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“Please, can’t you both just put this all aside for the holiday?” Mama begged. “For the family?”
“No!” Jenny and I chorused.
Mama switched tactics just by dropping her voice an octave. “Now, girls, this is just silly. We’re family. And it’s Christmas. If you can’t forgive your family around the holidays, what—”
“Stop,” I told her. The way she stretched the word into “faaaaaamily” when she wanted something always set my teeth on edge.
“The time of year doesn’t change anything. I don’t want her around my family,” Jenny ground out.
I shot her a look that could have dropped a more observant woman. So, it was her family. As far as she was concerned, I wasn’t part of it anymore. Frankly, she was welcome to it. “I’m going.”
“Now, Jenny, be a good sister,” Mama told Jenny. “We have to have the whole family together for Christmas. The good Christian thing to do would be to—”
“She’s dead!” Jenny cried. “The good Christian thing to do would be to give her a decent burial.”
“Now, Jenny, you know you don’t mean that,” Mama said through clenched teeth.
“Burial talk is my cue to go,” I said, grabbing my jacket. “I think I’ll be leaving the country for New Year’s, so please don’t call.”
I stuck my head into the den to give Daddy a quick good-bye, which he couldn’t hear over the screeching and beeping of the boys’ new radio controlled-monster trucks.
From the kitchen, I heard Mama whine, “Tell Jane it just won’t be Christmas without her.”
“You have me, Kent, the boys here, why—” I closed the front door on Jenny’s wounded response.
I looked back through the window. Wilbur looked absolutely miserable. I was sympathetic, but when it came to the Jameson family Christmas, it was every man, woman, and vampire for themselves.
10
Adult werewolf children are expected to stay within the confines of pack territory. Those who move more than a five-minute run from pack headquarters are either disowned or hosts to frequent weekend guests.
—Mating Rituals and Love Customs of the Were
From the dawn of time, women have formed friendships for one purpose only: to make sure they’ll have someone to provide unpaid serf labor for their weddings. And we all just go along with it, spurred by fear that if we don’t submit to the bridal demands, there will be no one to slave over our own weddings.
That’s why, six months before the actual wedding, I was spending an evening measuring and cutting exactly fourteen inches of cornflower-blue ribbon over and over and over and … over. These ribbons would be sent to a printing company to be stamped with “HMS Titanic” on one side and “Zeb and Jolene—Struck by Love” on the other. They would then be tied around old-fashioned hurricane lamps as part of Jolene’s carefully planned tablescape. Each table was going to be named for famous (read: deceased) Titanic passengers, such as John Jacob Astor and Molly Brown, then decorated with hurricane lamps and fake ice. Of course, no one would pay attention to a seating plan, which is another Southern wedding tradition.>“Fine?” she asked. “Just fine?”
I nodded, my lips pressed tightly together, narrowing my gaze as Mama shot me a canary-devouring feline smile. She said, “You’ll never guess who was asking about you at prayer meeting the other night.”
“You’re right. I won’t.”
“Adam Morrow, you remember, you used to have such a big crush on him in high school. I used to find his name doodled all over your notebooks. Adam Morrow. Mrs. Adam Morrow. Jane Jameson-Morrow, Jane E. Morrow. Jane and Adam Morr—”
“I got it. I remember.”
She smiled. “Well, he has been asking about you at church. And I thought, why not ask him over for dinner sometime? A poor single boy who works as hard as he does knows how to appreciate a good home-cooked meal.”
“Mama, please don’t.”
Mama pursed her lips, turning back to the steaming contents of her stove. She stirred. She salted. She tasted. Finally, she turned back to me with a dreamy expression of the generous mother-goddess that, frankly, scared me. She cleared her throat and used her special “imparting motherly wisdom from the mountaintop” voice. “When your daddy and I were dating, he planned on going fishing with some friends over Homecoming weekend. This was back in high school. We’d only been dating a little while, and I think he didn’t want me to think I could plan things out for him.”
“Clearly, he didn’t know you very well,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said, stirring the potatoes. “I told him it was perfectly fine if he wanted to go fishing with his buddies, because Eddie Carroll had offered to take me to the dance.”
“Mr. Carroll? My math teacher? Ew.”
“You should have seen him in high school. With a full head of hair, he was quite the man about town. If things hadn’t worked out with your father—”
