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Dick was a vampire the worse for wear. In the weeks since I’d seen him, he’d developed little worry lines where the undead weren’t supposed to get lines. He looked tired and pale, like a man who’d been beating himself up night after night, only to stay up half the day to do it some more.
This was about as comfortable as one of those intervention shows, when the clueless alcoholic walks into a hotel room to find a circle of friends with tear-jerking letters. When I stopped, Jane prodded me to keep walking. I walked around the bar and stood at the point farthest away from Dick, which Andrea seemed to find really amusing for some reason.
Dick was making a study of the ceiling and would not look at me. Jane cleared her throat. Dick shifted his eyes to the track lighting.
“Dick!” Jane exclaimed. “Out with it.”
Dick cleared his throat. “Um, Nola, Jane tells me you seem to have some misconceptions about my intentions toward you. I just wanted to apologize for any occasions on which I made you feel uncomfortable or objectified in any way.”
“Did someone write that speech for you before you came?” I asked flatly.
“I think he cobbled together portions of those ‘leaving to spend more time with my family’ speeches given by disgraced politicians,” Andrea said, sipping fresh blood and coffee.
Jane snickered.
“You both suck,” Dick told them. “OK, look, Nola, I didn’t want to just throw this out at you when you first showed up. I wanted you to get to know me better so it wouldn’t come as a shock. But I guess I got a little over-enthusiastic, and instead of being friendly to you, I came across like a . . .”
“Creepy stalker?” Jane suggested cheerfully.
“Sex predator?” Andrea added. “Which made me an accessory to said predator.”
Dick pointed a finger in their direction. “That.” He cleared his throat and reached toward my hand. Thinking better of it, he awkwardly changed directions and wiped his hand on his jeans. “Gilbert Wainwright, he was my great-great-, well, a couple of times great-grandson,” Dick said. “Which would make me your great-great-, several more times great-grandpa.”
My jaw dropped. The room seemed to list like a ship’s deck under my feet. I studied his face closely. I could see the slope of my mother’s nose on his face, the irregular bow to his lips. “Holy shit!”
Behind me, Andrea slapped Jane’s shoulder and hissed, “I told you so!”
Jane yelped and said, “I thought she would find Dick being a relative a preferable alternative to him wanting to sleep with her. Damn it, Andrea, get a cold rag. I think Nola’s going to faint.”
“Nope. Panic attack,” I wheezed. “My whole life is one long series of barely averted panic attacks. I’m going to sit down.”
My knees buckled as I leaned onto the bar stools. My face seemed so cold all of a sudden, and my stomach roiled. Jane exclaimed something about wanting the news to be “a surprise, not a bad talk-show reunion!”
“Are you OK?” Dick asked as my head swam.
Dick was my ancestor? Mr. Wainwright may have been a little disheveled, but he seemed respectable. But Dick? Sometimes I had to fight the instinct to clutch my purse to my chest to keep him from snatching it.
I couldn’t keep taking shocks like this. I’d lived for years believing that my life was arranged in a specific, if slightly bizarre, way. And now these little bombs of revelation kept dropping on my head and changing the way I saw myself, my family, my whole damned life. Part of me wanted to throw that stupid bottle of synthetic blood at his head and tell him not to speak to me again.
And yet there was the curve of my cheek and the odd long line of my mother’s nose in this man’s face. And I felt the loss of my nana all over again. She would know exactly what to say in this situation, and here I was as stunned as a half-dead fish. Whatever momentum I’d built toward the stool shifted, and I knew I was on a collision course with the floor. A pair of cool, strong hands caught my elbows and held me upright. And the next thing I knew, my face was pressed against the worn, clean cotton of Dick’s T-shirt.
Andrea appeared at his side with a bottle of water and pressed the cool plastic into my hand. Dick apologized over and over as he helped my bum locate the seat.
“If it makes you feel any better, for weeks, Dick has been running himself ragged, fussing over stuff like ‘Is that chair safe enough for Nola to sit in?’ and whether he should baby-proof his house,” Jane mused. Dick glared at her. “What, it’s not my fault that you’re a wide-open channel when you receive emotionally charged news.”
I stared at Dick. “Baby-proofing?”
“I’ve never been able to spend much time around my kin while they were living,” he said, shrugging. “And you look so fragile.”
“And so fixing up the house I’m living in now . . .”
“Is a much-needed business investment,” he assured me. “Which just happens to ensure your safety and comfort. While we’re talking about the house, you can take your rent checks back. There’s no way I’m going to charge my own granddaughter to put a roof over her head.”
“I want to pay my own way . . . what do I call you now? It seems wrong to call you Dick.”
“Grampy?” Jane suggested with a wry grin. Andrea threw a coffee filter at her head.
“I don’t know,” Dick said, and if I wasn’t mistaken, the slightest bit of pink-tinged moisture was gathering at the corners of his eyes. “You could call me Grandpa if you want. Or Papa. Whatever makes you happy.”
