Grandma and the Prince - Part 34

<--Mona in shocking pink; my
mom in emerald green; Aunt Dede (Grandma El's
sister) in pale blue -- taken at my
wedding reception

Jack was tall, lean, dazzlingly blond. One of those "golden boys" you read about but never see in real life. He had an equally dazzling dog, a Weimaraner named Ursic, and the kind of career that used to exist only in Jackie Collins's novels.

He was a photographer who worked with the legendary Francesco Scavullo in Manhattan at the dawn of the 1960s and he was my Aunt Mona's first post-quickie-marriage-and-annulment romance.

And what a romance it was! It isn't often that a girl of my era gets a front row seat to something so adult and exciting, but the summer I turned ten I definitely got lucky.

I've said before that Mona was definitely her mother's daughter. (If Grandma El been born two generations later, she could have ruled the world.) She had guts and ambition and a fearlessness that sometimes got her into trouble. She also fell in love fast and hard and when she did, all of that "I am woman, hear me roar" power suddenly morphed into American Geisha. But that's for another story on another day.

Anyway, it's the summer of 1960 and Mona and her friend Helen are about to open their own real estate agency on Broadway in Elmhurst, Queens. It's a relatively daring venture for two women in their early 30s. (Women in business was still a disconcerting concept for many people.) Sounds great, doesn't it? Only problem was, Mona and Helen decided to open their business directly across the street from the real estate office of Henry C. Reilly . . . the man they'd worked for until three weeks before their Grand Opening.

But nobody was thinking about Henry at the Grand Opening. There was champagne and balloons and music courtesy of the small record player in the corner of the room. Grandma El was there and Aunt Dede, my parents and I, Helen's friends and family, and Jack.

Now this was the first time I'd laid eyes on him and let's just say I was totally smitten. Goggle-eyed, tongue-tied, head-over-heels smitten by every single thing about him. Even his dog seemed more golden and glamorous than normal dogs. To be honest, I can't remember a single word he uttered but if I close my eyes I can still see his lazy smile, the twinkle in his blazing blue eyes . . . and the way my aunt turned downright kittenish when he was around.

Let me tell you, this budding romance writer was totally enthralled. Which probably explains why I stalked them that afternoon. I didn't miss a thing. The way they looked at each other, the furtive glances, the quick touches. I took it all in, tucking the details away for future reference.

Which is how I ended up seeing my first real life, deeply romantic, they're-not-my-parents Hollywood kiss.

The party was winding down. Grandma El was starting to pick apart the paint job and we all knew it was only a matter of time until the serious criticizing kicked in. My parents were ready to leave but I needed to use the bathroom before we did.

Except that was a lie. I'd noticed that Mona and Jack had disappeared into the storeroom a few moments ago and the storeroom was adjacent to the bathroom and . . . well, you get the picture. I cautiously, slowly let myself into the storeroom and there they were. My tiny dark-haired aunt and her tall golden-haired lover were wrapped in each others' arms looking for all the world like the hero and heroine of one of the romance novels I was still twenty years away from writing. It was a full-on Hollywood moment. She was on tiptoe, her arms wrapped around his neck. He was bent low, one large hand splayed across the small of her back, the other thrust deep into her dark, shiny curls.

I stood there, unable to move or think or even breathe. I swear to you I could almost hear bells going off somewhere in the distance although, given the fact that we were located next to the bus station, it was probably the B-52. They had no idea they were being watched. (They probably had no idea they were still on this planet, to be honest.) This was really happening and I was the lucky audience.

It wasn't a movie. It wasn't a TV show. It wasn't a Broadway play. This was real, grown-up life in all its glittering, glamorous, thrilling glory and I was totally captivated by the possibilities.

I was only ten years old but I knew that when I grew up, I wouldn't settle for anything less. I wanted sparks. I wanted electricity. I wanted love and romance and all the excitement that came with the package.

And I also wanted the happy ending that eluded Mona right up until the end.

To be continued. . .

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Leave a comment and you'll have a chance to win a signed book! Winner to be announced next month.

