My oldest has moved into a new home in Hollywood, and she thinks it’s haunted. It’s in a wonderful newly renovated neighborhood that was once part of the old art deco Hollywood, a space where golden age writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain lived, when Hollywood was the capital of make believe. They’re all dead, but some think they’re still hanging around. L.A. is hard to leave even if you’re dead.

So she thinks it’s possible one of them is living with her because little things have been happening. Shoes have been rearranged, some in order of color. Items on her desk seem to have been moved about while she sleeps. She’s convinced it’s a ghost, hopefully, Zelda’s.

Mae would know about this if she were here. Mae Roache, my mother’s older crazy cousin, was a bona fide fortune teller who held seances and read palms and tea leaves. Every family has a Mae. Check your albums.

My mother and her lady friends held tea parties twice a month at one another’s houses in the neighborhood. They all lived on the same block. But Mae came down from the north side on the street car to join them. I witnessed some of these readings personally. It’s a true story. Momma called her Mae, as I did, but the ladies always addressed her as Mrs. Roache, even though she never married.

Mae was true “Black Irish.” Momma considered that side of the clan to be “Shanty Irish” as opposed to “Lace Curtain Irish” like her own side. It took me years to sort that out. It was sort of an inter-family class warfare. I personally loved Mae because she always brought me penny candy in a brown bag.

Mae was my first “movie star.” She arrived smelling slightly of Sen-Sen and perfume. She was tall, olive-skinned with dyed coal-black hair plastered back like a Spanish dancer. She wore big earrings and beautiful scarves draped around her shoulders. Mae always came around the side of the house, refusing to enter the front door. She said there was a “cloud” over it. That’s exciting for a boy to hear. I watched that door for years. Even though I was only 8 or 9 at the time I had a sense that Mae was on to something.

As I grow older, I’m confronted with my own clouds. A child never forgets things like that. In her long dresses and scarves, chains of beads and rings, Mae was magical to me. She read the leaves and tarot cards and palms and made everyone gasp. I didn’t know until I was in my 30s, when my sister Rita told me, that all the women gave her a dollar apiece. I was not surprised that Mae was running a card hustle. God bless her.

The hook here is that the aforementioned daughter in the haunted house in Los Angeles is a scarily very young version of cousin Mae. Dawn has the same hair, sports the big earrings and believes in this stuff like her father and old Mae.

I wish I had a family picture of Mae, but no one in those days kept a camera at hand, and Momma said Mae refused to have a picture taken. In her last days, the cloud moved from the front door to my mother’s mind. She couldn’t remember Mae but I do. And until my cloud comes for me, I will never forget her, not with her baubles and beads and my bag of candy.

Goodnight Mae, wherever you are. Check in on my daughter now and then. Watch the door.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.