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“Well, yes, but not what I had in mind.”
“Never trust a man with a remote-control fireplace?” I suggested.
“No,” she said, her patience audibly thinning.
“Never trust a—”
“Honey.” I could almost hear Mama shaking her head in dismay at my lack of man-savvy. “Relationships are fifty-fifty, give and take. You have to make an effort. He’s up there all by himself for a whole week. Why couldn’t you go up to visit him?”
“I have to work. And isn’t that kind of desperate?”
“There’s nothing wrong with showing some interest. You could make a little more of an effort. I could have Sheila take a look at your hair—”
“Mama, I really need to get off the phone if I’m going to make it to work on time,” I said. “And Zeb’s over here, and we’re trying to talk about bridesmaid stuff. I’ve really got to go.”
“Don’t let them put you in yellow. You know how washed-out you look in yellow!” Mama was saying as I put the receiver in its cradle.
“Someone has to lock my grandma up. She’s single-handedly taking down the Greatest Generation,” I moaned.
Zeb smirked at me as I slumped down and smacked my head against the counter. In a granite-muffled voice, I told him, “Shut it, or I’m calling your mama and telling her that your parents’ names aren’t on the invitations. That’ll keep you tied up for months.”
“That seems uncalled for,” he muttered.
2
From were-weasels to werewolves, weres are territorial creatures. Once a pack has established a home, they will not leave that location for generations, until the local food sources have been depleted or they’re burnt out by angry farmers.
—Mating Rituals and Love Customs of the Were
Half-Moon Hollow is a strange place for a vampire to spend her days. We don’t have a performing-arts center or a museum, but we have had our own “Rowdy Rural Towns” episode of COPS. The program had never before featured the arrest of a naked guy stealing anhydrous ammonia.
The chamber of commerce had a hard time fitting that into the brochure.
Living in Kentucky is a mix of the ridiculous and the sublime. The same state that is home to top-shelf research hospitals, major manufacturers, and thoroughbred horse racing is a place where you can attend a schoolbus crash-up derby. (They do take the kids off the buses before they race them.) We have Opera Houses and Opry Houses. We have cities that are home to hundreds of thousands and towns like the Hollow, where one day, if the right couple gets engaged, the entire population will be related by marriage.
News of my transformation was slowly making the rounds of the Hollow kitchen circuit thanks to my former boss, Mrs. Stubblefield, using my application for undead unemployment benefits as justification for firing me from my position as the library’s director of juvenile services. Of course, she fired me hours before I was turned, but that didn’t keep her from crowing, “I told you so!” She couldn’t possibly let someone “like that” work around the public, much less as a children’s librarian, she told anyone who would listen. Mrs. Woodley, whose five children I personally tutored in the library’s Reading Remedy program, told her to shut her mouth or she’d toss Mrs. Stubblefield’s lumpy butt out of the Half-Moon Hollow Ladies’ Garden Club. I sent Mrs. Woodley a dozen frozen pot pies as a thank you.
Mrs. Stubblefield had recently “retired” (was asked to retire) after a band of roving teenagers—without my after-school tutoring program to keep them occupied—stuck pages from nudie magazines in all of the encyclopedias. And no one on the staff noticed. For a month. Plus, there was evidence that Mrs. Stubblefield shared her morning coffee with Jack Daniel’s.
Mrs. Stubblefield’s retirement meant that her stepdaughter, Posey, was the most senior member of the library staff. Posey, who was brought in to replace me, couldn’t understand the Dewey Decimal System without “Sounds like …” clues and laughed the way it was written out: “Ha ha ha ha ha ha.” I hated her on principle. And that principle was bitterness. Through Mama, I heard about Book Club nights, trumped-up late fines, and items being checked out of the (cannot possibly be replaced, never to leave the library) Special Collections room. Grant application deadlines had been missed. Federal funding fell through for Puppet Time Theater and the Adult Literacy Program.
Slowly but surely, my favorite library patrons were making their way over to the bad part of town to seek me out for their reading needs. It started when the Wednesday Night Book Club president, Anne Woodhouse, stopped by to talk to me about a selection. Anne had lost faith in Mrs. Stubblefield’s suggestions after she recommended that the club read the sequel to A Million Little Pieces. Then Sally Dortch stopped by to ask about Newbery Medal selections for little Hannah’s book report, but she saw Mr. Wainwright’s display of fertility idols and bolted. To be fair, giant ceramic phalluses generally send me running for the nearest exit, too. Finally, Justine Marcum and Kitty Newsome, the same library board members who helped Mrs. Stubblefield give me the boot, put on trench coats and Jackie O sunglasses to sneak into the shop and magnanimously announce that the board was willing to overlook my vampire status and welcome me back to the staff.
I’m not going to say it wasn’t tempting. It bothered me to see my library—a place that represented everything human and familiar to me—suffering, to see programs that had taken me years to cultivate crumbling. And I missed my kids. I missed their little faces, still and enraptured, during Story Time. I missed helping each one find just the right book to help spark a love of reading, introducing them to the books that I loved as a kid: Roald Dahl, Louisa May Alcott, Ann M. Martin. I missed bringing teenagers back to reading after they finally got through that horrible “I’m too cool to like anything” phase. But I had entered a new phase in my life, and as far I was concerned, I could still do the kind of work I did at the library at Specialty Books.
I had done my best to keep in touch with the human world, be a respectable undead citizen. Andrea Byrne, my new blood-surrogate friend, was helping me find classes and other constructive activities to fill the night hours. We had started taking yoga together. Sure, I didn’t technically need breathing exercises anymore, but I was finally coordinated enough to balance on one foot. I had made a few friends there, several of whom switched to a different class after they realized I was a vampire. In further personal development, I’d started recycling everything in sight. Since I was going to be walking the earth a lot longer than originally forecast, I wanted it to last as long as possible. This, combined with the yoga, convinced my mother that I had joined a cult.>“Awww,” I moaned. “Another one?”
This may seem like a strange, even cold, reaction. But you have to understand my grandma Ruthie’s marital history. She’d been widowed four times, via milk truck, anaphylactic shock, spider bite, and lightning strike (the lamented, aforementioned Grandpa Fred). I wrote a poem titled “Grandpa’s in an Urn” in fifth grade. I had to spend a lot of time in the guidance counselor’s office after that.
I loved Bob. Despite not being my actual grandpa or even a step-grandpa yet, Bob had always been nice to me. But he was engaged to Grandma Ruthie for five years and had chronic conditions of the heart, lungs, and liver. He had survived longer than expected.
“Your grandmother says there was some sort of mix-up with his medication.” Mama sighed. I could practically hear the cap from her “nerve pills” rattling loose.
Knowing this would take a while, Zeb got out my blender to begin another batch of experimental “Jane shakes.” He’d been using a combination of condiments and dessert toppings to make the synthetic blood a little bit more like the human food I missed so much. My current favorite was Faux Type O mixed with a little bit of cherry syrup and a lot of Hershey’s new Blood Additive Chocolate Syrup: “The pleasant sensation of chocolate without the unpleasant undead side effects!” That was an excellent selling point considering those side effects were the vomiting and agony that came with vampires trying to digest solid foods.
Mama’s voice trembled under the weight of Grandma Ruthie’s expectations. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Grandma seems to think we should be hosting the funeral as the next of kin. Bob’s children are having a fit. She’s already made a scene down at Whitlow’s Funeral Home over the release of the body. And now she expects me to help her plan the visitation, the buffet, the service—”
“The full Ruthie Early-Lange-Bodeen-Floss-Whitaker special?” I asked.