Congratulations to my five winners from last month's post. Please email me at barbarabretton AT gmail DOT com with your mailing info and I'll ship out your signed book ASAP.

1. marybelle
2. Pat Cochran
3. chris bails
4. Kaelee
5. franalokas
   

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PS: I'm Barbara Bretton and you can find me here and here. And don't forget Twitter and Facebook, too. If you're looking for a couple of short, inexpensive e-reads, please check out my novellas, THE MARRYING MAN and I DO, I DO . . . AGAIN. They're both from my Harlequin backlist and currently available at Amazon for 99 cents each. Check them out if you have a moment. I think you'll like them.

Grandpa's Big Adventure (Grandma and The Prince - Part 31)

Grandma El and Grandpa Larry at my wedding, fifteen years after they broke up

Did I ever tell you about the time my grandfather ran away from home? He was 84 when he and his fifth wife Bess separated. What had worked for almost thirty years suddenly stopped working and he packed up his suitcase, claimed the La-Z Boy, then called my husband for a getaway car out of Dodge.

It was probably the biggest scandal they'd seen at Leisure Village at the time. My husband said the street was lined with retirees come out to watch Larry make his break for it. Let's face it, it isn't every day you see a multi-married octogenarian slap a Mets cap on his head, climb into the cab of a U-Haul, and wave goodbye.

Now I can't explain why after thirty years of marriage they decided to split up but as much as I loved my step-grandmother, I was very excited over the prospect of my grandfather moving back to our side of the Hudson. And I can admit this now that all of the principals in Grandpa's Big Adventure are gone: I was hoping he and Grandma El would get back together.

That sounds terrible, doesn't it? You're not supposed to be a matchmaker for your mismatched grandparents but the thought that their romance interruptus might get a second chance was downright irresistible to me.

Grandpa rented a two room apartment about a block and a half away from my parents' apartment in Queens, within walking distance of everything he could possibly need. But there was one problem: Grandpa was almost completely blind by that time. Not that something as trivial as blindness could stop him.

Now Grandma El lived about six blocks from his new digs. Six short blocks filled with possibilities. But as it turned out they might as well have been on separate continents. Grandpa might have fled the retirement village and Grandma Bess, but he was still a married man and his demeanor was impeccable. No flirting. No dating. No shenanigans. Not even if the woman in question was family as well as an old flame.

I was crushed. Not that I am a believer in infidelity but I was a newly-minted romance writer at the time (I sold my first book about six months after Grandpa moved to Queens) and hot on the trail of a happy ending.

Instead I found myself in the middle of a romantic triangle where the combined age of the participants was 253 years! We might grow older but the same emotions still burn inside our hearts and the almost daily phone calls from my grandmothers proved that to me for all time. Grandma Bess, his wife, wanted to know what "That Woman" was up to. ("She's a witch, Barbara, a sorceress, and she wants Larry. She always has!") and Grandma El, his former fiancee, countered with a wicked laugh and a few comments of her own. ("That old stick-in-the-mud is sapping the life out of Larry. I'm much more fun!")

And what was my grandfather thinking? I haven't a clue because he wasn't talking.

The months passed. The phone calls increased. The 1982 holidays came and went and there we were, zipping through 1983 at rocket speed.
Grandma El's stuffing recipe

Suddenly it was Thanksgiving and we were all gathered at my parents' apartment to celebrate: Roy and I, my parents, my aunt Mona, my uncle Budd, my aunt Dede, Grandma El, and the man of the hour Grandpa Larry.

"I have an announcement," he said somewhere between the candied yams and the mince pie.

I looked over at Grandma El. Was that a merry twinkle I saw in her eyes or just the candlelight?

I held my breath as Grandpa Larry cleared his throat.

"Bess and I have decided to give it another try."

The prodigal husband was going home. He signed over his bank account to Bess, his half of the house, and the rest of his heart, but he was going back home where he knew he belonged.

Was I disappointed? I have to admit the dream of Grandma El and Grandpa Larry getting back together again after so many years was a tough one to let go but there was no denying Grandpa Larry's and Grandma Bess's pure joy in being together again.

