A Comedy of Heirs Read Online Free PDF Page A

affectionately called Charlie, was built like most of the women in my father’s family. She was about five foot five and there was a certain pear shape to her, really narrow through the shoulders with hips twice the size. My mother’s family tends to be narrow through the hips and top heavy, so I got lucky and came out somewhere in between.
    Aunt Charlotte stood in my living room hanging my antique Christmas ornaments that my grandmother, her mother, had given me years ago. The reason she had given them to me is because she had bought them the year my father was born. I started putting them on the tree only in the last few years because with toddlers it wasn’t a smart thing to do. The girls were old enough now, so there was no need for that sort of caution.
    Aunt Ruth had not arrived yet and, Uncle Jed, my father and Uncle Melvin were all down in the basement, doing what else? Playing music. Uncle Isaac and Aunt Sissy, whose real name is Felicity, had not arrived either. It was too much of an opportune moment not to say something to Aunt Charlotte about Nathaniel Keith, her grandfather. I wasn’t about to say anything about the newspaper articles, I just wanted to get the story from her on how he had died. Or how she’d been told that he had died.
    Mary was still trying to get that one strand of lights to work. I considered this a miracle, because Mary is my flighty, rambunctious child and usually does not have the patience for this sort of thing. There were about ten kids in the living room, and at least five of my cousins who were older than me, in their late thirties. I was fairly safe to bring up this subject.
    â€œCharlie,” I began.
    â€œYes?” she said. She hummed along to the Gene Autry Christmas album that I’d had since I was a kid, the one with Rosemary Clooney on it.
    â€œI’ve recently dusted off my genealogy cap, and started working on my family tree again,” I said.
    â€œI thought you always did do that stuff,” she answered.
    â€œWell, for other people, but I haven’t worked on mine in years. It’s really weird getting reacquainted with all of the information. There was so much stuff I had forgotten or things that I got mixed up.”
    I placed a ceramic angel in an open spot on the tree. Rachel tied little red velvet bows on the ends of some of the branches. My mother and the sheriff were in the kitchen popping corn and then they were going to start stringing it for us. I preferred popcorn or beads on the tree to that garland stuff.
    I ventured further. “Now, who was it, which one was it that died in the hunting accident?”
    Anybody that knew me fairly well would know that I would not get something like that confused. Hopefully though, that particular character trait of mine would get by Aunt Charlie.
    She looked over at me from the coffee table where she was putting a hook on one of the ornaments. She wore Coke bottle glasses so her brown eyes seemed huge against a rather small-boned face. She had turned sixty-eight this year, and was the best quilter in the state to come along since my grandma. My opinion of course.
    â€œHow could you forget that?” she asked.
    â€œWell, some of my records are all mixed up,” I said.
    â€œIt was Nathaniel Keith, my grandfather, your great-grandfather,” she said and walked over to the Christmas tree and began searching for the perfect place for the ornament she had chosen. She wore a handmade quilted vest with Christmas ornaments all over a deep blue background.
    â€œThat’s what I thought,” I said.
    My cousin Wendy, Uncle Isaac’s daughter and the mother of the Brite twins peeked her head from around the back of the tree. “Torie, you can just talk about dead people at any time, can’t you?”
    â€œWell, yeah,” I said.
    Wendy rolled her blue eyes. We were the same age and she had plopped out five children in six years. She was a Girl Scout leader,