“Oh.” I sighed, burying my face in my hands. “I forgot all about that. I was sort of attacked by a masked figure while I was cleaning up the Pumpkin Patch debris last night. I’m pretty sure it was the same guy lurking in the school parking lot a few weeks back. He tried to stake me, but I fought him off. With a rake. He ran away into the woods.”
Jane’s lips disappeared as she pinched her mouth shut and exhaled loudly from her nose. She nodded, jaw clenching and unclenching. “And you didn’t think that maybe you should have reported this right away instead of sending me a cowardly text right before sunrise?”
I winced and offered, “I was traumatized?”
“Dick,” Jane said wearily, “get my spray bottle.”
“Jane, no!”
Hours later, I sat outside Les and Marge’s house in my minivan with Kerrianne’s funeral potato casserole riding shotgun. While I’d loved the carb-based grief fuel when I was human, tonight I had to ride with the windows down just so I could tolerate the smell. This was what Southern people did in the face of death, no matter what their social class. They heard about someone passing. They threw together a casserole to sustain the mourners during their time of need, and they called on them to deliver the covered dish and their well wishes. And if they happened to pick up a tidbit of gossip about the bereaved or the strange circumstances of the death, all the better.
Just because I was a vampire now, that didn’t mean I was going to give up on tradition.
I hadn’t told Danny about his papa yet. I didn’t know how. He was so young, and he’d lost so much already. It seemed cruel to take something else from him. In addition to that stress, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing contacting Marge. But I wanted to continue the tentative relationship I’d rebuilt with her. I didn’t want Les’s death or my being a suspect in that death to derail the progress we’d made.
My life was complicated.
I leaned forward and tapped my forehead against the steering wheel. “Please, Lord, please don’t let this be one of those decisions I end up regretting a lot.”
Balancing the warm Pyrex in one hand, I knocked on the front door, a formality I’d insisted on even when Rob was alive. I didn’t want Les and Marge to feel comfortable just walking into my home unannounced, or vice versa. Of course, they did it anyway, but I tried to communicate how I felt about the issue with this little quirk.
An older woman, a friend of Marge’s I vaguely recognized from my in-laws’ annual holiday party, opened the door. Her blandly pleasant smile evaporated as she realized who was on the front stoop. “Oh. It’s you.”
Without further response, she walked away, disappearing into the crowd of people milling around in the living room. Nice.
The house looked and smelled exactly the same, like Lemon Pledge and gun oil. How could so much about my life have changed but this place remain the same? The crowd parted as I walked through the living room, like Moses walking through a particularly gossipy sea. I could hear murmurs, snatches of conversation, “no blood missing,” “so torn up Marge wasn’t allowed to identify him.”
I also heard hissing whispers of “Who does she think she is?” and “How could she?” from the other mourners. My memory flashed back to the days before Rob’s funeral, in this very room, being comforted by some of the same people. I’d sat on Marge’s couch, hands clenched together so tightly my knuckles felt bruised, desperately trying not to have some reaction, some moment of weakness that could be criticized later. Now these people were staring at me like I was something they wanted to scrape off the bottom of their shoes. And I could not give less of a damn. There was a real freedom in simply not caring.
I smiled at the lot of them, as sweet as pie, but without showing fang, because there were limits to what I could get away with in a group this trigger-happy. From what I understood, bullets couldn’t kill me, but they stung like hell.
Marge was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee clutched between her hands. She looked older, tired, and shrunken, as if she’d lost twenty “flu pounds” since the last time I saw her. She was wearing an old denim gardening shirt and no makeup, and her hair was slicked back into a bun instead of in its usual feathery helmet. Several of her friends from church sat with her, patting her arms and murmuring comforting platitudes, but she didn’t seem to hear them. She was staring straight ahead.
I put the funeral potatoes on the counter with all of the other dishes and approached her slowly. Her best friend, Joyce Mayhew, shot to her feet, vibrating with righteous indignation. “How dare you show your face in here, Libby Stratton? Rob would be so ashamed of you—”