Free Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts by E. J. Copperman

asked what we’d be eating. I decided that gave me free rein.
    “I believe you’re sorry,” I told Steven. “But that doesn’t make us a family again.”
    He was about to answer when the kitchen door swung open. “Who’s not a family?” I heard from the doorway.
    My mother stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of her ex-son-in-law standing next to me by the kitchen sink. You have to understand: Mom has believed that everything I’ve done in my life—absolutely everything —has been brilliant, beyond question, always amazing, never anything less than genius.
    Except marrying The Swine.
    Although Mom hadn’t ever expressed disapproval of my marriage—that’s just not her style—she had never told me what a wonderful choice I’d made or how Steven was exactly the son-in-law she’d always wanted. From Mom, that was close to being a declaration of war.
    Steven had done his best to charm both my parents, and had failed miserably in both cases. It should be noted that my father had not held back the way Mom did, and frequently referred to my husband as a “bum,” despite the fact that Steven was (very) gainfully employed doing some financial thing I didn’t understand pretty much the whole time we were married. Dad, gone five years now, had not valued a man based on his checking-account balance.
    “Steven,” my mother said now, her voice dropping almost to the kind of gasp you hear in horror movies when a person realizes she’s in the same room as a psychopathic killer.
    “Loretta!” The Swine gushed, walking to Mom and spreading his arms for a hug, which my mother stood still for, but did not reciprocate. “It’s been such a long time!”
    “Yeah,” Mom said. She waited until he ended the embrace, then walked toward me, taking off the little backpack she uses in lieu of a real purse. She put it down on the table, eyeing me with questions the whole time. “How long have you been back?” she asked Steven.
    “Since the day before yesterday,” The Swine admitted, thereby ratting me out as a daughter who doesn’t keep her mother sufficiently informed. Granted, he had no idea I hadn’t told Mom, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t blame him for her disappointment in me.
    “It’s been really busy since then,” I jumped in. “Haven’t had a minute to myself, honestly.”
    “I’ll bet,” Mom said. “So what brings you back, Steven?”
    My ex smiled his most convincing smile—he almost had me fooled, even—and told Mom all about how he had just wanted to reconnect with his family and see his little girl again. She smiled throughout his spiel, nodding occasionally, and did not so much as glance in my direction, giving The Swine her full attention.
    He stopped, finally, to take a breath after this dissertation on the power of family ties and lost chances, and Mom said, “No, really. Why are you here?”
    The Swine shook his head a little and used Smile Number Forty-Two, the sad and misunderstood one I’d seen quite often during the last year we were married. “I can see you’re just as hard to convince as your daughter, Loretta. Well, I’ll have to work twice as hard to win your trust, just like Alison’s. But you’ll see; the old Steven is gone forever. The man you see before you is the new Steven. I’m a changed person.”
    Mom turned to me without missing a beat and asked, “What’s for dinner?”
    In the end—after a short lecture from Mom about inviting people over for takeout—we decided on Thai food for the evening. The small talk after I called in our order was excruciating, as Steven was desperate to show off what a wonderful father he was (anybody can be good at something he only has to do every couple of years), so he called Melissa down. She, also wanting to present her dad in a positive light, was on behavior so impeccable I strongly considered the possibility that aliens had stolen my daughter and replaced her with a cyborg replica programmed for good manners. I wasn’t