He was there for her a few years later when she was diagnosed with cancer and there for her when she left this world eight years later.

And a certain romance writer got her happily-ever-after ending, even if it didn't look quite the way she had expected it to.

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the U.S.!

===

P.S. I'm Barbara Bretton and you can find me here and here and here. SPELLS & STITCHES (Book #4 in my Sugar Maple Chronicles) will be in bookstores on December 6th. Make sure you visit my website in December and enter my Win A Nook Color contest. Good luck!




P.P.S. If you'd like to sample Sugar Maple (knitting! magick! love!) you can read chapter one of SPELLS & STITCHES here or pick up an e-copy of CHARMED: A SUGAR MAPLE SHORT STORY at Smashwords (free!) or Amazon Kindle ($0.99)

Grandma and the Prince - Part 8

<==Grandma at 19

Something happened to me the year I turned twenty-six.

It was 1976, our Bicentennial year, a year of history and memory. A year of looking back to discover how we came to be. I suppose my family is as representative of the U.S. in the 20th century as any family could be.

Three of my four grandparents were born in other countries. Only one, my mother's father, was born in this country and he was halfChippewa.

I started thinking a lot about how my family evolved during that year, trying to weave together the disparate stories into a whole I could understand. And who better to start with than my garrulous, storytelling grandmother El?

Grandma was living in a small apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, the New York City neighborhood where I'd grown up. It wasn't much as far as apartments go, more a glorified studio than anything else. You entered into a dark and narrow hallway. The bathroom was off that hallway, along with a huge walk-in closet that also held Grandma's chifferobe and secretary desk. Everything else had been lost in the fire two years earlier that destroyed the Woodside building where she and her daughter Mona had both been living.

The moment she smelled smoke and heard the fierce sibilant hiss of flame, she grabbed her strongbox of old photos, her bankbook and jewelry, and climbed out onto the fire escape in her nightgown. The metal rungs of the ladder were slick with ice but that didn't stop Grandma. She ordered the firemen to keep their hands to themselves and made her way down two flights to safety.

When the smoke cleared, she learned she'd be traveling much lighter through life. Paintings, framed photos, furniture, clothes--gone, all of it. These days they call it simplifying your life but it was more than that. It was a tragedy.

So much of her past was lost in that fire, so many clues to her heart and soul. Of course, none of that mattered to me in 1976. I was only twenty-six and my grandmother was going to live forever. She was my constant, my North star. And she was ready to talk.

We decided I'd drive in early Sunday morning for breakfast and conversation. I had my questions all planned, fresh batteries in my cassette recorder, and a curiosity so intense that I was willing to brave the Long Island Expressway on a July Sunday in order to satisfy it.

No matter where Grandma lived, the place always looked like her. I remember the Prospect Avenue house with the steep front steps and angled roof. The small ranch house on Eckhardt Terrace with the apple trees in the back yard and the pinball machine in the basement. The address didn't matter. You'd know who lived there the second you walked through the door. She hated this apartment, her last, but still she'd made it her own. She'd found a loose pillow-back sofabed at a thrift store and stitched up a slipcover in a slightly tatty chintz fabric that seemed to give off the faint scent of Tigress. She had paintings on the walls, oils and watercolors and prints, street scenes, rainy vistas, all of them in ornate frames hung suspended from thick velvet cords. They weren't the pictures she'd carried with her from home to home but still they fit. I can see each of her homes in my mind's eye.

Grandma and I talked for hours that summer day. She was instantly comfortable with the whirring of the tape recorder, so much so that she would ask me to stop the tape when she wanted to say something incriminating or downright bitchy. But I can’t remember the words.

I remember the room and the heat and the smell of toast and bacon and the feeling of having turned a corner, of being accepted in her world as an adult and not a child. I remember the narrow little table pushed against the wall, the way you could reach the sink from your chair without even stretching very far at all. I remember the sound of people talking beneath her window, of the gentle ticking of her anniversary clock.

