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“Awww,” I moaned. “Another one?”
This may seem like a strange, even cold, reaction. But you have to understand my grandma Ruthie’s marital history. She’d been widowed four times, via milk truck, anaphylactic shock, spider bite, and lightning strike (the lamented, aforementioned Grandpa Fred). I wrote a poem titled “Grandpa’s in an Urn” in fifth grade. I had to spend a lot of time in the guidance counselor’s office after that.
I loved Bob. Despite not being my actual grandpa or even a step-grandpa yet, Bob had always been nice to me. But he was engaged to Grandma Ruthie for five years and had chronic conditions of the heart, lungs, and liver. He had survived longer than expected.
“Your grandmother says there was some sort of mix-up with his medication. ” Mama sighed. I could practically hear the cap from her “nerve pills” rattling loose.
Knowing this would take a while, Zeb got out my blender to begin another batch of experimental “Jane shakes. ” He’d been using a combination of condiments and dessert toppings to make the synthetic blood a little bit more like the human food I missed so much. My current favorite was Faux Type O mixed with a little bit of cherry syrup and a lot of Hershey’s new Blood Additive Chocolate Syrup: “The pleasant sensation of chocolate without the unpleasant undead side effects!” That was an excellent selling point considering those side effects were the vomiting and agony that came with vampires trying to digest solid foods.
Mama’s voice trembled under the weight of Grandma Ruthie’s expectations. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Grandma seems to think we should be hosting the funeral as the next of kin. Bob’s children are having a fit. She’s already made a scene down at Whitlow’s Funeral Home over the release of the body. And now she expects me to help her plan the visitation, the buffet, the service—”
“The full Ruthie Early-Lange-Bodeen-Floss-Whitaker special?” I asked.
“I wish you would stop calling it that,” Mama huffed.
“She’s held the same funeral service for four husbands. I’ll call it what I want. ” I snorted.
“Jane, I’m really going to need your help with this,” Mama said, the faintest wheedling tone creeping into her voice.
“Why can’t Jenny help you with this?”
“Jenny’s busy with the Charity League Follies, and she’s serving as chairwoman of the Women’s Club Winter Ball this year. ” Mama was in a full-blown whine now.
“But good old Jane doesn’t have a life, right? Why not make her chairwoman of the funeral luncheon?”
“Don’t start that, Jane,” Mama warned. “If you would just talk to Jenny and work out this silly business, you could both help me. ”
“I think it ceased being silly business when I was deposed,” I told her.
Jenny had made good on her promise not to talk to me after I came out to my family. She had, however, sent me a lovely note through the law firm of Hapscombe and Schmidt, stating that Jenny wanted access to the family Bible. The Bible, which contained all of the Early genealogical information, had been willed to me through our great-aunt Jettie as part of the contents of our ancestral home, River Oaks. Jenny’s lawyers had stated that as a vampire, I could not touch it and had no use for it. I’d had the local offices of the ACLU and the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead send her a cease-and-desist letter stating that such statements were inflammatory and untrue. She’d responded by sending me a copy of the family tree she’d painstakingly calligraphed onto parchment, with my name burned out with a soldering iron. An ugly flurry of legal correspondence followed, and I ended up drinking Thanksgiving “dinner” with my parents after the rest of my family went home.
“Now, don’t expect me to take sides,” Mama said. “You girls are going to have to work this out yourselves. ”
“Most of the funeral stuff is going to be done during daylight hours,” I said. “I’m not even going to be able to attend the burial. Humans get upset when vampires burst into flames right next to them. “
“But you have all the time in the world to plan Zeb’s wedding,” Mama grumbled. She always got a little cranky when I brought up the “v word. ” “Where’s the happy couple registered? The Dollar Store?”
“First of all … that was really funny,” I whispered, glad that Zeb had ducked into the walk-in pantry and hadn’t heard it. “But it was a mean thing to say. I’m the only one allowed to make mean jokes about Jolene’s family, as I am the one wearing the ugliest dress in the history of bridesmaid-kind. ”
“What color is it?” Mama demanded. “It’s not yellow, is it? Because you know yellow makes you look sallow. ”
“Mama, focus, please. I will help with the prep work for Bob’s funeral as much as I can, during the evening, when I can fit it in around work hours. But I can’t do much. ”
“That’s all I’m asking for, honey, a little effort,” she said, placated.
