Better Get To Livin'

Book 3: Ellery Novel

by Sally Kilpatrick

Genres: Women's Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

Home is where the ghosts are in this “quirky, fun love story. I couldn't put it down.” (Haywood Smith, New York Times–bestselling author).
 
Smart, witty, and delightfully offbeat, this new novel from the author of The Happy Hour Choir and Bittersweet Creek is an uplifting story about following your heart, even when it leads to the last place you’d expect . . .
 
Presley Cline has put aside dreams of Hollywood stardom and come back to Ellery, Tennessee, to work in a beauty shop. In truth, the dreams in question were more her mother’s than her own. Presley may have the face and body of a movie icon, but she lacks the stomach for it. Yet a loving relationship and normal home life seem almost as unattainable as an Oscar. Being able to see and speak to dead people certainly isn’t helping.
 
Presley’s first job, beautifying “clients” at the Anderson Funeral Home, is quite a change from working on a movie set. The place is home to dozens of ghosts all hoping that Presley can help them move on—and also one very-much-alive owner, Declan Anderson. Like Presley, Declan is caught between following family expectations and his own aspirations. But with a little meddling from loved ones and locals—both living and dead—Presley is starting to see that life is too short not to be who you want to be, and the most rewarding journeys involve some unexpected detours . . .
 
Praise for Sally Kilpatrick’s The Happy Hour Choir
 
“Kilpatrick mixes loss and devastation with hope and a little bit of Southern charm. She will leave the reader laughing through tears. This is an incredible start from a promising storyteller.” —RT Book Reviews

Release date: May 31, 2016

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Camera flashes blinded me as a cool breeze whipped across my backside. I yanked my skirt out of my thong, but the damage had been done. I pushed through the small throng of paparazzi and made a break for my car. One asked for my comment. Another asked who I was.

Why, I’m Presley Cline, F-list actress extraordinaire. Do you mean you haven’t heard of me?

But of course I didn’t say that because, for once in my life, I didn’t want anyone to know who I was.

That second paparazzo gave me hope until the next morning when my agent, Ira, called me at an ungodly hour. He skipped the hello as he always did. “Kid, you gotta get out of town and lie low.”

“Do you think I’m out of the running for the lead in the godmother movie?”

He made that noncommittal Ira sound.

“But they say all publicity is good publicity, right?”

“That’s what people with only bad publicity say. Parents like for their kid movies to have good role models, and most fairy godmothers don’t get caught on the wrong side of a booty call with their pants down.”

Technically, it was my skirt up, but I didn’t correct him.

“Ira, I don’t even know where to go,” I said. My most recent boyfriend, Rob the wonder accountant, had found a newer, younger girlfriend and then absconded with a majority of my funds. A quick look out the window of my apartment showed at least one suspicious person outside waiting for me to emerge.

“Go someplace quiet. Real quiet,” he said with a grunt. “I should have something to tell you by New Year’s.”

Then he hung up on me, which wasn’t that big of a surprise.

“Someplace quiet, huh?” I let the curtain fall back and looked around for a duffel bag. It looked as though I was going to be spending Christmas back home in Ellery after all, and whoever said there was no place like home for the holidays obviously didn’t have a mother like mine.

“I told you not to come home until just before dawn. The paparazzi are more likely to be asleep then.”

I’m such a nobody, the paparazzi shouldn’t have been there. Had Ira sold me out?

I did my best to ignore the ghost in the corner, a curvy brunette with bangs. Somehow she always had a cigarette and a plume of ghostly smoke winding around her. Sometimes I could even smell the Lucky Strikes.

I continued to pack, hoping Pinup Betty, the erstwhile inhabitant of my apartment, would go away. She didn’t. I’d tried everything I could think of to exorcise her, but none of it had worked.

Ghosts gravitated to me, and Pinup Betty was more stubborn than most.

According to my mother, I was born with a knot in my umbilical cord, which was also looped around my neck twice for good measure. The knot, the loop, the fact she smoked throughout the pregnancy—one or all of those things meant I was born blue and lifeless. She told me she prayed when she saw me, for the first time since she’d found out she was pregnant, not saying amen until I gave a whimper then a cry.

Those eighty-seven precious seconds must’ve been enough to connect me to another world because I, like the little boy in the movie, could see dead people. In fact, I was looking at Pinup Betty in spite of myself.

“What’re you looking at?”

