Ella smacks him in the shoulder. “No decorum-having ass.” She turns to us both. “I’m the only one with an ounce of intelligence in this group, so you can talk to me.”
“She got about as much smarts as she does hair,” Michael mocks.
“Two scoops,” Tony echoes.
Ella flips them both off without looking their way. She asks Dani what we’re looking for and when Dani tells her, she holds her finger up to her lips and pulls out her phone.
A woman with a raspy voice answers Ella’s call on the second ring. “What you want, Ella Reese?”
She gives us a sympathetic smile. “Auntie, you know anything about some kind of deathbed scavenger hunt Tanya set up? I got two people who say Tanya sent them.”
The woman is silent on the line. She’s silent for so long that Ella checks to see if she hung up. “Auntie?” Ella goads.
“Tomorrow morning. Tell them to come see me,” the woman says before hanging up.
Dani and I share a look of horror. What the hell has Tanya gotten us into?
Chapter Thirteen
Dani
MY STOMACH IS IN MY ASS WHENELLA PICKS US UPfrom the hotel the next morning to take us to see “Auntie Joyce,” who didn’t sound happy when Ella called last night.
Ella pulls up to a quaint ranch-style home with a white vinyl exterior and a dark green roof. I wonder how much time Tanya spent at this house. There isn’t a single detail, at least on the outside, that looks like she had a hand in it. She gave Victor a glass-covered rose just to give his office a fraction of light; her touch is nowhere to be found on this house. Is that because of her or because of the family member living here? Ella shuts her engine off and looks to me in the passenger seat and Micah in the back seat as if she’s sending us to our deaths.
“We’re here. Everything’s gonna be fine, just … don’t look her in the eye when you meet her, okay? She doesn’t like that.”
“What?!” I shiver.
She holds her stomach as a loud laugh bursts from her mouth. “I’m just playin’. You just seemed so nervous, I had to. Come on.”
Damnit, Ella.
She doesn’t knock before walking into the house. She leads us past the living room, which is filled with furniture that seems like it’s been well-loved for generations, and into the brightly lit kitchen, where the scent of maple syrup permeates the air. Still no sign of Tanya’s presence anywhere.
Who I assume to be Auntie Joyce sits in a chair next to the kitchen window, staring out with a lit cigarette hanging from her fingertips.
“Hey, Auntie, here they are, as requested.”
She doesn’t turn to look at us, but the sound of children’s laughter streams through the window, drawing Ella’s attention. “I’ll go check on them.” As she slowly backs out of the kitchen, she mouths the words “Don’t look her in the eye” to me, prompting me to flash her my middle finger.
“Come sit,” Auntie Joyce’s voice booms throughout the kitchen.
There’s one chair opposite her at the kitchen window and more at the table right behind her. I silently plead with Micah, so he takes the chair opposite her, but of course the moment I sit down, her head shoots in my direction.
Auntie Joyce has a short black fro with streaks of silver throughout. Her cheeks are soft where her eyes are hard. One of her eyes has more wrinkles beneath it than the other, which somehow makes her look more endearing than intimidating.
She holds her hand out to touch my face, but only briefly, before doing the same to Micah. “So, you’re Tanya’s kids,” she says, matter-of-factly.
My chin wobbles as Micah holds his head up high. “Yes,” we say in unison.
She takes a puff from her cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window, then she puts it out in the ashtray sitting on the windowsill. “I wasn’t sure when you’d make it here. You were the other shoe I was waiting to drop.”
She tells us that Tanya revealed her diagnosis and said we’d be visiting sometime after she passed. Joyce is a great-aunt to some and a cousin to others, but everyone in the family just calls her Auntie, though being one of the sisters to Tanya’s father makes her Tanya’s actual aunt. To have lost your brother so long ago is already a monumental pain. But to then have to secretly carry around the knowledge that you were also going to outlive the only living legacy of that brother is a burden I never wish to know.
No wonder she sounded so upset on the phone. She’s been waiting for us much longer than we knew.
“Come on, let’s take a walk.” She turns to yell out the window. “Ella, I’ll be back. Don’t be letting them run in and out the house.”
