Page 137 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I remember all of them,” he says as he puts the pen down.

“I know.”

“No.” He looks at the paper. “I don’t think you do. I remember them because for a very long time there was no one else left who did. I mistook that for a duty that could not be shared.”

I look down at Eli Mercer’s name.

“What changed?”

Julian considers that.

“I stayed in the room.”

So Eli Mercer goes down the hill, and Mabel doesn’t ask who remembered him. She finds the fire marshal’s report she dug out in 1994, a church burial entry nobody had connected to the fire, and a newspaper notice from the following week. By the end of February Eli Mercer exists in three places instead of one. Mabel is unbearable about the Pruitts for days.

Theo Goodwin makes no adjustment of any kind.

None. On the sixth of February, Theo asks Julian to look at the cellar hatch. On the twentieth it’s the ice on the north side of the building. In March there is an entire Sunday afternoon during which the two of them take the pump apart on the floor of the back room, and Theo swears at it, and Julian does not. At the end of it Theo says, “Well, there you are,” and gives Julian a beer he does not drink. Half an hour later, he takes it back and pours it away without comment, which is the closest thing to a ceremony that has ever occurred in that building.

Only once does Theo do something else. It’s a Thursday in late February and they are looking at a beam in the ceiling of the front room that has been sagging in a leisurely way for as long as I can remember.

“That’s not original,” Julian says.

“How d’you know?”

Julian says, “It is not original.”

Theo Goodwin looks at the beam, and then at him, and then back at the beam.

“Huh,” he says. “All right. What was it, then?”

That’s all. That is the entire adjustment.

Julian tells him there was a fire in 1911 and the original beam was replaced afterwards. Theo says his grandfather never mentioned any fire. Julian says his grandfather wasn’t born then, and Theo says fair enough, and then they argue about the beam for twenty minutes.

I think that’s when I finally understand what I kept expecting to happen and what actually happened instead. Julian spent so long assuming that being known meant being hunted that he never really considered the other thing that can happen when people know something strange about you. They can keep needing the pump fixed.

Harriet Coyne is a different problem. Harriet has questions, and Harriet has decided that I am the correct channel for them, and I have told her four times that I am not going to do it.

“It’s a simple question, Penny.”

“It is not a simple question.”

“I only want to know whether he sleeps in the ground. Because Eunice says the ground and I say a bed, and there’s five dollars on it.”

“Then it’s a bet, Harriet, it’s not a question⁠—”

“It can be both,” says Harriet Coyne, with dignity.

I make a rule and I hold to it. I am not a translator. I am not the front desk for four hundred years of frequently asked questions. If people want to know things about Julian, they can ask Julian, who is right there, at the end of my counter, being asked things by everyone in town about roofing and shipwrecks and once, memorably, by Doris about a good wool sock pattern.

He answers the sock question. Of course he does. He’s been alive for the good ones.

Harriet’s campaign goes on for four weeks. It’s resolved in the parking lot of the grange, when Harriet—who has plainly been waiting for a considerable time—walks straight up to Julian himself while I am carrying two chafing dishes and cannot physically intervene.

“Mr. Volkov.”

“Mrs. Coyne.”