The Single Undead Moms(9)

But as I got to know him during his numerous visits to check on Jane and monitor my progress, I saw that despite the shifty exterior, Dick truly cared about Jane, and because Jane cared about my progress, so did Dick. They had history. Not only was Dick the best childhood friend of Jane’s husband, but on Jane’s first night out as a vampire, Dick was the one who stopped the disastrous parking-lot fight that almost got Jane’s skull crushed. Dick was also married to Jane’s friend and business partner, Andrea, and occasionally worked at Jane’s bookshop to keep an eye on “his girls.” Jane said these sorts of multilevel entanglements were common in vampire relationships.

“Just wait until you meet Gabriel, Zeb, and the rest of the bunch,” she said as we sipped a particularly iron-rich Maxwell House International Coffee Café New Orleans blend of blood and caffeine. “You’ll see how enmeshed we really are.”

For some reason, that warmed my still heart. Despite my bumpy start, Jane was going to introduce me to her family. And given the way she talked about them all, with that fond, exasperated tone only a mother could understand, I knew how important they were to her. Maybe I would be able to find a community among vampires that I’d never had as a human. Oh, sure, I had acquaintances, women I knew from church and the PTA, but I didn’t have a lot of close friends. Or any close friends, really. I told myself it was because I didn’t have time, but I suspected that I simply wasn’t good at making them. My childhood hadn’t exactly prepared me for sister-friends.

I was a classic adult child of a single parent. I never met my dad. Mom never said much about him, other than to tell me that they hadn’t had a lot of time together but he’d been the love of her life. I appreciated that she never threw him in my face as I was growing up. She never blamed me for her expulsion from one of the Hollow’s nicer subdivisions to the Garden Vista trailer park. She never accused me of ruining her life. She just didn’t share that life with me. We were more like roommates, moving in circles around each other, carefully avoiding long conversations or anything that might make the other uncomfortable.

My father was just another topic Mom didn’t discuss. I didn’t think about it much until we studied genetics in high school, and I had to leave half of my personal Punnett square blank. I didn’t know what color my father’s hair or eyes were. I didn’t know what color his parents’ hair or eyes were, so I had no idea whether my deep-set blue-green eyes came from his side of the family. I was pretty certain the blond hair and fair skin came from my mom’s side. But since her parents kicked her out when she announced that she was pregnant and then moved from the Hollow to “get away from the shame,” I hadn’t had much of a chance to study their genetic traits.

My father, like so much of my childhood, was an equation I’d had to figure out on my own, and when the answer didn’t come, I’d set it aside for consideration some other day. There were times when I felt rootless, like not knowing more about my parents meant I lacked an identity. But I tried to turn the problem on its side and see that lack of detail as setting me free from the constraints of someone else’s expectations. The only limitations put on me were the ones I put there. Oddly enough, I seemed to have put a lot of them on myself without even realizing it, but that was an epiphany I wouldn’t have until much later in life.

I realized that my life story sounded pretty pitiful, a lonely waif child left to languish in a single-wide. But I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I knew what some of the other kids in my neighborhood were going through. By comparison, I had it relatively easy. I didn’t get smacked around. I didn’t have a fully functioning meth lab in my bathroom. Mom may not have been a font of praise and maternal wisdom, but she worked hard to provide what she could for me. I learned how to do things on my own, how to take care of myself, and that’s more than a lot of my classmates graduated from high school knowing.

And then she was gone, leaving me alone. While I was used to being alone, I wasn’t used to feeling alone. Without the only family I knew, I was adrift, ripe for the picking, when I met Rob a year or so later, at the Qwik Mart, of all places. He was looking for flowers to buy his mom for her birthday and asked me what kind he should get. I told him not to buy his mother gas-station flowers. (That should have been a clue, really.) Rob was a few grades ahead of me, so I didn’t really know him. And I hadn’t been into extracurriculars or school dances, so he didn’t recognize me.

I’d thought I was lucky to catch Rob’s attention. I’d never dated before. Between homework and a part-time job that helped keep up with our bills, I didn’t have time. And I was so afraid of ending up like my mother that I practically hid from boys when they tried to speak to me. To end up with a man who not only wanted to marry me but also had a ready-made family looking for a daughter seemed too good to be true.