“I can’t believe we keep forgetting to check this stupid PO box,” I grumbled as I slammed the door of my Jeep. “I bet it’s stuffed full of junk. We really should start the process of canceling Aunt EJ’s mail. Or at least forward it to the house.” I still didn’t know why she’d had this PO box, to begin with.
My twin sister, Mae, closed the passenger door much more quietly, making me wonder if it’d even shut all the way. I knew better than to say anything to her, though. She was all meek and mild much of the time until it came to putting me in my place.
But that was okay. I loved her anyway. If she didn’t stand up to me, who would? “You didn’t have to tag along, but I’m glad you did.” I held open the door to the post office. “You know how I hate running errands alone.”
“Me, too.” Mae opened the inner door to the mailbox area for me. “In other countries, having errand dates with your friends is customary. Going to all the boring, annoying places together, like the dry cleaners and post office. We could start a trend here in the States.”
I paused with my key held out, about to put it in the slot. “That’s a great idea. You and I run around together a lot, but errands are seriously boring and kinda lonely unless you’re married and have a spouse to go with.”
Mae held her hands out while I cleared the stuffed box, catching the random envelopes and magazines as they slid out. “Oh,” she murmured. “How sad. This letter is addressed to Aunt EJ.”
“Someone still hasn’t heard she passed?” I peered down at the envelope. “Who do we know in Townsend, Tennessee?” I locked the box back up as Mae shook her head absently. “Looks like an elderly person. Look how shaky the lettering is.” It looked like chicken scratch, as Aunt EJ would say.
“No idea.” She stuffed it in her purse, then we sorted through the rest of the mail quickly into the large garbage can, throwing out the catalogs, ads, and coupons. In the end, we took one copy of Southern Living and three letters from Tennessee, all in the same shaky handwriting, back to the Jeep.
“Open it up,” I urged as I turned over the engine and cranked up the air conditioning. Southern California was no place to be living without A/C in July. “See if there’s a phone number. We can call to tell that person that EJ passed over two years ago.”
As I pulled out onto the main road, Mae skimmed the letter. “It’s kind of hard to read, but it sounds like this woman knows…knew Aunt EJ very well. And she definitely doesn’t know she’s dead.”
It still caused a pang in my chest to hear her say those words. And no doubt they were just as hard for her to say. It wasn’t like in the movies when someone died, and six months later, everything was sunshine and roses. Our aunt, Eliza Jane, had raised us from infancy after our parents died together in a car wreck. She was the only mother we’d ever known, and it hurt no less to lose her.
“Any idea how we can get ahold of her besides writing a letter?” I asked and turned into our neighborhood, conveniently just down the road from the post office. Mae and I lived together in our Aunt EJ’s house, which she’d left to us. It’d worked out pretty well when Mae divorced her no-good, lazy, piece of total crap husband last year. She’d moved in with me, and her daughter went off to college at the University of Tennessee. We’d been together ever since, and it’d been nice to see Mae starting to come out of the shell her ex had stuffed her into.
Humming low in her throat in response, she opened the other letters. “We need to read these more closely. There’s some bizarre stuff in here.” When she opened the last one, she chirped, a little noise she’d always made when happy. “A phone number!”
I pulled into the driveway, and Mae stuck the letters back in her purse while we unloaded the car. “Did you get that gluten-free cookie mix for Harriet?” I asked as I grabbed the shopping bags. “I still say you could just order it online and have it shipped directly.”
Scoffing, Mae grabbed the rest of the bags, her bangles clinking together as she walked around me and into the garage. “I like buying locally. Not from some conglomerate that can ship it for me.”
I kicked the back of the Jeep shut and followed. “What kind of weird stuff is in the letters?”
The neighbor’s white Pomeranian, Mayo, ran around the corner of our three-bedroom bungalow and darted toward my ankles, yipping at the top of his voice. I squealed and ran into the garage, screaming for Mae. “Get this rodent!”
Mae rolled her eyes at me, set the bags down, and picked the vicious mutt up. “He likes to bark, but you know he doesn’t bite.”
I didn’t care. Glaring at my sister, I backed into the house and slammed the door behind me. Animals were utterly unpredictable. They could do anything at any given time, not to mention the germs. Licking themselves, going to the bathroom in the house, and who knew what else?
Hey, I didn’t discriminate against dogs. It wasn’t that Mayo was a dog; it was about him being an animal. I didn’t like any of the vile creatures.
Mae came back a few minutes later with the bags. She set them down, and I started putting the paper products away while she pulled the letters back out.
“This is nuts. Talking about magic and murder.” Her voice was incredulous, which was understandable if the letter seriously talked about magic. I mean, come on. Magic? Really?
“If it’s an elderly person, maybe they’re not in their right mind?” I asked. We began putting groceries away, but Mae soon picked up the letters again.
“Let me read this one to you,” she said. “My dearest Eliza Jane. It’s been too long since you last visited. Three years! If you don’t come soon, I’m going to die, and then how will you feel?” She blanched and glanced up at me. “Oof. Awkward.”