Whatever we talked about, I captured ninety minutes of it on tape. I remember the
cassette. Capitol Records made the blank tape and packaged it in a cardboard box
decorated with a Peter Max drawing that was all curves and primary colors. The label was red and white.

The tape is old now and a little flukey with age. I popped it in an ancient cassette player and was jolted from my chair by the sound of our laughter. I didn't remember the laughter. Isn't that ridiculous? But I remember now.

It wasn't easy but I transcribed the tape about ten years ago and while the
omissions are telling (like forgetting her first husband, the man who was my biological grandfather) the content is downright fascinating and I hope to share it with you next month.

(The photo above is Grandma El at 70.)

* * * *

Today's my birthday and to celebrate I'm giving away a signed ARC of my August
book, LACED WITH MAGIC. All you have to do is leave a comment and I'll choose one winner (thanks, Random Number Generator) on Sunday night and announce it right here and on my blog.

Good luck!

Grandma and the Prince - Part 6 - Barbara Bretton

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

For all that Grandma El retained her love of England until the day she died, she never felt the need to go home again. When she left England for the United States during World War I, she didn’t look back. Through the years El talked endlessly about the importance of family and how it was she who kept us all together but, when push came to shove, she’d found it easy to leave her English relatives behind.

It wasn’t that easy for her sister Edith. Dede (her family nickname) was the child who had been bartered to childless relatives in return for passage to New Zealand for her parents and siblings. She was the one who’d been left behind in England while El and Cass ran free in Auckland. England was her home and always would be.

In 1963 Dede retired from her job at the Hotel Taft and moved to a three room apartment on Layton Street in Elmhurst, five short blocks from where we lived. My mom was elated. She’d adored Dede from their first meeting and the thought of having her living nearby put a permanent smile on my mother’s face. Dede was an odd combination of reserve and warmth, of wicked humor and cool sophistication. She and my mom went to the movies together every week. Risque foreign films with subtitles and content objectionable to the Diocese of Brooklyn that they laughed about afterward over coffee and pie at Dede's apartment.

My Aunt Mona, El’s daughter, adored Dede too. She took her shopping after work, out to dinner, vied with my mother for Dede’s attentions and love. Grandma was still living in New Jersey at that time, which was a good thing for all concerned. The major battles between the sisters were still a few years in the future.

R to L: my aunt Mona, my mother, Aunt Dede

Taken at my wedding 9/8/68

Dede was the one who stayed in contact with our relatives in Liverpool so when she decided to return to England for a visit, nobody was very surprised. “Come with me, El,” she said to her sister. “Let’s go home together.” But my grandmother wouldn’t consider it. “What do I want with England?” she said to Dede. “You can go alone.” And Dede did. She went to Rome and Venice and Naples. She went to Zurich and Brussels. She went to Paris. She went to London where she met a man who would become very important to her. And then she went home to Liverpool. To Sea View where she’d spent her childhood.

To the same dog she’d played with as a girl? Wait a second!

The well-groomed collie was sprawled on the lawn when her cab pulled up the long curving drive. What a well-behaved dog, Dede thought. He didn’t even glance her way when she called to him. “That looks just like Teddy,” my aunt said to the cousins who greeted her. “That is Teddy,” they said. “He died the year after you left for America. Grandmamma had him stuffed.”

I am descended from a long line of animal lovers but obviously some of them loved animals a tad too much. Poor Teddy had spent the last forty-five years as a lawn ornament, brought inside only when it rained. “We just couldn’t part with him,” they said. “We comb his hair ever day.”

That was one of the nicer family stories Dede told us. The other ones? Well, let's just say I'm not proud of the genetic mix bubbling through my veins. My great great grandfather was master of all he surveyed. When Dede moved back to Sea View, he was still the patriarchal figure whose moods set the tone for life inside the great house. The Edwardian Era flourished in London, but the Victorian Era, in all of its repressed and urgent sexuality, still reigned in my family’s home. My great great grandfather knew he existed above the law within the walls of his house. Children lived in the shadows, in a netherworld of adult expectations and their own fragile dreams.