“As little as possible,” I assured her. “How is Grandma doing?” I asked, trying not to let the resentment in my voice bubble through the phone line. “Should I stop by her house on the way to work?”
“Um, no,” Mama said in a sad attempt to be vague. “There’s going to be such a crowd there …”
“And it would be a shame for me to come by and make things awkward,” I finished for her. The heavy silence on Mama’s end said I was right, but Mama preferred not to put it into words.
I don’t know why Grandma’s rejection of me still stung. Elderly relatives were supposed to give you lipsticky kisses and ask intrusive questions about your love life. They were supposed to brag about your achievements to the point where nonrelatives wanted to gouge their eardrums at the mere mention of your name. They were not supposed to request at least one week’s advance notice if you attended family gatherings or insist on wearing a cross the size of a hubcap whenever you walked into a room. My only consolation was that Grandma looked like Flavor Flav and usually tipped over under the weight of her bling.
Eager to get back to a subject she could control, Mama listed the dishes she expected me to prepare to perk up the usual funeral potluck offerings. Apparently, there was some sort of dessert involving Jell-O, cream cheese, and mandarin oranges in my future. While I saw it as completely unfair that someone who didn’t eat should have to cook, these arguments failed to impress Mama. I promised to come by for my assigned shopping list after dark.
“How are things going with that Gabriel?” Mama asked. Mama was happy I was dating someone, particularly someone who literally came from one of the oldest families in town. But she was pretending that Gabriel wasn’t, either. I could only expect so much. “Have you seen him lately?”
“Not for a week or so. He had to go to Nashville for business. ”
On the other end of the line, Mama sighed. Dang it. I had just extended the conversation by about twenty minutes. Ever since I’d established a semi-sort-of-relationship with Gabriel, Mama’s favorite activity had been giving me relationship advice. I thought she saw it as a girlie bonding thing. “Honey, what have I always told you?”
Now, honestly, that could be any number of things, ranging from “Avoid contact with any surface in a public bathroom” to “Men don’t buy the cow when you hand them the keys to the dairy. ” So I took a shot in the dark.
“Um, never trust a man with two first names,” I guessed.
“Well, yes, but not what I had in mind. ”
“Never trust a man with a remote-control fireplace?” I suggested.
“No,” she said, her patience audibly thinning.
“Never trust a—”
“Honey. ” I could almost hear Mama shaking her head in dismay at my lack of man-savvy. “Relationships are fifty-fifty, give and take. You have to make an effort. He’s up there all by himself for a whole week. Why couldn’t you go up to visit him?”
“I have to work. And isn’t that kind of desperate?”
“Ther
e’s nothing wrong with showing some interest. You could make a little more of an effort. I could have Sheila take a look at your hair—”
“Mama, I really need to get off the phone if I’m going to make it to work on time,” I said. “And Zeb’s over here, and we’re trying to talk about bridesmaid stuff. I’ve really got to go. ”
“Don’t let them put you in yellow. You know how washed-out you look in yellow!” Mama was saying as I put the receiver in its cradle.
“Someone has to lock my grandma up. She’s single-handedly taking down the Greatest Generation,” I moaned.
Zeb smirked at me as I slumped down and smacked my head against the counter. In a granite-muffled voice, I told him, “Shut it, or I’m calling your mama and telling her that your parents’ names aren’t on the invitations. That’ll keep you tied up for months. ”
“That seems uncalled for,” he muttered.
2
From were-weasels to werewolves, weres are territorial creatures. Once a pack has established a home, they will not leave that location for generations, until the local food sources have been depleted or they’re burnt out by angry farmers.
—Mating Rituals and Love Customs of the Were
Half-Moon Hollow is a strange place for a vampire to spend her days. We don’t have a performing-arts center or a museum, but we have had our own “Rowdy Rural Towns” episode of COPS. The program had never before featured the arrest of a naked guy stealing anhydrous ammonia.