“Very,” I muttered as I poured water to soak the berries. “Hang on. Who is this woman?”
Mae skimmed the letter. “It says something about her health failing, and she doesn’t always feel like herself, then it’s signed, your loving mother, Susan.”
I turned off the water and dried my hands as I slowly turned around to look at my sister. “What?” Eliza Jane’s mother, our grandmother, died before we were born. She’d told us that many times over the years when we’d asked. We had no family to speak of, save maybe some distant cousins none of us knew. We hadn’t even bothered doing one of those online DNA tests, though Mae kept saying she wanted to.
She shuffled through the other two letters. “They’re all signed like that.”
“Okay, let’s hear the rest of it.” I slid onto one of the stools at our kitchen island, the ones EJ had painstakingly picked out. We hated them, but neither of us could stand to get rid of them.
“Okay, um. It says the magic of the mountains is gone and has been since EJ left. Yada, yada, please bring the girls to visit. They must be walking by now?” She raised her eyes to look at me, her right eye matching the blue of my left and my right eye matching the brown of her left. We were identical mirror twins. Identical in every way, except on the opposite side. The only difference was that I was born with a stork bite behind my right ear.
She held the letters in her left hand, her dominant. That was one of the few ways we didn’t mirror. I was also a leftie. “Does this woman think we’re infants?” I asked. We’d looked just alike when we were babies and into our teens. Of course, like many parents of twins, Aunt EJ loved dressing us identically.
When we’d gotten old enough to convince her to let us have our own looks, we’d started looking less alike and more like our natural selves. I put on a bit of weight in college while Mae stayed slim, even throughout her pregnancy, which I probably gave her crap about too often. I liked to keep my hair bright and colorful, and she tended toward not dying hers at all.
My dear sister was all about living the crunchy life: natural fibers, organic food, and high-priced stuff. I was happy either way, so I let her have her way with the food choices. As long as I had access to ice water and Diet Dr. Pepper, I was happy.
“Yeah, here she gives advice for what to add to our formula since we aren’t getting breast milk.” She sat the papers on the island and looked at me with her mouth hanging open. “She’s got to be having memory problems, but that doesn’t explain how she thinks she’s EJ’s mom?”
“Let’s call the number,” I suggested. “Maybe we’ll get some answers.”
She pulled my phone out of her purse—I loathed carrying a purse—and slid it over to me. “You call. I don’t want to talk to people.”
Mae wasn’t a big fan of peopling. As a doula and nurse, I always had to people, so I didn’t mind so much. “Sure.”
I typed in the number and waited until someone answered. “Hello, Susan Myers’s room.” The male voice was rich and cheerful.
“Hello, um, I’m not sure where I’m calling,” I said tentatively, putting the phone on speaker. “I received a letter from Susan Myers for my aunt. Could I speak to Susan?”
“Are you a relative?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. She’d been writing letters to my aunt, but my aunt passed away over two years ago. Susan wrote a letter recently, and we just got it, but she says she’s my aunt’s mother. That can’t be, as my aunt told us her mother passed away many years ago.”
“Hang on,” he said, not unpleasantly.
I shrugged at Mae, who gave me a wonky look. The man came back a few moments later, after a sound of shuffling papers. “Are you Lela or Mae Myers?”
Erm, how’d he know that? “Yes, I’m Lela Myers.”
“Susan’s paperwork says she doesn’t want us to notify her next of kin before her passing, only after. But since you’ve called, I can tell you that her next of kin is her sister, Bertha, and she visits daily. She’s here now. Listed after her are Lela and Mae Myers. It does have an Eliza Jane Myers as deceased, but Susan’s memory has been especially bad the last six months or so, so she may not remember that.”
“Bertha?” I mouthed silently at Mae.
She shrugged. She’d never heard the name either.
“Well, as you’re the next of kin, I can tell you, if you’d like to see your grandmother before the end, I’d suggest you come immediately. We don’t expect her to last the night.”
“Oh,” I whispered. “Well, as I didn’t know Susan existed before today, I’m not sure I’ll be able to come all the way to Tennessee, but can I get an address just in case?”
He rattled off the place, and it matched the address on the envelope. “Whispering Pines Nursing Home. We’re right down the road from the county hospital. Can’t miss us.”
I thanked him and hung up.
“A grandmother we never knew we had?” Mae asked. “When did our lives turn into a soap opera?”
On the other hand, this sounded like the kind of adventure we needed to get into, especially the opposite-of-adventurous Mae. I searched my phone and held it out for her to see. “According to this, Townsend is close to the University of Tennessee. Maybe we should go find out about this person who says she’s our grandmother. We can visit Harry while we’re there.”
Mae waved me off with one hand. “You’re talking crazy. We can’t take off and go to Tennessee. Not and get there before the woman passes away, at least.” She paused and blinked a coup