Free Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling by Pamela Browning

flights of stairs and found Goldy in the lobby, sitting behind her desk watching TV.
    She looked up briefly, showing absolutely no surprise that the two of them had descended from on high rather than walking in the front door.
    “Your aunt Sophie is here,” she said.
    Karma’s eyebrows flew up. “My aunt Sophie is dead.”
    “Well, she’s here anyway.” Goldy gestured in the direction of a cardboard bucket of the same ilk as the ones that fast-food fried chicken came in.
    “What inthe world are you talking about, Goldy?”
    “Your aunt Sophie. They delivered her ashes. That’s them right there.”

4
    T HE NEXT DAY WHEN K ARMA met her uncle Nate at the neighborhood ice-cream parlor, she informed him about the fried chicken barrel now reposing on top of her refrigerator.
    “Okay,” he said, “so I should have ordered an urn. But what difference does it make? Sophie wanted her ashes scattered in the ocean. She loved the ocean.”
    Karma took time out from licking her raspberry frozen yogurt on a stick. “And you’re going to scatter them, right?”
    Nate looked uncomfortable. “No, not me. You, Karma.”
    Karma stopped stock-still in the middle of Ocean Boulevard. “Why me?”
    “I pretend like she’s buried. I go to the cemetery every day to see her grave, God rest her.” He pulled her out of the path of a speeding dune buggy. “You should watch where you’re going, Karma. I don’t want to be going to any more funerals for a while.”
    They resumed their stroll. “With me out of the way, you could give Rent-a-Yenta to Paulette,” Karma said while thinking that scattering Aunt Sophie’s ashes was something Nate should do.
    “I don’t want you out of the way, Karma. Your cousin Paulette was second choice. Anyway, she already has a job counting money for a big Wall Street firm.”
    Lucky Paulette, Karma thought glumly. She probably had a boyfriend, too. But not someone as handsome and charming as Slade Braddock, she’d wager. Not that Sladewas her boyfriend, but he had kissed her. He was a good kisser, too.
    “Anyway, Karma, I like to go to the cemetery and look at Sophie’s grave. I sit there for a while and I talk to her.”
    “Aunt Sophie doesn’t have a grave. She’s in that fried chicken barrel.”
    “Barrel? Don’t call it a barrel. It’s a fried chicken bucket. Sophie wouldn’t need a barrel. She was as slim on the day she died as she was on the day I married her. And anyway, I picked out a grave that looks like it could be Sophie’s. Sometimes I drive Mrs. Rothstein to the cemetery, too, so she can visit her husband’s grave nearby. There’s a pretty bottle-brush tree, and we like to sit under it on a nice wrought-iron bench. Let me have my fantasy that Sophie is there, bubbeleh. Don’t spoil it for me.”
    “But Uncle Nate—”
    “Your aunt Sophie was my life. I miss her.” Nate wiped a tear from his eye.
    Karma slid an arm around his shoulders. “She’d want you to make a new life, Uncle Nate.”
    He sighed. “I know, I know. That’s true.” He cheered up slightly. “So when can you scatter the ashes?”
    Karma finished the rest of her frozen yogurt and tossed the stick in a trash can painted with a purple palm tree. “I don’t know. I’ll have to figure out a way. I think I’ll need a boat, since you can’t really toss ashes from shore without the prevailing winds throwing them back at you.”
    “You let me know what you’re going to do.”
    “I will, Uncle Nate. Thanks for the frozen yogurt.” She bent and kissed him on his wrinkled cheek.
    “You’vegot your yogurt class tonight, don’t you?”
    “Yoga. I practice yoga. I eat yogurt.” Her uncle had never been able to tell the difference between yoga and yogurt, which had been endearing at first, but now it was beginning to wear on her.
    “Okay, yoga. Didn’t I hear that the big cowboy was coming to class?”
    “Where did you hear that?” Karma uttered in surprise.
    “Goldy mentioned it. Is it