Page 2 of Crazy Spooky Love
“No!” I almost yell, but Lenny is already across the room with his hand out to help her down. My mother sly-eyes me as she steps from the table, keeping a firm grip on Lenny’s hand.
“Long life-line,” she murmurs, tracing her scarlet nail across Lenny’s palm.
“Mother,” I warn, but my somber, cautionary tone falls on her selectively deaf ears. I expected nothing else, because she’s pulled this trick before. Admittedly, the standing-on-the-table thing is a new twist, but she’s got form in scoping out my prospective boyfriends to make sure they’ll fit in with our screwball family from the outset. Not that her romantic gauge is something to put any stock in; Leo passed her tests with flying colors and look how that ended up. I got my heart broken and he got a spot onMorning TVas the resident psychic. Where’s the justice in that? Look, we may as well get the clanky old skeleton out of the family closet early on here, people. It’s going to come out sooner or later, and despite my attempts to pull the wool over Lenny’s eyes, there’s never any running away from this thing for long.
My name’s Melody Bittersweet, and I see dead people.
It’s not only me. I’m just the latest in a long line of Bittersweet women to have the gift, or the curse, depending on how you look at it. My family has long since celebrated our weirdness; hence the well-established presence of our family business, Blithe Spirits, on Chapelwick High Street. We’ve likely been here longer than theactualchapel at the far end of the street. That’s probably why, by andlarge, we’re accepted by the residents of the town, in a “They’re a bunch of eccentrics, but they’reourbunch of eccentrics” kind of way. What began as a tiny, mullion-windowed, one-room shop has spread out along the entire row over the last two hundred years; we now own a run of three terraced properties haphazardly knocked into one big, rambling place that is both business and home to not only me, but also to my mother, Silvana, and her mother, Dicey. Gran’s name isn’t actually Dicey. It’s Paradise, officially, but she’s gone by Dicey ever since she met my grandpa Duke on her fifteenth birthday and he wrote “Dicey and Duke” inside a chalk heart on the back wall of our building. He may as well have written it on her racing heart.
“Silvana!”
Speak of the devil.Does no one go to bed around here?
Gran stands in the open doorway with her hand raised as if to knock. I guess I should be glad she’s slightly more respectably dressed, if a lilac floor-length, shot-silk kimono, bearing huge Technicolor dragons could be considered as such. Her usually pin-curled red-gold hair is piled elegantly on her head and she wears a slash of fire-engine-scarlet lipstick for good measure. Most people couldn’t carry the look off, but thanks to her poise, confidence, and couldn’t-care-less attitude, my gran wears it with artful success. She glides past me without invitation and gazes at my mother and Lenny, who are still hand in hand on the rug.
God. First thing tomorrow morning, I swear, I’m going to look for a new place to live, somewhere,anywhere,that is not in the same building as my mother and my gran. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a charming old place and I love my family dearly. It’s not even as if I don’t have my own space here, because, theoretically at least, I do. Mum and Gran have the sprawling ground-floor apartment behind Blithe Spirits, and I have the smaller upstairs flat tucked away at the back. In lots of ways this makes me fortunate; I get to have a nice little home of my own and stay close to my family. Which would all be fine and dandy, were it not for the fact that my family are liableto come up and let themselves into my flat—using the spare key I gave them for dire emergencies only—and embarrass the shit out ofme.
“Why is Silvana entertaining a man half her age in your flat?” Gran glances from me to my mother. “You should have said you were expecting company, darling. I’d have taken myself out for dinner.” She touches her hand lightly against her hair. “Aren’t you supposed to drape a towel over the doorknob or something, isn’t that the modern way to signal these things?”
She looks spectacularly amused with herself, and one glance at Lenny tells me that he knows he’s way out of his depth with these two and is in the process of writing me off as the worst date he’s ever had. His eyes slide from me to the door, and I can almost hear him begging me to let him leave unharmed.
“He’s not Mum’s date, he’s mine. Or else, he was,” I mutter, and then I’m distracted as a beer-bellied pensioner in a soup-stained shirt slowly materializes through the ceiling, his flannel trousers not quite meeting his hairy ankles. Stay with me; I see dead people, remember? As do my mother and my grandmother, who also watch him descend with matching expressions of distaste.
“Finally,” my mother spits, dropping Lenny’s hand so she can round on the new arrival. “Two hours I’ve been chasing you around this bloody building. Your wife wants to know what you’ve done with the housekeeping money she’d hidden in the green teapot. She says you better not have lost it on the horses or she’s had it with you.”
My gran rolls her eyes. “I rather think she’s had it with him anyway. He’s been dead for six weeks.”
“You’re a fine one to talk, given that you still sleep with your husband twenty years after he died.” Mother flicks her silver hair sharply. Touché.
Lenny whimpers and bolts for my front door, turning back to me just long enough to splutter “Something’s come up, gotta go,” before he hoofs it out and down the stairs two at a time.
I hear his car door slam and wonder what came up. Probably his dinner.
“Breakfast, darling?”
My mother acts as if nothing untoward happened last night when I stomp barefoot into the warm, farmhouse-style kitchen she shares with Gran.
It’s a double standard, I know. I moan about them letting themselves into my flat and then breeze into theirs as if I own the place, but in my defense it’s totally my mother’s fault. She props their door open and then lures me down the stairs with the smell of home cooking; usually something sweet and irresistible. I think she’s actually found a way to pump the smell of freshly made waffles through the ancient heating system, a siren she knows I cannot ignore.Sugar alert! Sugar alert! Melody Bittersweet, report to your mother’s kitchen for culinary fabulousness and a grilling on your love life, immediately!
“You can’t get round me with waffles this time,” I grouch. I spent most of last night tossing and turning, thinking about the fact that my life is heading precisely nowhere. “Where’s Gran?”
“She’s behind you.” I turn at the sound of Gran’s stage-school growl and find her standing right behind me making Big-Bad-Wolf claw hands in the air for her own amusement. Resplendent once more in embroidered purple silk, she pours herself a strong black coffee and takes a seat at the scrubbed pine kitchen table.
“I’m glad you’re both here,” I say, pulling up one of the mismatched chairs and squirting a lake of syrup onto the waffles I said I didn’t want. I heap on a few fresh blueberries to stave off my guilt. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
“You’re pregnant?” Gran clasps her hands in shiny-eyed anticipation.
“Given the fact that you two terrify any prospective boyfriends, it’s hardly likely, is it?”
Mother looks sanguine beside the cherry-red Aga she had installed to complete her farmhouse-kitchen fantasy. “Marry a woman, marry her family.”
I grit my teeth as thoughts of my own Miss Havisham–style fate strengthen my resolve.
“I’m starting my own business.”
The pair of them swivel their heads and stare at me with widened eyes. I suddenly feel very on-the-spot.
“In the empty room beneath my flat,” I press on. Blithe Spirits is so big that several rooms have fallen into disuse, and the big one at the back on the ground floor is perfect for my new enterprise. It has its own door out onto the cobbled alleyway, which can serve as public access, and there’s an open fireplace in there to keep it warm through the chilly months. Technically, it’s in my bit of the building anyway, so I don’t expect to have to put up much of a fight forit.