They knew what they were doing, my family, when they asked for Dede rather than El. Dede was tall and awkward, a quiet girl who grew into an introspective woman. She lived an interior life. Not so my Grandma El. El would not have gone quietly to her new home. Society’s conventions were enough to still Dede’s protests. Society would have had to work much harder on El. I like to believe society would have lost the battle.

No one spoke up against my great great grandfather. His daughter Claire retreated into her own private world. She crept through the house on silent feet, seeing everything, revealing nothing at all. Dede would awaken with a start in the middle of the night to find Claire standing over her, gazing down at her with vacant eyes. No motherly touch from Claire, no words of comfort from anyone at all.

(Would it surprise you to learn that Dede grew up to be a reserved, self-contained, independent woman who turned into the quintessential geisha each and every time she fell in love?)

My great great grandfather’s reach extended beyond Sea View. Your daughter for my patronage, he’d said to the dairy farmer. The dairy farmer thought it sounded like a fine deal and the two men struck a bargain. The girl, a scared little chit in a faded cotton dress that had obviously known its share of owners, was delivered that night to Sea View. Dede watched from her window on the second floor as the child walked around back to the servants' entrance. Briefly she considered tapping on the window, to let the girl know there was someone who understood what she was feeling, but Dede knew an action like that would bring the wrath of God down on her own head and so she kept silent.

I learned from Dede that my great great grandfather died in bed one night with a young girl spread-eagled and crying beneath him. There was a sense of acceptance about Dede as she told this story that puzzled me, but that was only because I was too young to really understand what she wasn’t saying. I was a happy, spoiled American child of the 1950s. Stories about rich relatives and spooky mansions and Jane Eyre-ish little girls passed around like baseball cards were the stuff of the books I devoured on a daily basis. The fact that this was real, that it had happened to my Aunt Dede, took years to sink in.

A hint of things to come: Dede runs off to Detroit with a handsome cop. My grandmother ends up destitute with two kids under the age of five. (Although I didn't find out about that until I was fifty years old!)

As with most things in my life, it is only through writing about them that I've come to understand my family's history.

Okay, maybe "understand" isn't the right word. Let's just say I'm starting to make a little sense out of it.

Thanks to all of you who have read and enjoyed the story so far. I appreciate your comments more than I can say. This month three commenters chosen at random will receive signed copies of CASTING SPELLS and JUST DESSERTS as a small token of gratitude.

PS: I'm Barbara Bretton and you can find me here and here and here. My next book, LACED WITH MAGIC, will be released in August 2009.

Grandma and the Prince - Part 4 (Barbara Bretton)

I'm going to jump forward in time this month and give you a preview of things to come. Next month we'll head back into the early 20th century and visit New Zealand and New York City.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

----

Once upon a time my Grandma El and her daughter, my Aunt Mona, dated the same man.

Unfortunately that man was my grandfather.

I thought that would get your attention. I didn't cut my teeth writing confession stories for nothing. If you want to sell your story to an overworked, underpaid editor, you've got to hit her right between the eyes with a left hook she's not likely to forget.

For a brief moment in time and space, my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather were simultaneously spouseless. (Which was pretty much of a miracle, if you consider the fact that my Grandpa Larry had five of them and Grandma El had three.)

My grandfather Bert died on June 1, 1950. My grandmother El and Grandpa Larry both remarried in 1954. I did the math. Somewhere between 1950 and 1954 they got up close and personal and damn near turned the Fuller/McNutt family on its ear.

For such a tiny family, mine seemed to generate enough sturm und drang to rival any fictional clan Tennessee Williams ever dreamed up. My husband likes to say we're small but volatile. And that's about as good a way to put it as any other I've heard. This, however, was more than any of them could handle.

