by Молли Харпер
“She’s held the same funeral service for four husbands. I’ll call it what I want.” I snorted.
“Jane, I’m really going to need your help with this,” Mama said, the faintest wheedling tone creeping into her voice.
“Why can’t Jenny help you with this?”
“Jenny’s busy with the Charity League Follies, and she’s serving as chairwoman of the Women’s Club Winter Ball this year.” Mama was in a full-blown whine now.
“But good old Jane doesn’t have a life, right? Why not make her chairwoman of the funeral luncheon?”
“Don’t start that, Jane,” Mama warned. “If you would just talk to Jenny and work out this silly business, you could both help me.”
“I think it ceased being silly business when I was deposed,” I told her.
Jenny had made good on her promise not to talk to me after I came out to my family. She had, however, sent me a lovely note through the law firm of Hapscombe and Schmidt, stating that Jenny wanted access to the family Bible. The Bible, which contained all of the Early genealogical information, had been willed to me through our great-aunt Jettie as part of the contents of our ancestral home, River Oaks. Jenny’s lawyers had stated that as a vampire, I could not touch it and had no use for it. I’d had the local offices of the ACLU and the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead send her a cease-and-desist letter stating that such statements were inflammatory and untrue. She’d responded by sending me a copy of the family tree she’d painstakingly calligraphed onto parchment, with my name burned out with a soldering iron. An ugly flurry of legal correspondence followed, and I ended up drinking Thanksgiving “dinner” with my parents after the rest of my family went home.
“Now, don’t expect me to take sides,” Mama said. “You girls are going to have to work this out yourselves.”
“Most of the funeral stuff is going to be done during daylight hours,” I said. “I’m not even going to be able to attend the burial. Humans get upset when vampires burst into flames right next to them.“
“But you have all the time in the world to plan Zeb’s wedding,” Mama grumbled. She always got a little cranky when I brought up the “v word.” “Where’s the happy couple registered? The Dollar Store?”
“First of all … that was really funny,” I whispered, glad that Zeb had ducked into the walk-in pantry and hadn’t heard it. “But it was a mean thing to say. I’m the only one allowed to make mean jokes about Jolene’s family, as I am the one wearing the ugliest dress in the history of bridesmaid-kind.”
“What color is it?” Mama demanded. “It’s not yellow, is it? Because you know yellow makes you look sallow.”
“Mama, focus, please. I will help with the prep work for Bob’s funeral as much as I can, during the evening, when I can fit it in around work hours. But I can’t do much.”
“That’s all I’m asking for, honey, a little effort,” she said, placated.
“As little as possible,” I assured her. “How is Grandma doing?” I asked, trying not to let the resentment in my voice bubble through the phone line. “Should I stop by her house on the way to work?”
“Um, no,” Mama said in a sad attempt to be vague. “There’s going to be such a crowd there …”
“And it would be a shame for me to come by and make things awkward,” I finished for her. The heavy silence on Mama’s end said I was right, but Mama preferred not to put it into words.
I don’t know why Grandma’s rejection of me still stung. Elderly relatives were supposed to give you lipsticky kisses and ask intrusive questions about your love life. They were supposed to brag about your achievements to the point where nonrelatives wanted to gouge their eardrums at the mere mention of your name. They were not supposed to request at least one week’s advance notice if you attended family gatherings or insist on wearing a cross the size of a hubcap whenever you walked into a room. My only consolation was that Grandma looked like Flavor Flav and usually tipped over under the weight of her bling.
Eager to get back to a subject she could control, Mama listed the dishes she expected me to prepare to perk up the usual funeral potluck offerings. Apparently, there was some sort of dessert involving Jell-O, cream cheese, and mandarin oranges in my future. While I saw it as completely unfair that someone who didn’t eat should have to cook, these arguments failed to impress Mama. I promised to come by for my assigned shopping list after dark.
“How are things going with that Gabriel?” Mama asked. Mama was happy I was dating someone, particularly someone who literally came from one of the oldest families in town.
But she was pretending that Gabriel wasn’t, either. I could only expect so much. “Have you seen him lately?”
“Not for a week or so. He had to go to Nashville for business.”
On the other end of the line, Mama sighed. Dang it. I had just extended the conversation by about twenty minutes. Ever since I’d established a semi-sort-of-relationship with Gabriel, Mama’s favorite activity had been giving me relationship advice. I thought she saw it as a girlie bonding thing. “Honey, what have I always told you?”
Now, honestly, that could be any number of things, ranging from “Avoid contact with any surface in a public bathroom” to “Men don’t buy the cow when you hand them the keys to the dairy.” So I took a shot in the dark.
“Um, never trust a man with two first names,” I guessed.
“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 ma
rriage.
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.