The chamber of commerce had a hard time fitting that into the brochure.
Living in Kentucky is a mix of the ridiculous and the sublime. The same state that is home to top-shelf research hospitals, major manufacturers, and thoroughbred horse racing is a place where you can attend a schoolbus crash-up derby. (They do take the kids off the buses before they race them. ) We have Opera Houses and Opry Houses. We have cities that are home to hundreds of thousands and towns like the Hollow, where one day, if the right couple gets engaged, the entire population will be related by marriage.
News of my transformation was slowly making the rounds of the Hollow kitchen circuit thanks to my former boss, Mrs. Stubblefield, using my application for undead unemployment benefits as justification for firing me from my position as the library’s director of juvenile services. Of course, she fired me hours before I was turned, but that didn’t keep her from crowing, “I told you so!” She couldn’t possibly let someone “like that” work around the public, much less as a children’s librarian, she told anyone who would listen. Mrs. Woodley, whose five children I personally tutored in the library’s Reading Remedy program, told her to shut her mouth or she’d toss Mrs. Stubblefield’s lumpy butt out of the Half-Moon Hollow Ladies’ Garden Club. I sent Mrs. Woodley a dozen frozen pot pies as a thank you.
Mrs. Stubblefield had recently “retired” (was asked to retire) after a band of roving teenagers—without my after-school tutoring program to keep them occupied—stuck pages from nudie magazines in all of the encyclopedias. And no one on the staff noticed. For a month. Plus, there was evidence that Mrs. Stubblefield shared her morning coffee with Jack Daniel’s.
Mrs. Stubblefield’s retirement meant that her stepdaughter, Posey, was the most senior member of the library staff. Posey, who was brought in to replace me, couldn’t understand the Dewey Decimal System without “Sounds like …” clues and laughed the way it was written out: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha. ” I hated her on principle. And that principle was bitterness. Through Mama, I heard about Book Club nights, trumped-up late fines, and items being checked out of the (cannot possibly be replaced, never to leave the library) Special Collections room. Grant application deadlines had been missed. Federal funding fell through for Puppet Time Theater and the Adult Literacy Program.
Slowly but surely, my favorite library patrons were making their way over to the bad part of town to seek me out for their reading needs. It started when the Wednesday Night Book Club president, Anne Woodhouse, stopped by to talk to me about a selection. Anne had lost faith in Mrs. Stubblefield’s suggestions after she recommended that the club read the sequel to A Million Little Pieces. Then Sally Dortch stopped by to ask about Newbery Medal selections for little Hannah’s book report, but she saw Mr. Wainwright’s display of fertility idols and bolted. To be fair, giant ceramic phalluses generally send me running for the nearest exit, too. Finally, Justine Marcum and Kitty Newsome, the same library board members who helped Mrs. Stubblefield give me the boot, put on trench coats and Jackie O sunglasses to sneak into the shop and magnanimously announce that the board was willing to overlook my vampire status and welcome me back to the staff.
I’m not going to say it wasn’t tempting. It bothered me to see my library—a place that represented everything human and familiar to me—suffering, to see programs that had taken me years to cultivate crumbling. And I missed my kids. I missed their little faces, still and enraptured, during Story Time. I missed helping each one find just the right book to help spark a love of reading, introducing them to the books that I loved as a kid: Roald Dahl, Louisa May Alcott, Ann M. Martin. I missed bringing teenagers back to reading after they finally got through that horrible “I’m too cool to like anything” phase. But I had entered a new phase in my life, and as far I was concerned, I could still do the kind of work I did at the library at Specialty Books.
I had done my best to keep in touch with the human world, be a respectable undead citizen. Andrea Byrne, my new blood-surrogate friend, was helping me find classes and other constructive activities to fill the night hours. We had started taking yoga together. Sure, I didn’t technically need breathing exercises anymore, but I was finally coordinated enough to balance on one foot. I had made a few friends there, several of whom switched to a different class after they realized I was a vampire. In further personal development, I’d started recycling everything in sight. Since I was going to be walking the earth a lot longer than originally forecast, I wanted it to last as long as possible. This, combined with the yoga, convinced my mother that I had joined a cult.