Page 1 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

CHAPTER 1

“You’ve named the soup,” Lucy says. “You know that, right? You’ve given soup a name.”

“It’s not just soup.” I hold up the menu card, admiring my own calligraphy. “It’s ‘Widow’s Broth: A Crimson Reduction.’ Say it out loud. It has drama.”

“It has a personality disorder.”

I set the card at the head of the table anyway, right where I want the mayor to sit. He complains every year that I make him eat things that sound weird, and every year he asks for seconds. Men.

The Salt & Sage looks nothing like itself tonight. My white walls and sea-glass jars have surrendered to something darker. I’ve draped the two long farmhouse tables in dark crimson linen and lined the beams overhead with tapered black candles I ordered from a supplier who probably thinks I run a coven. Considering the theme for this party is Transylvanian Twilight, he’s not far off. Obviously, this is old-school Gothic vampire. Real vampires, from everything I’ve ever heard, are considerably less interested in velvet curtains and blood-orange tarts.

Lucy leans against the counter with her camera, snapping shots of the black roses I’ve arranged in mismatched silver goblets. Her red curls catch the last of the light coming off the harbor through the tall windows. She looks unimpressed. She’s been my best friend since we were twelve, and she always looks unimpressed. I love her for it.

“Twenty-four seats,” she says. “For a Tuesday.”

“The Twilight Feast waits for no calendar.”

“You said that last year.”

“Because it was true last year, too.”

I nudge a goblet half an inch to the left and step back. There’s always a moment when the dining room I’ve arranged stops being a project and starts becoming a place. When the candles and the linen and the place cards all come together. This is that moment. My chest does the warm, ridiculous thing it does, and I grin at my crimson-drenched sail loft like an idiot.

“You’re doing the face,” Lucy says.

“I’m not doing a face.”

“You’re absolutely doing the face. The one you do when a party’s about to work.” She lowers the camera. “Pen. Genuine question. Do you ever want to just… order a pizza? Sit on the couch? Not turn dinner into theater?”

I consider this the way you’d consider whether you’d like to remove your own spleen.

“No,” I say.

“Right. Silly of me.”

The thing is, I could explain it to her, but she already knows. She’s heard it a hundred times. A dinner party isn’t the food. The food’s the excuse. You put people around a table, you give them something delicious and a little bit weird to talk about, and something happens that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Walls come down. The lonely woman from the bookshop laughs at something the lobsterman says. Somebody who’s been grieving remembers they can still enjoy dessert. That’s the magic. I feed people because it’s the best way I know to tell them they matter.

I don’t repeat it again, because it’s five o’clock on a work night and Lucy would throw a rose at me.

“Guest list,” I announce instead, grabbing my clipboard.

“You already sent the invitations.”

“Twenty-three of them.” I tap the pen against my teeth. “There’s a gap.”

“There’s always a gap.”

I look at her.

“Every year you leave one,” she says. “Every year you fill it with somebody new, and every year it works.”

Lucy raises the camera again, framing the candle line. “So invite the Bayberry’s cousin. The one who does the whittling.”

“Barry.”

“Barry.”

“Barry brought a duck to the Harvest Supper, Lucy. A live one. In a basket. It got into the pie.”