Grandma El in NYC around 1952

I don't remember anything about that time. I was too young and families were much better at keeping secrets in the 50s than they are now. However, the knowledge that El and Larry had been briefly engaged seemed to become part of my particular universe when I was around six or seven years old. I loved my new grandparents (Les and Bess. Who could make that up?) but it always seemed a shame to me that El and Larry hadn't been able to make a go of it. Being around them was like going on vacation. They loved to dance and laugh and travel. They were both social creatures who enjoyed nothing more than being around other people, a trait I most definitely did not inherit. Put me in a crowd of strangers and I clam up and scuttle toward the nearest exit. Put either one of them in a crowd of strangers and--well, let's just say they didn't stay strangers long.

When El and Larry walked into a room, they brought their own built-in spotlights. Star quality? Absolutely. They both had it in spades. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with looks. It was something else, something that went so deep that my grandfather still had it--whatever it might be--when he died at 100 years of age. Oh yes, they were a match made in romantic heaven and, for a time, it looked like they'd have the happy ending I've spent many years writing about.

So where does El's daughter Mona enter into it? She's the one who told me she'd dated Larry while he was dating her mother. Sex or movies? I don't have the answer to that one. I'm not even sure I want the answer.

Still, although it was more than fifty years after the fact, the look of triumph in her eyes was unsettling. Picture the teenage girl with the dying father and high-stepping mother. Picture the rebellious young woman with the Ava Gardner looks who finds a way she can hurt her mother and shake up the family at the same time.

Mona at 16

It's Christmas 1952. The middle-aged mother is widowed and unsure of herself as a woman. The daughter is twenty-six and in her prime.

The man? Well, he just might be in over his head.

Grandma El and Grandpa Larry

My parents took sides. My mother's sympathies were with El. My father's were with Larry. As my mother once told me, "I had no childhood baggage with El, the way your father did. It was easier for me to love her."Same as my dad loved Larry. There was a connection between the two men that was easily as close as the connection between a father and his natural child. My grandfather's five marriages didn't turn my dad's childhood into chaos.

But, in the end none of that mattered, because the whole affair was already barreling toward the finish line, thanks to a pair of birthday earrings from Larry that El decided to have appraised. For insurance purposes, she said, but I have my doubts. My grandmother was appalled to discover that her beautiful earrings were courtesy of Macy's and Monet. My grandfather was appalled to discover that it mattered so much to her.

They broke up and before the year was out both had married other people.

Grandma El's wedding to Grandpa Les - she looks so sad, doesn't she?

The rivalry between El and Mona, however, intensified.

El & Larry at my 1968 wedding; Bess refused to attend

Grandma in her 70s; her life force comes right through, doesn't it?

In 1982 my grandfather took a mutually agreed-upon hiatus from his fifth marriage. He was 86 years old and living a comfortable life in Rossmoor, a retirement village south of Princeton. Unfortunately he and Bess were rubbing each other the wrong way and they decided that a separation was the way to go. In typical fashion, my grandfather took nothing but the clothes on his back, his NY Mets baseball cap, his books and photographs. He moved back to Elmhurst, about four blocks awayfrom his daughter and son-in-law.

And about ten blocks away from El and Mona.

You know that old saying, too close for comfort? This situation defined it and it brought out the worst in everyone. What should have been z happy time of reunion and re-discovery turned into an utter disaster.

Grandma Bess called me two and three times a week. "What's your grandfather doing?" she would ask me, sounding angry and fearful and all shades of emotion in between. "Has he seen THAT WOMAN?" THAT WOMAN, of course, was my eighty-two year old Grandma El. God only knows what she would have done if she'd known about Mona.

Mona seemed indifferent, but Grandma El glowed like a schoolgirl every time she saw my grandfather. I'll admit that I once again entertained fantasies of seeing the two of them walk off into the sunset together. But life was just too complicated for such a simple, satisfying ending. There was too much history between them. Too much history between the lot of them.

Now picture a dinner table in Elmhurst, Queens. Picture a celebration. I'd sold my first book. I was thirty-one years old and flying high. My small-but-volatile family had gathered to toast my success and the champagne was flowing. There's a photo of El and Larry sitting next to each other at the table. They're in the same pose they'd been in thirteen years earlier at my wedding, huge smiles and twinkling eyes and a sense of rightness about them that maybe only I could see. (I've been tearing the house apart looking for it. I promise to post it when it shows up.)

