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“Is there something else you wanted to tell me about the house?” I asked.
She nodded. “The reason it is very interesting that the house was built in 1828 by a Tucker is because there are records of that land being purchased in 1827 by a Tanner.”
I felt a bit dense. Like maybe I needed Mom to connect the dots a bit more. “Okay, so they sold the land to the Tuckers?”
“No record of that at all.” Mom didn’t even have to say that she was extremely interested in this information. Her tone said it all.
“Okay, so what, Mom?”
“So the Tuckers clearly stole the land from us.”
I sincerely hoped my mother wasn’t considering some kind of legal action over something that had happened hundreds of years ago. I didn’t need the extra hassle. I needed her to give up the dumb feud, let me fix up the house, and sell it. “From us? Really? It’s ‘us’ now?”
“The Tanners. Us.” She gave a fierce nod to make her point.
“I’m sure there’s some other record somewhere that explains what happened next.”
“Maybe.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “That old Tucker fart has been down poking around in those records too.”
“Down where? And which fart?”
“City Hall in the archives where I’ve been digging. I saw him in there today.”
“Who, Mom?”
“Victor Tucker. Your boyfriend’s uncle.”
A little thrill shot through me at the idea of Michael as my boyfriend, but it was so far from reality I needed to put this to rest immediately. “Michael Tucker is not my boyfriend, Mom.”
“You’re living together,” she pointed out.
“No. I mean, we are, but...God, Mom, what’s your point?”
“I think Victor is doing what I’m doing.”
“And that would be?”
“Trying to prove the house should rightfully belong to the Tanner family, not be left equally to both families.”
I stood,Charmedcompletely forgotten in my annoyance over her ridiculousness. “The house, Mom, was not left equally to both families. It was left to two individual people, neither of which has any interest in continuing this ridiculous feud.”
“That’s easy to say when it hasn’t affected you personally.”
“You’re kidding, right? How many complaint sessions have I sat through with you and Aunt Verda moaning about her moose? How long were we on the phone when your shop was turned upside down?”
“Those things didn’t happen to you, Addie. They happened to us.”
That stung. Mom had complained for years that I’d run away from the family, that I’d thought I was too big for my britches and had to show off by moving to New York. She’d been so passive aggressive about it for so long that I stopped coming home to visit. And now she was essentially telling me she didn’t count me as a Tanner at all. “Yes. And I’m sorry. And if we don’t stop, things are going to get worse and someone might end up getting hurt.”
Mom sniffed in response and I decided that seven-thirty was not too early for a thirty-five year old woman to go to bed. In the morning, the floors would be finished drying, and I could go back to the house. And to Michael. My not-boyfriend who I lived with.
Maybe Mom had a little bit of a point.
* * *
The following day,I went to the house with a fresh load of laundry and a fast belief that ghosts would not be as difficult to handle as my mother. I also had a load of garden supplies I’d bought at Michael’s store earlier when I had been disappointed not to find him there. What I did find were his cousins, Virgil and Emmett, who both smelled strangely floral, as if their clothes had been washed with some too-strong detergent.
“Aren’t you that Tanner lady?” One of them asked me, narrowing his eyes.
