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“Sorry. This must be a real inconvenience for you.”
“Don’t you sass me!” she screeched.
Wilbur wagged his finger at me. “Young lady, you need to learn some respect for your elders.”
“Wilbur, I don’t think you want to get involved in this,” I told him.
“Let’s all calm down and talk about this like rational people,” Daddy said.
“Jane, Jenny, stop it. You’re upsetting your father,” Mama said, wringing one of my dishtowels into knots.
“Sherry, hush. Jenny and Jane have been due for this conversation for a long time. I think we need to let them have it.” Daddy tried to pull Mama and Grandma out the door, toward the living room, but Grandma wouldn’t budge.
“No, there are things that Jane needs to hear,” Grandma Ruthie insisted. “You all have coddled her for way too long and let her get away with saying or doing whatever she wants. It’s time she heard the truth about how this family feels about her letting herself get turned into a vampire. We’re ashamed, Jane. We’re embarrassed. What you’ve let yourself become reflects badly on us all.”
Daddy’s face flushed, and he actually raised his voice to yell, “Don’t you put words into my mouth, Ruthie—”
“And Jenny was only trying to show you what you’re facing when you go out among decent people.” Grandma sniffed. “Decent people don’t want a vampire living in their neighborhood. You’re just making things harder for yourself. I really think the best thing for you to do is to deed the house over to Jenny. She can sell her house and give you some of the proceeds to start fresh.”
“She’s finally lost her mind,” Jettie whispered. “Somebody slap her. Hell, slap her just to entertain me.”
“Now, Mama, you’re not making any sense!” Mama exclaimed. “You need to sit down and rest. You’re not yourself right now.”
“Start fresh where, exactly?” I asked Grandma Ruthie, the icy calm in my voice making the color drain from Mama’s cheeks.
“A big city, like New York or San Francisco, where you’d find more of your kind,” she said, patting my hand for about a millisecond before drawing back.
“In other words, a big city that’s thousands of miles away from you or anyone you know,” I said in the calmest tone I could manage.
“Well, yes.” She preened, pleased that I was seeing things her way at last. Wilbur smiled broadly, the slightest edge of his canines peeking out over his lips, as he wrapped an arm around my grandmother. He looked so damn smug that the following just sort of slipped out:
“You know what, I wasn’t going to do this. But since you brought up the whole undead-shame thing, I think you should know that your husband-to-be is not quite fully living himself.”
“Jane, what are you talking about?” Mama asked.
“She’s just being dramatic,” Grandma Ruthie huffed. “You know how she is.”
“Yes, I just make random stuff up, like, for instance, that I saw Wilbur walking out of a vampire bar at four A.M. And also I did a little research on Wilbur’s special macrobiotic health shakes that you so lovingly cart around for him, the key ingredient of which is Sus scrofa domestica. Common domestic pig. You’ve been hauling around pig’s blood in your precious Aigner bag.”
Wilbur didn’t respond. He merely stared bullet holes through me with those rheumy brown eyes. Grandma, however, turned four different shades of pissed off and seemed to be struck mute. It was too good to last.
“You may have gone too far there,” Aunt Jettie murmured.
“What a horrible thing to say! Why? Why would you say that?” Grandma Ruthie cried. “You’re always so sarcastic and hurtful when it comes to your step-grandfathers. So hurtful, so judgmental. You think I don’t hear your little comments, but I do. Can you tell me why you don’t think I deserve a little bit of happiness, a little comfort, in my last years?”
“You’ve been having your last years since I was in middle school!” I cried. “And I think you’ve had more than your share of happiness and comfort in your last years.”
“Why don’t you like Wilbur?” Grandma whined.
“It’s not that I don’t like Wilbur. I don’t know him well enough to dislike him. No offense, Wilbur. But there are things in his background that don’t add up, things I think you should know about before you launch yourself down the aisle again. For instance, do you know how many times he’s been married?”
“Just once, to his high-school sweetheart,” Grandma said, dismissing me.
“Six times,” I corrected her, and nodded to her engagement ring. “You might want to ask yourself how many women have worn that tasteful solitaire over the years.”
“You told me—you—you told me once!” Grandma Ruthie exclaimed, staring at Wilbur and her left hand in alternating horror.
“I don’t think you can afford to throw stones here, Ruthie,” Daddy said.
