Page 51 of Crazy Spooky Love
I find Gran in thekitchen doing yoga whilst watching the Mexican daytime soap opera she’s addictedto.
“I thought you’d given up on this after the character you liked lost the plot and held a bank up dressed in his wife’s underwear,” I say, heading for the sink.
She straightens and sips from the teacup on the table that she uses to disguise her champagne during the day. “It was all just a misunderstanding, darling.”
I frown, wondering how you explain robbing a bank in your wife’s red-lace corset. Gran looks away from the show as it cuts to a commercial break and shrugs. “It’s Mexico. They do things differently over there.”
I want to jump to Mexico’s defense, because they gave us Frida Kahlo and Salma Hayek and enchiladas, but I let the whole debate go in favor of searching under the sink for latex gloves, needed to read a dead man’s diaries. Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuffup.
“Gran, you don’t happen to know where those thin rubber gloves have gone, do you?”
“Shop,” she says, or at least I think that’s what she says. I retract my head from behind the u-bend and straighten up on my knees.
“Did you say they’re in the shop?”
She nods without taking her eyes from the screen. “Silvana took them a few days back.”
I haul myself to my feet, and as I pass the fridge she holds her teacup out without looking atme.
“This tea needs a little more milk. Would you mind, darling?” I flip the fridge door open and extract the champagne bottle,wondering if Nonna Malone knocks back the grappa while she bakes cookies or if it’s just my bonkers gran whose blood is twelve percent proof.
I head around to thefront of the building and push open the ancient shop door, enjoying the familiar, mellow jingle of the old-fashioned bell. It suits my mother’s style to keep Blithe Spirits as traditional as possible, and there is little different about the shop interior now to how it might have looked a hundred years ago. The wooden paneling has been carefully maintained, and the small beveled panes of glass in the curved bay windows are all original. Jugs of fresh flowers fill the deep windowsills and the counter that runs along one side has a deep, subtle shine from decades of beeswax. My mum has added a couple of forest-green velvet armchairs in front of her impressive library of occult books, deeply buttoned and comfortable, and I find her sitting in one of these now, the newspaper open in her hands and her glasses balanced on the end of her slender nose. Everything about her is long, lithe, and pale; she must look at me and wonder how she wound up with a barely five-foot brunette. Not that she’s ever said anything of the sort; she’s never made me feel anything but perfect, because I have my dad’s round brown eyes and, according to her, his wide smile and dimples. We look entirely unrelated, but people who know us well tell us that we are more similar in personality than in looks.
“Melody.” She closes the paper and takes her glasses off as she looks up, blinking a few times to adjust her eyes. “Have you come to tell me that your gran’s watching that wretched show again?”
“Well, no, but she is,” I say, scanning the shelf behind the counter. “Have you got those thin rubber gloves in here? The ones that have been under the sink forever?”
“They’re beneath the counter, left-hand side,” Glenda’s voice drifts into the shop, and a second or two later she pops her headaround from the little office out back. I grab the box and pull out one solitary glove, then growl with frustration as I peer down into the now empty box.
“I’ll make a note to bring a fresh supply in the morning,” Glenda says. “I like to keep some in stock. You never know what you might need to do around here.”
She catches my mother’s eye tartly, clearly making a point.
“Your gran asked Glenda if she’d be so kind as to clear up vomit a few days back,” my mother says, looking sheepish. “A customer’s teenage daughter threw up when Gran told her that her dead grandpa saw what she did behind the art block at school.”
Glenda raises her eyebrows. “Dicey said she’d have cleared it up herself if it wasn’t for her knees. The woman has practiced yoga for longer than I’ve been alive, she has better knees than I do.”
I try not to smile as Glenda disappears into the back office again, leaving me holding one useless latex glove. My mother taps her long fingernail on the newspaper.
“There’s an article in here about that house you’re working at.” She slides her glasses back on and flips the pages until she finds the one she wants, then doubles the paper over with a shake and hands it to me. “You can have it. I’m done with it.”
I look down as I take the newspaper and note Fletch’s smug smiling face next to the byline. I might have known. I tuck it under my arm and head out of the shop, already planning to deface Fletch’s photograph when I get back to my desk.
“Planning on trying to getaway with murder, Ghostbuster?”
Ah, shizzleshits. Of all the people to run into on the street with the newspaper under my arm, I have to practically walk into the man whose face I’m currently dreaming about defacing with a bright red Sharpie. He looks pointedly at the latex glove I stupidly still have in my hands and then back up to my eyes. “Yes, yours,” Iretort, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand. “Tell me, do you spend your entire life stalking me or were you just passing?”
“Someone’s full of themselves today.” Fletch holds his hand up to show me the brown paper bag from the arty-farty sandwich shop a few doors down. “Lunch.”
“Try not to choke on your rocket,” I grouch and then I pause and wish the ground would swallow me up. Thankfully he swerves the obvious pun, but the amused spark in his green eyes tells me that he’s thinking it all the same.
Instead, he nods toward the newspaper. “Page fifteen. You’ll like it.”
I push it farther under my arm so he can’t see that it’s already open to his article. “I’m planning to use it to clean up dog poo.”
All right, yes, I know it was a crap line. It was the worst use I could think of for a newspaper at short notice. Don’t judgeme.
He laughs under his breath. “You don’t even have a dog.”