I was one of a few vampires in the Hollow who chose to maintain relationships with the living after being turned. Studies showed that most vampires who had turned since tax consultant/vampire Arnie Frink outed us with his right-to-work lawsuit dropped out of sight and moved to big cities such as New York or New Orleans. They became assimilated into the large populations of vampires and learned how to adjust to their new lifestyles … or they became addicted to chemically enhanced blood, passed out in a gutter, and woke up as the rising sun fried them to a crisp. At least, that’s what Mama told me when I mentioned that I might go to St. Louis for a seminar called “Emerging Issues for the Postmillennial Undead.” Apparently, Oprah did a whole show on “Vampires Led Astray.”
And somehow, I’d made it onto the undead junk-mail radar. I started receiving advertisements for Sans Solar sun-blocking drapes and specialized vampire “sleeping compartments,” which were basically coffins. But at least I’d stopped getting credit-card applications. After the government considers you dead, credit-card companies are less likely to extend a credit line to you. It’s the one discriminatory attitude toward vampires that’s fine by me.
But even the undead could appreciate the magical air in the Hollow as Christmas approached. The early December temperatures, always a crap shoot in western Kentucky, were hovering in the mid-40s. As a human, I’d been a summer person. But when “getting a little color on your cheeks” could leave you with third-degree burns and/or permanent death, you learn to appreciate the joys of winter. The days were getting shorter, meaning that I could get up and around earlier. The cold brought a sharpness to the scents of the living, bright splashes of scent against a misty gray.
The chill also gave me an excuse to wear the sleek new black coat I’d bought on a rather disastrous shopping trip with Andrea. She took me on a tour of these nice underground shops (not literally) on the outskirts of Memphis. And I didn’t buy a damn thing but the coat. But at least I no longer looked like I was walking around in a big puffy sleeping bag.
Christmas in the Hollow means spitting snow that never amounts to anything but still sends everyone running for bread and milk. It means exchanging decorative tins of cookies with acquaintances you don’t like that much. It’s mall Santas who arrive in fire trucks and challenging your neighborhood to a round of competitive outdoor decorating. Because you’re not really celebrating the birth of Jesus unless your house can be spotted by passing aircraft.
I stamped the whopping half-inch of snow (mostly sleet and mud) from my boots as I neared the door of Specialty Books. The familiar smell of dust and crumbling paper greeted me as I called out to Mr. Wainwright. The shop was much cleaner than it had been that fateful night when I had wandered in and narrowly missed a shelf collapsing on top of me. Well, the mess was newer. We had at least lined up the bookshelves so that customers could navigate without climbing. The soft hum of fluorescent lighting flickered over piles of browning paperbacks and splitting leather bindings. Gilt titles, rubbed away by loving fingers, glinted dully from their piles. I slid my shoulder bag behind the counter and surveyed the damage Mr. Wainwright had wrought since I had left twelve hours before.
Trying to organize the shop was an uphill battle, and I was making no progress. It wasn’t that Mr. Wainwright ignored my efforts, but when he looked for something, he had this way of tearing through like a tornado. We had a system: I spent three days painstakingly arranging a subject section; he destroyed it in less than an hour. It was like working for a slightly dangerous three-year-old.
I was, however, proud of the fact that there were no longer dead spiders occupying an entire shelf in the reference section. They were now occupying a jar in Mr. Wainwright’s office. He’s a nice man. I try not to ask questions.
Our evening routine consisted of two hours of cleaning and boxing the online orders.
Then, with no customers to speak of, he would make tea or warm bottled blood, and we would sit at the c
ounter. He would tell me stories of his travels across the world seeking demon artifacts, vampire horde houses, and packs of rare were-creatures. He even spent five years in Manitoba searching for Sasquatch.
“Hello? Mr. Wainwright?” I called again. I would never get to a point where I could call him by his first name. A person who knows that there was more than one Brontë sister deserves to be addressed with respect.
“Back here, Jane,” came a muffled voice from the rear of the shop.
I followed his voice to the stockroom, which we had only rediscovered the night before.
Mr. Wainwright had “misplaced” the door behind a rack of old Tales from the Crypt comics sometime in the mid-1980s.
“Mr. Wainwright?” I saw two brown loafers sticking out from under a carton in a horrible parody of The Wizard of Oz. Mr. Wainwright’s about eighty years old and looks as if you could snap him like kindling. His being pinned under a giant box of heavy books was not going to keep my paltry part-time employment checks coming in.
“Are you all right?” I cried, lifting the box off him with little effort.
“Oh, thank you, Jane,” he said, sitting up from his spot on the floor. He seemed to have made the best of his predicament. His ever-present lumpy gray cardigan was pillowed under his head. Clutched in one hand was an old dog-eared copy of Stephen King’s Nightmares and Dreamscapes. “Fortunately, when the box fell on me, this bounced off my head. I haven’t read it in years. You must admire the universal accessibility of Mr. King.
He scares the bejesus out of me every time.”
“And he’s the reason I have clown issues,” I said, shuddering at the thought of It. “How long have you been down here?”
He rolled his shoulders. “Oh, three or four hours at the most.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“I’m tougher than I look,” he said as I lifted him up and set him on a dusty folding chair.
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to try to move things around without me here? After yesterday. When the other box fell on you,” I said, struggling to keep a patient tone.
