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“Janie, you’ve got to find a job,” he told me as he hovered near the door. I think he was afraid to leave me unchaperoned.
“Or one of us is going to go crazy. And it probably won’t be you.”
“I know,” I groaned. “I’ll have to find something before my savings and the good graces of Visa run out. But there are some financial advantages to all this. I don’t need to pay health or life insurance anymore. My grocery bills and medical expenses are practically nothing, even though my monthly sunscreen budget has increased astronomically. ” Zeb did not seem convinced. “I’m trying, Zeb, really. I’ve looked in the want ads, online, and there’s nothing around here for me. Everything that I’m qualified for with night hours involves a paper hat or pasties.”
“And technically, you’re not qualified for the jobs with pasties, either,” Zeb said, dodging when I reached out to smack him.
After Zeb went home, the remaining sensible-librarian portion of my brain told me to put on some PJs, hide under the covers, and read the Guide for the Newly Undead. But the idea seemed so confining. Surely my night life wasn ’t supposed to get more boring after becoming a vampire. I knew I would just sit there twitching, unable to concentrate. I didn ’t want to stay home, but I didn’t know where I could go. I wasn’t comfortable going to any of the known vamp clubs and bars in our end of the state. I wouldn’t have been able to make it home by sunrise, anyway. And besides Gabriel and Missy, I didn ’t know any vampires.
Knowing my luck, I’d offend someone with some archaic undead etiquette issue and end up staked.
So I did what any other rational person does at two A.M. I went to Wal-Mart. If nothing else, I wanted to check out the
“special dietary needs” aisle, which translates into vampire products.
There are three things vampires need to know about grocery shopping just after they’re turned. One, the smell of freshly cut meat is far more appealing. Two, the ice cream aisle is not fun anymore. And the cheesy glow of fluorescent lights is even more unbearable with super senses.>Jettie inherited the house sometime in the late 1960s from her father, Harold Early, whom she cared for in his old age. This did not sit well with Grandma Ruth, who had already packed up her house after Great-grandpa’s funeral in anticipation of moving in.
Beyond steam-cleaning out the old-man smell, Jettie supervised most of the electrical and plumbing modernizations to the house. While Harold preferred the soft glow of a hurricane lamp, Aunt Jettie was a stickler about having access to an automatic dishwasher and a long hot bath. She also repainted and refinished almost every surface in the house, so now it felt like an actual home. But her real legacy was in the garden. Jettie planted seemingly random splashes of pansies, heavily perfumed roses, fat and sassy sunflowers, whatever struck her fancy. If you stared at the blooms long enough, you could almost make sense of it. But as soon as you started grasping the pattern, it slipped out of focus. And because many of the plants were low-maintenance, even my special plant-murdering powers hadn’t killed them. Yet.
While the Half-Moon Hollow Historical Society was willing to forgive Aunt Jettie for plumbing updates and paint, she scandalized the lot of them when she took River Oaks off the town’s spring tour of Civil War homes. An annual tradition, the tour features little old ladies in hoop skirts leading bored high -school students and overenthusiastic Civil War buffs around the five known authentic antebellum homes in the Hollow.
The historical society isn’t so much a club as a hereditary social mafia. There are only fifty active memberships, which are passed down from mother to daughter among the older families in Half -Moon Hollow. When my great-grandmother Lillie Pearl died in 1965, it fell to either Jettie or my grandmother to take the Early family slot. Guess which one took the bait? Grandma Ruthie was right at the front of the hoop-skirt pack, but she had no real control over the house. As soon as River Oaks was in Jettie’s name, she told those “corset-wearing imbeciles” to take their tour and shove it.
Considering the community’s reaction, you would have thought Jettie had declared kittens the other white meat. Her rusted rural-route mailbox was flooded with hate letters. There were editorials in the Half-Moon Herald imploring Jettie to reconsider.
Her coupons were refused at the Piggly Wiggly. It was the final nail in the coffin of Grandma Ruthie and Aunt Jettie ’s relationship and the chief reason Jettie left the farmland, the house, and its contents to me when she died.
As much as it upset certain members of my family, owning River Oaks allowed me to move out of the Garden View Apartments. There was neither a garden nor a view. I had both at River Oaks. In fact, Jettie’s rose garden was what broke my fall from the second story during our “What Can Kill Jane?” series of experiments. In retrospect, the roof jump should have been planned more carefully. Seeing my head bent at a 157-degree angle seemed to upset Zeb.
“Uggghhhh, stop with the caterwauling,” I groaned as Zeb rushed over. I sat up gingerly, waiting for the gashes and bruises on my forehead to disappear. I rolled my neck, popping the vertebrae back into place. That was the dumbest experiment so far.
We tossed a toaster in the bathtub with me. It tickled. Zeb hit me with his car. I left a two-foot dent in the grille. Zeb wanted me to eat Pop Rocks and drink a Coke. But considering the pot-pie episode, I declined, and he suggested the roof jump.
Fitz thought me lying on the grass, groaning, was part of a fun game and ran over to lick my rapidly healing face. Zeb batted the canine tongue bath out of the way and shook me.
“Are you OK? How many fingers?”
“Too many.” I squinted.
“What day is it?”
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “I find that both sad and liberating.”
“What’s the dot on an ‘i’ called?”
“A tittle,” I said.
“Dude, how do you know that stuff?”
I shook my abused noggin. “I’ve read books, several of them. So, to sum up, me jumping off the roof—not your best idea.”
“Yeah.” Zeb made a noncommittal face. “But you survived, and it looked really cool…Hey, let’s get the chainsaw.”
“Children, this is becoming disturbing,” Jettie said, materializing on the porch.
“It’s OK,” I told her. “We’re just trying out all of my new tricks.”
“Yeah, I know. Are you sure you’re OK?” Zeb asked.
