When the baby was born, Addison and Maggie Savannah named her Minnie Katherine. When they discovered a tiny blemish on her foot, they nicknamed her Minnie Mole.
Southern parents have bestowed worse terms of endearment.
Minnie Mole was my Great Aunt. She came to live with my parents when her mind and memory got too bad for her to live on her own.
She moved in with little possessions. Her lifetime was filled with giving things away more than collecting.
This didn't prevent her from bringing something into the house.
Dementia is a sonuvabitch.
It came with Aunt Minnie like a fog. Descending on my parents' home, making it difficult to navigate. When I visited, my folks seemed to move more slowly through the house. Afraid of what they might bump into or trip over.
I'm not talking ottomans and end tables.
Things started out slowly. They'd catch Aunt Minnie talking to someone who wasn't there. Hear her in the den, carrying on in conversation, complete with pauses, waiting for the unseen other to respond.
"Can you believe Ted came to see me?" she'd say. He's a good man, that Ted."
We knew she worked with Ted at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
We also knew he'd been dead for a decade.
Aunt Minnie not only heard things, but she saw things no one else could see.
"There's a little girl running around the house," she told my mother. "She hopped off the front porch. I wonder why she doesn't come inside?"
"I don't know, Mole. Maybe she needed to get home," my mother said.
On some days, we learned it was easier to enter Aunt Minnie's reality than for her to join ours.
The strange happenings continued.
Shadows crept along the walls. The hint of a person caught looming in the corner of an eye. A putrid smell from the washroom that couldn't be blamed on sewage backup.
"Maybe something died in the crawlspace?" I told my father one afternoon.
We checked under the house. Our search came up empty.
Odder occurrences followed.
None topped the exploding casserole dish of baked spaghetti.
It wasn't late, but the house was drifting off to sleep.
My parents were upstairs, their chins touching their chests as they finished watching The Sopranos.
My mother thought she heard the front door open, then shut.
The sequence came again. A little faster. A little harder.
Then again. This time, the door was slammed.
Then Aunt Minnie screamed. "You get out of here! You leave them alone!"
My mother got up. From the top of the staircase, she could see Aunt Minnie. Dressed in her pajamas, her hair in curlers, she stood like a sentinel. Her hand on the doorknob.
"Mole, honey, is everything alright?" my mother asked.
Aunt Minnie turned and looked up. She was crying.
"She's trying to get in," she said. "She's trying to hurt y'all. I ain't gonna let her." Her voice rose, and the tears came again.
When my mother reached her, she was shaking. They walked over to a couch and sat down.
"Who was trying to hurt us?" my mother asked.
Aunt Minnie named a deceased sister. A woman who had been known to kick a hornet's nest for pleasure. She'd been credited for inciting riffs in a family that didn't need any more. In life, she was known for her cold temperament. In death, her tombstone sat on a plot of land that the sun never appeared to reach.
"Nobody's here, honey," my mother said. "If they were, they're gone now."
Aunt Minnie wouldn't let it go. She kept insisting that the dead were trying to get into the house.
"I know it's her," she said. "I saw her."
She repeated her name.
That's when they heard an explosion in the kitchen.
Earlier that evening, my father had made baked spaghetti. He did this once a week, lining a 9x13 casserole dish with noodles, sauce, and cheese.
The leftovers had been sitting to cool on the stove.
At the sound, my father flew down the steps and walked into a storm of glass and marinara.
The contents of the Pyrex were everywhere. All over the oven, plastered on the fridge, and filling the sink.
The walls mimicked the infamous Amityville house - soaked red.
My father started cleaning. In the other room, Aunt Minnie whispered to my mother, "She did it. She's mad. She's always been hateful."
An hour later, the kitchen looked less like a murder scene, and my mother took Aunt Minnie upstairs to sleep with her.
It was a while before they closed their eyes.
Twenty years later, my parents would redo their kitchen. They would ditch the laminate hunter green countertops for marble. The cabinets were upgraded with soft-close hinges.
Until that time, my father would find random specks of tomato sauce on the popcorn ceiling. Proof it all really happened.
Afterward, every time we ate spaghetti, the incidents of that night would come out like a prized bottle of spirits. Forking pasta in our mouths, we'd retell the tale.
"Lord, what a mess," my mother would say.
"I never heard of a dish breaking like that," my sister added.
"You really think it was a ghost? You really think it was..."
"Shhhhhhhh," my mother said. "Don't say her name. Don't bring whatever that was back on us."
Aunt Minne is gone now.
My father, too.
Like them, the stains of that long-ago night only exist in memory.
Yet, sometimes I wonder. Did my mother or father mistakenly turn a burner on and forget? Or maybe Aunt Minnie Mole walked into the kitchen, saw the spaghetti, and thought she'd heat some up. Given her state, this was possible.
When I tell this story, I never voice this. I don't think it would do any good.
And to this day, for reasons I can't fully explain, I still won't say the sister's name.
I don't imagine I ever will.