“Just thinking about how happy I’m going to be to leave you behind,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll come with you. I’m getting bored of sitting around here waiting for something to happen.” She took a drag on her cigarette. I braced myself for a coughing fit, but it didn’t come. At least the ghostly smoke only carried the faintest whiff of the real thing.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You got me into enough trouble with your so-called advice.”

She waved away my concern. “It’ll turn out all right in the end. You’ll see. As long as you gave him a night to remember, then you’ll get that part. It’s not like things have changed that much since the forties.”

Not that I was about to admit it to Betty, but I hadn’t given Carlos anything to remember other than the memory of me running out of his house like my hair was on fire. Now the whole world was accusing me of something I hadn’t done.

I zipped up my duffel bag. No need to pack too much because I’d be back before the new year. “Bye, Betty. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

She grunted and went back to staring at the ceiling as I closed the door behind me.

Three weeks. I could stand anything for three weeks—even my mother.

Folks around town have always speculated that the Anderson men lived forever due to an overexposure to embalming fluids. Since great-granddaddy Seamus lived to be over a hundred, I couldn’t prove them wrong. Sure, my father didn’t make it that long, but there always has to be one, right? With the distinct possibility of dull decades stretching out before me, I did have to question my quality of life. After all, I was standing in the city cemetery at dusk on the night of the Ellery Christmas parade.

Christmas carols and jingle bells echoed over the graves, and I had a sudden and intense longing for a greasy cheeseburger from Burger Paradise. I could blame Grandpa Floyd for that one. After every burial, he’d do two things: go get a hamburger and kiss Grandma full on the lips the minute he got back. He said there was nothing like putting a body in the ground to make a man suddenly aware of his own mortality.

“¡Oye, Jefe! This look good?”

I looked away from the Anderson plot to where Manny leaned out the backhoe’s cab.

“Perfect-o, Manny-o,” I said. He grinned at my mauled southern Spanish. We both knew I could do better, but it was my way of telling him he was forgiven for last week’s incident of driving a backhoe while intoxicated and thus knocking over two grave markers. Caroline, my stepmother and our boss, wanted to garnish his paycheck to get back the money his stunt had cost. So far, I’d been able to hold her back. After all, Manny was Armando’s nephew and still reeling from the sudden loss of his wife. Cemeteries freaked him out, which was rather unfortunate for someone whose third job was digging graves.

Our most recent grave filled, Manny drove the backhoe up on the flatbed and hightailed it out of the cemetery. I reached into my pocket for a cigarette only to remember I’d quit. Again. I couldn’t even look at puffs of my breath and pretend they were smoke because it was pretty warm for early December. Hell, it was the warmest December I could remember, and I couldn’t get out of my monkey suit fast enough. Only my father’s discipline reminded me that I was not to take off my suit coat until I was safely home and thus off duty.

“We have a certain reputation to maintain, son,” he used to say. “A momentary discomfort on your part is worth making sure you do the job right.”

Doing the job right. I snorted. Manny and I would’ve been gone already if I hadn’t let the Latham family have such a late graveside service. They’d been holding off as long as they could in the hopes that a relative from Seattle would be able to make it despite a canceled flight. Dad or Sean would’ve easily talked them out of such foolishness with words like decorum or extra fees after three. But I was the soft touch. My traitorous tongue told them we would be happy to hold the service a little later and that, perhaps, a twilight service would be a touching and beautiful way to remember someone who worked the night shift.

What a load of horseshit.

Not only would I do just about anything to make people feel better, but I also didn’t feel the need to always pass on extra fees due to extenuating circumstances, which explained why, at least according to Caroline, I was running Anderson’s Funeral Home into the ground. To top it all off, she was still ticked at me for laughing at her unintentional pun.

What she didn’t know, in this case, certainly wouldn’t hurt her. I was awfully close to paying off the loan from the chapel we’d added on a few years back. Sean, my younger brother, was supposed to be home any day now, fully graduated from Gupton-Jones and ready to take my place as soon as he dragged his punk-ass self back from Atlanta. After I gave her the loan pay-off for Christmas, I would still have enough to buy the old McHaney place on Maple Avenue, a great way to start my second career renovating houses. Yep, it was going to be a pretty merry Christmas.

Across the street from the old cemetery, I saw Manny pull his truck—complete with the offending backhoe—over to the only Mexican restaurant in town. He had made it to El Nopalito for his medicinal shot of tequila, but I wouldn’t have to worry about him because his sister would make sure he didn’t drive under the influence.

