have been dressing up for all the funeral activities, and today is no exception. My father probably can’t wait to get back to Vermont and break out his ancient jeans and sandals.
I’m putting on pajamas as soon as I get home. I’m even wearing lip gloss and mascara today, and my eyelashes keep sticking together. How does anyone wear this crap every day?
Mr. Franklin clears his throat and reopens the huge tome that contains my grandmother’s final wishes. I don’t think any of us have ever given any thought to this moment—it seemed like Granana would live forever.
By the way, I know ‘Granana’ looks like a careless typo, but it’s not. I called her by that rather
unusual name because when I was born my mother’s mother boldly claimed the name ‘Grandma’ for herself, and my parents wanted Dad’s mother to have a different name, so I wouldn’t get confused.
Granana did not want to be called ‘Nana’ (something about her evil mother-in-law), so they compromised and made up their own name.
I often think my parents must have taken one look at me as a baby and decided I wasn’t the brightest bulb, since they thought I couldn’t keep two ‘Grandmas’ straight.
I turned out to be an honors student who has never gotten less than an A in any class.
However, I don’t like to brag, especially in front of Jason. It’s a good thing his profession relies more on the ability to schmooze than academic achievement.
Mr. Franklin interrupts my day dreaming. “So as I was saying, Mrs. DeLuca left the previously discussed sum of money to her son and daughter-in-law.”
Fortunately, after much eye rolling and sighing on my mother’s part, Dad agreed to accept the money and ‘put it to good use.’
Money for money’s sake is foreign to him, but my mother often points out that she would be happier with a bigger house.
I’m glad I don’t live in Vermont, so I won’t be a witness to the discussions about the distribution of this newfound wealth.
Mr. Franklin appears relieved that he can move on without any further complaints or questions. “The Catholic Church Mrs. DeLuca attended will receive a smaller sum, and then the remaining assets go to Lia, along with a substantial cash inheritance, based on the guidelines and requirements Mrs. DeLuca has detailed. I’ve given you all a copy, and Ms. DeLuca, you have until Monday to let me know if you will accept your grandmother’s terms.”
He takes off his reading glasses and polishes them. I notice this is a nervous tic of his because he’s done it numerous times, and it’s not like he’s reading Wills in a sandstorm. How dirty are his glasses?
Everyone looks at me and I finally get a chance to speak. Normally I am the most talkative one in a room, but I’ve been rattled by the loss of my grandmother, and her odd request of me.
Something Molly Can't See Page 27