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“Mama, I’ve only known him for three days!” I cried.
Mama made that tsk/sigh combination sound only mothers can master. “Well, are you at least seeing him? Have you tried dressing a little more feminine? Making an effort? You know, you’re not getting any younger.”
I snorted. I wouldn’t be getting any older, for that matter. “Mama, I don’t think you—”
“You’re never going to get married if you don’t lower your standards a little bit.”
“Mama—”
“Don’t you want to be settled? Get married? Have a fami—”
“Mama!” I shouted. “I’m not engaged. I’m not dating anyone. I—I…”
Time slowed. I could read every muscle, every pore in my parents ’ faces. Daddy’s eyes were narrowed, considering me carefully. Worry crinkled the lines at the edges of his eyes. Mama ’s mouth was drawn, clearly expecting some sort of bad news beyond “your daughter was fired in a spectacularly public manner that will be chewed over for months. ” Their emotions came in stinging slaps of scent. Confusion, disappointment, irritation, sadness, impatience, a sour haze that was making my head ache. And that was just from Mama. My eyes burned with unshed tears. How do you tell someone that their child has died? How do you explain when that child is sitting in front of them, seemingly alive? How do you tell your parents that you’ve moved beyond them on the evolutionary scale? And that your mama’s going to need to serve O negative alongside her Thanksgiving gravy?
Well, I didn’t. Because I’m a great big coward.
“I’m not ready to date anybody right now, Mama,” I said, swiping at my eyes. “And I’m not going to move back home. I just need some time to focus on finding a new job and figuring out what I’m going to do next. I’ll be fine.”
“I told you, you’re going to come to work at the quilt shop with me,” she insisted.
“No. Just no.”
Her lip trembled as she heaved a sigh and stared at the ceiling. Oh, crap. She did the same thing when I announced that I was attending college three hundred miles away and finally severing that pesky umbilical cord. That was the Christmas I got my first quilted vest. You have to admire a woman who exacts revenge through handicrafts. “What’s wrong with working at the quilt shop?”
“Nothing!” I cried.
“Do you have something better planned?” she demanded.
“No,” I said. “But I have planned not to work at the quilt shop.”
I looked to Daddy for help, but he was staring out the window with a puzzled expression.
“What’s this interesting news, then?” Mama demanded. “You said you had interesting news.”
I groped for some plausible fib. Fortunately, this was the moment Daddy noticed the absence of Big Bertha. “Janie, where’s your car?”
“Oh, it broke down the other night,” I said, a little too quickly. “It’s in a shop over in Murphy. That’s kind of what kept me held up for the last couple of days.”
Daddy scrutinized my face. I made a comprehensive study of the crown molding. I’ve never been able to lie to my father. I rat myself out before I can be accused of anything. The one time I smoked pot in college, I called Daddy the next morning to confess because the idea that he could find out any other way made me want to throw up. After expressing extreme disappointment and making me feel two feet tall, he promised not to tell Mama, because she would have made me leave school to enter rehab that very minute. It’s not exactly a healthy dynamic, but it’s the only one we have.
I managed to shush the two of them long enough to describe Big Bertha’s post-Shenanigans breakdown. Mama proceeded to skin Daddy for not performing routine maintenance on “that old hunk of junk.” Over the din, I gave a heavily edited version of my long walk home that night. I decided to omit the part about being shot or identifying the drunken hunter. I did not like Bud McElray. At the same time, I didn’t want my cousins Dwight and Oscar to beat Bud bloody with a sock full of batteries. Is that considered forgiveness?
I also skirted around the “got turned into a vampire” portion of the proceedings. Again, I’m a huge coward. I told them I’d been so caught up in the wounds to my pride I just couldn ’t face anybody. I had holed up at an undisclosed location to think.
Technically, that wasn’t a lie. It was stretching the truth to the breaking point, but it wasn’t a lie.
“But we’re your family,” Mama huffed, stretching the word out to “faaaamily” in a way that set my fangs on edge. Being faaaamily justified a lot of things in Mama’s book, including signing me up for an online matchmaking service without my consent and attempting to wax my eyebrows while I was napping. “Who are you going to turn to if not your family? That’s why you need to come stay with us, Janie. You need someone to take care of you.”
“I’m twenty seven years old!” I cried. “I can take care of myself! I don’t need you folding my laundry and pouring my Cheerios every morning.”
Jettie appeared at my left and whispered. “I can take their car keys if you want me to, pumpkin.”
“You think I want to prevent them from leaving?” I whispered back.
“Who are you talking to?” Mama demanded, turning to my father. “John, she’s talking to herself.”
“I’m not—” I started, then reconsidered the wisdom of reintroducing my parents to dear departed Aunt Jettie, who never liked my mother anyway. “Yes, I am. I’m talking to myself.”