Manny swore up and down he could feel the ghosts while he was in the graveyard, which made his job as assistant to the cemetery sexton unfortunate. I called bullshit. Why would a ghost hang around a cemetery? What fun would that be? Not that I believed in ghosts because I didn’t. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed in heaven or hell or a god who sent people to one place or another. Best I could tell, you got what you got. All the rest was science we hadn’t figured out yet.

Declan, my boy, life holds too much mystery to be explained by science alone. There are some things you have to take on faith.

Shut up, Dad.

I turned to my father’s monument. I knew his voice was only in my head just as I knew I’d paused here at his grave and would have a hard time leaving it. Here in the quiet of the cemetery I could feel that connection with him and Grandpa Floyd and even Great-Grandpa Seamus—the old Colonel who’d started the whole family business.

“For once, Dad, we aren’t in a mell of a hess,” I said. “I’m about to pay off the loan, you know. I’m going to keep my promise to you and find a way to go into business with Uncle El. I won’t be designing houses, but I’ll get to fix them up.”

All that’s left is for you to find a good woman.

Where had that come from? It had to be my mind playing tricks on me because it sounded like something Dad would say. I wasn’t about to repeat his mistakes, though. My mother hadn’t been cut out for being the funeral director’s wife, and she’d gone to her rest a long time before my father. I couldn’t quite look at her grave since she hadn’t loved me or my brother enough to stick around.

The throaty sounds of a muscle car made me look up, and I saw a classic Firebird roar down MLK beside me. Suddenly, it seemed silly to be standing in a graveyard talking to a headstone so I started picking my way through the unevenly laid out graves just as the security light hummed to life.

I had been hanging out in a cemetery after dark in a suit that was too hot for comfort because I didn’t want to go home—now how sad was that?

Pretty sad, but I didn’t plan to be sad much longer.

I actually started whistling as I rounded the shiny black hearse and climbed inside. As of Christmas, I was going to be free, but until then I would keep my promise.

Because an Anderson always keeps his promise.

So much for keeping my promises. Guilt had hit me hard somewhere around Amarillo, and it hadn’t let up the rest of the way to Tennessee.

I’d told myself—and LuEllen—that I wasn’t coming home until I’d made it big. Now here I was driving her vintage Firebird right through town.

Oh, you’ve made it big all right.

That picture with my skirt caught in my undies as I left a certain producer’s beach house in the middle of the night had gone viral. To make matters worse, I shouldn’t have gone over there in the first place because—at least according to some media outlets—the part had been mine to lose.

I really, really want that part.

Finally, after years of playing a corpse or mouthy hooker or sexy dancer, I’d found a role I wanted to play. Leave it to me to succumb to the casting couch for a chance to play a fairy godmother. Leave it to me to chicken out at the last minute but to still be caught by the paparazzi, thus making it look like I had actually done the one thing I’d sworn I’d never do.

Ira, for his part, had been subtly suggesting for years that I should at least flirt with various Hollywood power players, but it was Betty who’d told it to me straight: “Honey, you ain’t gonna get nowhere unless you go over there and make it happen for yourself. And by make it happen, I mean bang him.”

And that’s what you get for listening to a less-than-subtle ghost whose idols are Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.

I couldn’t tell my therapist about Betty, so I told her about Rob the Accounting Wiz instead. She, at the last session I could afford, had suggested my boyfriend’s betrayal had created within me a desperation that might lead me to make poor decisions.

Understatement of the century right there.

I had panicked when I saw I had no money, and Betty’s advice started making sense for the first time ever. But going over and over again how I’d come to that spot on a moonlit beach with my skirt tucked into my thong wasn’t accomplishing anything.

“Face it, Presley, you’re screwed.” And then I laughed because I hadn’t even gone through with the screwing.

I was still laughing—probably delirious from driving ten hours a day for nearly three days—when I turned right on MLK, but the sight of the cemetery sobered me up. For a split second, I thought about joining the people there. Surely, LuEllen had any number of pain pills lying around unattended.

Don’t be ridiculous.

I gripped the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles went white. So I’d embarrassed myself. And LuEllen. So I was back in town with my tail between my legs. It was three weeks. Ira said he’d tell me something before the new year, and I knew they planned to announce the cast list for The Secret Lives of Fairy Godmothers by mid-January. With any luck, my name would still be on that list, and I would go back to Hollywood and back to the life I’d had before. Once I got back, I could call in a favor or two for a modeling gig or a bit part and have enough to make the rent. Then I would start over.

