A Spirited Inheritance: A Family Ghost Story

By Betty Mermelstein

Teenager Karen has difficulty getting along with her mother, who does not share her love for crawling, six-legged creatures. While preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, Karen sees an image of a man when she polishes an old sterling silver spoon. She realizes that same face is in one of the photographs in the hallway upstairs. As she stares at the photo, and at the woman’s face in the frame next to his, both figures suddenly appear and ask where the bathroom is. They tell her that they are searching for a ruby scarab that was left in the same house a hundred years ago in the sunroom, which is now the bathroom. Karen tries to hide their existence from her mother, aunt, and younger cousin as she concocts a plan to have her mother win a free bathroom remodel in hopes that the ruby scarab can be found. Her ghostly ancestors get themselves in strange and funny situations as they attempt to help Karen find what they've been looking for. In the process, Karen learns to appreciate her relatives: past and present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Betty Mermelstein
• Release date: Jan 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311577177

Betty Mermelstein

Betty has been interested in writing since she was a child and has published a variety of material, including poetry, ebooks, humorous personal narratives, nonfiction articles, and a children's play. She has been a ballroom dancer for many years, doing performances and competitions with her instructor. Living in Arizona with her husband, Alan, Betty is a retired elementary and junior high teacher, and loves spending time with her sons' families.

Book preview

A Spirited Inheritance:

A Family Ghost Story

By

Betty Mermelstein

A Spirited Inheritance:

A Family Ghost Story

by

Betty Mermelstein

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2008

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to those who have gone before me: my ancestors whose pictures hang in my hallway upstairs. Their silent gazes have inspired me to write about them, only speculating what they must have been like.

Chapter 1

They’d be sorry, she thought adamantly. She’d stop eating. The humiliation of menial, meaningless work would become her nutritional ballast, and it would consume her as she consumed it. They’d walk into her room one day and find her decomposing, her flesh falling off her ribs onto the hardwood floor.

Karen! her mother, Jeanine, called from the living room. Make sure you dry each spoon as soon as it’s rinsed or else it may spot.

Zut she spewed into the soapy sponge that was furiously rubbing the current silver spoon over the sink. Zut was a mild French expletive she used often. She had learned it in French class and if she said it out loud no one else paid it any attention. The French teacher wasn’t forthcoming about more vulgar swear words.

Who’s going to look at these zut spoons anyway? she muttered. They hang there in the dining room on a wall nobody looks at, in a glass case nobody looks at. Who cares? Aunt Paula doesn’t.

Aunt Paula was due to arrive any minute for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, along with her nosy, younger cousin, Ellie. Karen couldn’t understand how her mother and her aunt could be sisters. Her mother was nasty neat and Aunt Paula left a trail of mess behind her as she walked. Not a hair was out of place on her mother’s head, much to Karen’s dismay, yet Aunt Paula’s hair had a mind of its own. She was never sure if her aunt ever really combed her hair. The only thing the two sisters seemed to have in common was their lack of men. Aunt Paula’s husband flew to Las Vegas to marry his addiction and Karen’s father flew the coop when she was only three. The two women always had plenty to talk about.

Ellie was another story. Only ten, she was a preteen who thought she was a preteen who really wasn’t. A faux preteen, Karen called her. She thought she was getting a mature body, she thought she could use the latest teen jargon, she thought she knew why girls plastered posters of Johnny Depp on their walls. Karen believed none of these to be true. And she was so in-your-face nosy!

All she had wanted to do was read her newest issue of Entomology Today, but her mother insisted on putting on her annual show of how clean can I make my house look so we can all eat some dumb bird? She probably knew Karen had her mind set on lounging on the couch with her favorite magazine and purposely gave her this task just to get her away from her beloved insect news. Her mother detested her interest in insects and made it well known.

Karen, did you hear me? her mother’s voice demanded.

Okey, dokey, mère, Karen smiled, staring at the cranberry sauce spoon already evaporating and spotting nicely behind the faucet. Who’s going to notice spots on that one?

I’m not a horse! her mother called, also disliking Karen’s use of the French word for mother, which sounded like a female horse.

I could be calling you a vache, Karen thought. It doesn’t sound like anything in English and it means cow. As she grumbled, Karen rubbed the current spoon bathing in cleaner with less enthusiasm. She began to stare at the initial on the handle. It was a fancy M with trailing curlicues that returned to encircle the initial so that it was no longer part of the alphabet, but its own artwork. She knew it was in the family, belonging to someone related to them from the past. Her mind wandered as she examined the violin body of the handle, bordered in a floral pattern all the way around.

Suddenly a picture had formed in her mind. There was a man eating soup at a table. He wore a shirt and suit coat. His hair was bushy silver, but she couldn’t see his eyes because he was looking down toward the soup bowl. The spoon he used, though, she could definitely see. It was the spoon she held now. She knew it was the same because of the initial on the handle. Then another picture took the place of that one. She saw in her mind a woman putting the spoon away in a special box. The woman was turned away, and she wore an apron over a long dress, her hair formed into long curled tubes that hung down her back. Karen had seen the box before. It was the same box that her mother kept the silverware in when it wasn’t in use. Of course, it would make sense that Karen saw that particular box in her mind.

Make sure there are four of each: spoons, knives, and forks. Oh, and don’t forget the salad forks. We’ll use them for pie for dessert. Karen’s mother had interrupted her thoughts.

Karen sighed with annoyance and could feel her mother’s presence over her shoulder. She wished her mother were looking at the now spotted cranberry spoon behind the faucet, but was pretty sure her gaze was fixed on Karen’s upper left arm.

You’re getting rid of that before Aunt Paula comes, I hope, Jeanine asked with some disgust in her voice. She was referring to the fake tattoo of a luna moth