Saving Allegheny Green Read Free Page A

transformation into her twenty-five-thousand-year-old spirit guide, a cavewoman named Ung, is quite a spectacle.
    Aunt Tessa spread her arms wide. “I speak from spirit world. Heed warning.” Her eyebrows dipped. She crooked a finger and lurched toward Rocky.
    Reflexively, he raised his hands, shielding his face. “Get her away from me. She’s creepy.”
    “The warning is for you!” Tessa-turned-Ung cried. “Much evil. Beware!”
    Chills chased up my arm.
    Granted, I don’t often believe in Aunt Tessa’s new age crapola but occasionally Ung will make a prediction that comes true. Of course, it’s not much of a stretch to figure out that a dope-smoking, unemployed musician who cheats on his girlfriend with his wife and vice versa is going to end up in trouble.
    The sheriff, who, by the way, had magnificent forearms, tugged me to one side. “What’s this all about?” he whispered.
    “You got me.”
    “Who is that woman?”
    “My aunt.”
    The sheriff rolled his eyes. “Why does that not surprise me?”
    “Are you disparaging my family?”
    “Looks like they’re doing the job all by themselves,” he commented.
    I planted my hands on my hips. Who did he think he was? I mean besides sheriff. He had the power to put us behind bars on one trumped-up charge or the other but he certainly didn’t have the right to bad-mouth my kinfolk. We took enough guff off the locals. You expected more understanding from your elected officials.
    “Hey, come on. Do something, man, get her off me,” Rocky cried.
    Aunt Tessa was hovering over Rocky’s prostrate body, trembling from head to toe. “The evil forces are strong,” she croaked. “Run. Run. Run for your life.”
    “That’s enough!” Conahegg ordered and motioned for a deputy to intercept Aunt Tessa. “Where is that ambulance?”
    As if on his command, the ambulance pulled down the graveled river road and into our yard, siren wailing and lights flashing.
    Aunt Tessa crumpled in the deputy’s arms, her face slack. On the floor, Rocky was sweating buckets and my idiotic sister sat rocking him in her arms and cooing into his ear. Some people never learn.
    “What do I do with her, Sheriff?” the deputy asked. Aunt Tessa was dishrag limp, and she often stays that way for an hour or more after channeling Ung.
    “I’ll take her to bed,” Mama said, surprising me with herhelpfulness. “Come on, Tessa.” She took her sister’s hand and guided her out the side door.
    “We’ll need statements from everyone involved,” Conahegg explained at the same time as two paramedics trotted into the garage.
    “Everybody else took off,” Rocky said. “’Cept for my darling, Sistine.”
    Oh, brother.
    “I’d never leave you, tiger,” Sissy whispered.
    No, but you’d shoot him in the foot, I thought rather unkindly.
    There have been many times in my life when I could have sworn I was a changeling. When I was a kid, growing up with a head-in-the-clouds, fairy tale believing, troll-doll-making mother, a florist father who collected butterflies and a cavewoman-channeling aunt, I harbored sweet fantasies that gypsies had stolen me from my rightful parents—usually a practical-minded accountant and a devoted stay-at-home mom—and left me on the Greens’ doorstep.
    Although I never came up with a proper motivation for such rash actions on the part of these anonymous gypsies, I quickly determined my place in the scheme of things. I was in the Green family to take care of everything. To attend to the routine chores no one else seemed inclined to do like paying bills, holding down a steady job, cooking dinner, cleaning the house, washing the car, changing the lightbulbs. That sort of thing. If it hadn’t been for me, the family would have unraveled long ago. Especially after Daddy died.
    “I’d like you to come to the station with us,” Sheriff Conahegg said to me.
    “But I didn’t witness the shooting.”
    He took me by the shoulder—that red-hot grip again!—turned