And stay far, far away from handsome accountants who promised to make my investments grow.

In the meantime, it was time to face the music and admit to LuEllen that I was flat broke.

That last light of day had completely faded by the time I pulled up to trailer number four of the Green Acres Estates Mobile Home Park. Green Acres was not the place for me. There were about a million other places I would raaaather be.

Weeds still grew around the battered trailer so thickly I couldn’t see the faux-brick vinyl that covered the underpinning. The rickety porch looked as though it would fall in with the first strong breeze.

I rolled out of the ’78 Firebird that had been a hand-me-down from my mother, and I stretched. I hadn’t stopped any more than I had to, but that still meant five stops since Amarillo. My legs were jelly.

Either that or they wobbled because they were afraid of what I might find inside. Unseasonably warm air wrapped around me. Kinda felt warmer than Los Angeles, which was good because I didn’t have a very impressive winter wardrobe.

One of the porch steps broke, and I thought I heard a hiss under my feet. Heart pounding, I hopped up to the landing, scratching my ankle on the broken step in the process. Great. Snakes hibernate in the winter, you dork. I didn’t want to think about the last time I’d gotten a tetanus shot so I hoped that snag was all wood and no rusty nail.

At least patching me up would give LuEllen something to do.

When my mother met me at the door, I didn’t recognize the walking skeleton with the orange leather skin. The woman who’d taught me everything I knew about curling hair and pulling it back into a hundred different styles had cut hers in a severe, straight bob with an awful dye job. The woman who’d spent hours teaching me how to properly apply eyeliner, mascara, and the perfect shade of lipstick now didn’t wear a lick of makeup.

“Well, I was wondering when you would show up,” she wheezed, pulling me in for an angular hug. “I guess I should be glad you’re home for Christmas.”

I might be an adult, but her disapproval stung just as much as it had when I was a girl. It was always about twirling the baton faster or singing a little louder or smiling a lot wider. I wanted to wish her a sarcastic “Merry Christmas to you, too!” and walk out, but I had nowhere else to go.

Instead I said, “LuEllen, you didn’t tell me they put you on oxygen.”

She stared at me, her smile sad. “Are you hungry?”

So that’s how we were going to play it.

“I got something outside Memphis,” I lied. Telling the truth would do no good because I already knew her cupboards would be bare, her fridge empty except for a rotted head of lettuce and maybe a block of government cheese.

That and the beer in the crisper drawer hiding behind the rotted head of lettuce.

“Baby, you’re bleeding on the floor. When were you going to tell me about that?” She shuffled off to the bathroom before I could explain about the broken step.

In the end, I sat on a bar stool by the little counter that separated kitchen and living room while she huffed and puffed as she nursed my ankle. It wasn’t as deep a scratch as I’d first thought, but the rubbing alcohol still stung like the dickens.

“There now,” she said. For a minute I thought she might lean down and kiss the wound to make it better, but she didn’t. Instead she got to her feet with a gasp and a grunt.

“Wanna watch some TV?” She gestured to the tiny set in the corner behind her, and I realized she hadn’t even bothered to put up a tree. Nothing about the living room said Christmas.

“I think I might want to roll into bed.”

LuEllen didn’t have cable. She also didn’t have much of an antenna, so my choices would’ve been limited to two channels, one of them PBS. Come to think of it, I might be able to watch TV without having to worry about seeing that damned picture of myself. Maybe later.

“Bed sounds good,” she said with a yawn.

I made a show of stowing my lone bag in the bedroom that had been mine, even though I wasn’t really ready for bed. When I unfolded the futon, dust clouded the air. My apartment back in California was a craphole, but it was still better than this place.

My walls were littered with teenybopper posters, complete with statistics down the side. They were innocent shots of fully clothed boy band members, but they still reminded me of how I’d turned down Playboy. I still couldn’t see myself sprawled out for God and everybody to see complete with inane stats down the side.

Presley Ann Cline: blond hair, blue eyes. 5’10” and 125 pounds. She likes baseball and long walks on the beach while holding hands.

She also has a jagged scar on her right thigh that you’ll have to airbrush out and a bunch of emotional baggage that you can’t. Oh, and she actually weighs ten pounds heavier than that, give or take.

If I’d done that spread, as well as the photographer who’d suggested it, I might’ve gotten somewhere. Where exactly, I still didn’t know.