Mona was at this dinner too. Maybe it was the champagne. Maybe it was a lot of other things.. Whatever it was, she began to talk. She pitched her voice low so only I could hear. "He wanted to make sure she was taken care of," she said, referring to her father Bert. "He told Larry to take care of Mother. She was still young and he wanted her to be happy."

"I don't get it," I remember saying to her. "He wanted Grandpa Larry to find someone for Grandma?"

"Find someone for her?" I can still hear Mona's bitter laugh. "He wanted him to sleep with her."

According to my aunt, in 1948, the year my parents were married-- four years before I thought anything had happened between them-- my Grandpa Bert called his wife and his son's father-in-law into his sick room to give them his blessing. "Take care of her," he told Larry. "I don't want her to be alone." Did he suspect something had already developed between them and he was trying to tell them it was okay? Or was it wishful thinking on his part, a last-ditch effort to keep the two sides of the family together after he was gone?

Either way, Grandpa Bert's time was almost past, while Grandma's was just beginning.

PS: I'm Barbara Bretton, author of CASTING SPELLS, and you can also find me here and here and here.

Grandma and the Prince: A Thanksgiving Story

It was the night before Thanksgiving 1996 and I couldn't find my turkey platter. Talk about a disaster in the making. I had looked in all the places where it should have been and now was reduced to looking in places where it couldn't possibly be. Lingerie drawers. Linen closet. Under the bed. I'm telling you that platter had vanished without a trace.

I was on my hands and knees pulling out old boxes of greeting cards and tchotchkes from the guest room closet when I stumbled on what would turn out to be The Big Family Secret.

Talk about an OMG moment! I think I lost consciousness there for a second. I mean, how would you feel if you happened upon cheesecake photos of your grandmother!? Was I hallucinating? Had I tapped into the hard apple cider one time too many? This was our seventh Thanksgiving without Grandma El with us. Had she suddenly decided the time was right to play a paranormal prank?

(Trust me, it would have been right up her alley. Think Marie Barone with an English accent and you're getting close.)

When I could breathe again without giggling like a six year old who'd caught her parents doing it, I stole another peek. Yep, that was my Grandma El. Look at her reclining languidly against a rock. And wait a second! There she is--back arched, arms wrapped around her knees--posed seductively at the water’s edge. Oh and how about Grandma rising up from the ocean with her arms outstretched like that old painting called September Morn.

It was more than I could take. I didn't need this peek into Grandma's sex life. I pushed the images of my Halifax-born, Oxford-educated Grandpa Bert kneeling in the sand with a Brownie Box camera, crying "Work it, baby, work it!" to his twenty-five years younger wife. Nope. I didn't need that image at all.

I was about to shove these faded photos back into the box and out of my sight when I saw it and I swear to you the earth shifted beneath my feet. It was a photo of my grandmother, clearly taken the same day as the others, in the arms of a man named Prince Mohindin. No, I take that back. Prince Mohindin was in her arms. Enveloped by her. Practically devoured.

Let me put it bluntly: Grandma was all over the guy like a cheap suit and the look she was giving the camera could burn the lens.

What in the name of family history was going on here? Grandma and an exotic prince? Had I stepped onto the pages of my very own Harlequin Presents? (And who said my grandmother got to be the heroine anyway? I wanted that job!) And the date on the backs of those photos was 1930 which meant she was six years into her marriage at the time.

Now Grandma El was a born storyteller who had kept me breathless all through my childhood with tales of growing up in both England and New Zealand in the early 20th century but she never once mentioned dating royalty. Especially not while she was married!

"I've lived a woman's life," she had told me on more than one occasion. "I've experienced everything a woman can experience." I used to laugh and roll my eyes at the statement but maybe she hadn't been exaggerating after all.

(to be continued)

PS: I'm Barbara Bretton, author of CASTING SPELLS and JUST DESSERTS among others, and you can find me on-line here and here and here.