I reached for the corner of one of the boy toy posters, but I couldn’t rip it down. If I did, I was admitting to LuEllen that I’d changed. I would admit nothing. I refused to feel guilty, considering she’d had me out of wedlock. Who was she to judge what I did in my spare time?

My therapist’s favorite topic had been how my mother had stifled my sexuality. She didn’t think it was healthy. Come to think of it, Rob wasn’t too fond of it, either, which is probably why he had a new girlfriend along with my money.

They could all kiss my sexually stifled ass.

I didn’t need a man at all.

What I needed was a beer.

Next door, I could already hear LuEllen’s ragged snores, so I sneaked down the hall to the kitchen. No rotten lettuce, but a shriveled apple and a petrified lime camouflaged a couple of longnecks.

My stomach growled in protest, but I knew the buzz would come on quickly and be enough to get me to sleep. Tomorrow I would figure out how to move forward while I waited. Tonight, I would have a beer and go to sleep—after all, going to bed tipsy was a family tradition.

As I walked across the funeral home parking lot loosening my tie and looking forward to a beer, my cell phone rang. I looked longingly up at my apartment above the old carriage house but answered the phone anyway.

The nursing home needed me to pick up Mrs. Borden, and they’d prefer that I come right away while so many of their patrons were asleep, to avoid upsetting them. I assured the nurse I would be right over and sent a text to let Armando know he wasn’t done for the night yet, either.

Just as I was adjusting my tie and heading back to the car, Caroline rounded the corner. “I thought I heard you, Declan.”

“Yes, ma’am, but I’m headed out again. Nursing home called.”

“A funeral director’s work is never done,” she said as she ran a hand through her short salt-and-pepper hair. “Not that you plan on doing that forever, as you’ve so often informed me.”

“I’m going to keep working part time,” I said.

“Mm-hmm. You’re going to run off and leave me, just like that brother of yours.”

Nothing left but to change the subject. “You’ve been working late.”

“Oh, you know. Puttering about on the computer. Gotta make up for the Latham fiasco.”

I didn’t take the bait. No good would come of our rehashing the argument about the late funeral or the extra money the cemetery had charged us, a charge I hadn’t passed on to the Lathams.

“Ginger Belmont passed away,” she said. “Armando’s on his way here.”

“That explains why he didn’t answer me.”

I leaned against the hearse. Knowing that someone was dying never made it any easier. Not even when they told you each and every one of their final wishes beforehand. Several times.

Caroline cleared her throat. “We’re going to lose our shirts on that one, too. Make sure you don’t let the Bordens talk you into something similar.”

“Look, we had to honor the policy Dad sold her. The Bordens don’t have a policy like that, so you should get your money.”

She shrugged. “You know full well that there’s a clause in those old policies that allows us to make an adjustment for inflation. And you could’ve upsold the casket, too.”

Always with the money. I knew she meant well. I knew she was concerned with keeping the business afloat, but still. “Why don’t you do the removal and talk with the family then?”

She raised one eyebrow. “You know I don’t do removals anymore because of my bad back. But if you’re such a bleeding heart liberal chicken, why don’t you tell Jessica to come see me in the morning about the particulars?”

“Gladly.”

As fate would have it, I wasn’t interested in the one woman interested in me. I had tried to talk myself into it, but she was too . . . sweet. All wide blue eyes and dark hair, she dressed like a younger version of June Cleaver, complete with the faux pearls. Long ago, at our high school’s first annual Sadie Hawkins Dinner, she’d asked me to be her date. She’d caught me by surprise at my locker, and I’d made an excuse about having to work for my dad. Her face had crumpled, and I’d felt bad ever since. Avoiding her had become second nature.

“Chicken,” Caroline said.

“And proud of it.”

She sighed. “I really don’t think she’s holding a grudge, but you do what you need to do, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Night, Caroline.”

She grimaced. She didn’t like it that I called her by her first name, but she was my stepmother, not my mother. “Night, Declan.”

She walked stiffly to her new Mercedes, leaving me to the hearse.

I’m running the funeral home into the ground, but she’s leasing a brand-new Mercedes. She’d tell me appearances are important. I’d remind her that appearances can be deceiving, like how a business barely squeaking by allowed her to drive a Mercedes.

What-the-hell-ever.

As soon as Armando showed, we’d go to get Miss Ginger and Miss Sylvia. Caroline could handle Jessica Borden.

Thanks to some red tape, I didn’t get back until one in the morning; then Armando and I did the embalming. This did not, however, absolve . . .