“But who’s going to take me camping and fishing?” he’d asked. “Papa said he had to make a man of me.”
“Mamaw will take you fishing,” Marge promised. “And camping.”
“But it won’t be the same,” Danny insisted.
“No, honey, it won’t be the same. But our lives weren’t the same after Mom became a vampire, right?” I asked. He shook his head, wiping at his nose with his sleeve. “It was different. But it was good. We’ve made the best of it. And we still have fun together, right?”
Danny nodded again.
“Your mamaw and your mom love you so much, Danny,” Marge said, pulling him into her lap. Despite recent protests that he was not a baby and too big for our laps, he snuggled into Marge’s neck and let her hug him. “We can’t bring your papa back. We can’t make things the way they were, but we can make the best of it.”
“OK,” Danny said, wiping at his nose again—on Marge’s sweater. “Does this mean Mamaw is going to be visiting me more, Mom?”
I gave Marge a small smile. “Yeah, buddy, Mamaw is going to come see you more.”
Marge ruffled his hair. “Which is a good thing, because Mamaw’s tablet crashed a month ago, and your mom is the only one I trust to fix it. Mamaw hasn’t played her Sudoku in weeks!”
I gaped at my mother-in-law, who was actually telling a joke in a time of crisis. It seemed that parts of my personality were rubbing off on her after all.
“Poor Mamaw,” Danny said, sighing and sitting up to pat her hair. “Mom will take care of it.”
Marge reached over and squeezed my arm. “Mom always takes care of the things that are important.”
Of course, my chilly reception from my former friends and neighbors at Marge’s was just the tip of the “so you’re a suspected murderer in a small town” iceberg. I couldn’t go to Walmart without other shoppers clearing the aisles to get away from me. I heard whispers behind my back whenever I ventured out of the house. I was hoping to get some sort of official notice not to attend PTA meetings, but apparently, being suspected of murder was not enough to get me out of parent volunteerism.
Eager to distract me from potential legal troubles, Wade made regular visits with Harley. He and the boys would eat dinner—rowdy, lively meals filled with knock-knock jokes and burp chastisement—while I added commentary from the living room. (I loved them all, but there was a definite limit to my food-smell tolerance. And that limit was burgeroni.)
Despite the olfactory offenses, it was nice to have Wade and Harley with us. They fit into our lives, not just as a convenience or assistance but in the way Wade seemed to understand what I needed, in the way he took the path of least resistance just because it was there. It was in the way Wade treated me as a vital, desired part of the unit instead of support staff. It was in the way the boys played so easily together, settling their own squabbles and building their own little worlds together. It was in how Harley sought me out as much as Danny did and how Danny thought Wade was the fixer of all broken things. That strange, unbalanced, half-empty feeling that had plagued our family even before Rob’s death seemed to be tilting back to rights.
And because I was a parent, a master multitasker, I could lie low and help nudge the investigation along. I made lists of Les’s friends for Jane and Dick to speak to about the last weeks of his life. I made lists of character witnesses who would testify that I was not an insane murderer. I made lists of the arrangements I would need to make for Danny if I was sent to vampire prison.
What I could not prepare for was my father’s arrival on my front porch.
It was the Thursday after the Pumpkin Patch debacle. Les would be buried the following morning, and Marge had asked for Danny to stay at her house that night, to give her some company and comfort as she got used to a quieter home.
The ease with which I packed Danny’s overnight bag surprised me. The old anxiety about letting my son spend time at his grandparents’ house without me was practically nonexistent. Marge and I had unofficially agreed to a ceasefire, trying to make this new transition easier for Danny. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake. I hoped that without Les’s intense all-or-nothing approach, we could find some happy balance that would keep both of us in Danny’s life. Frankly, I was tired of the competition. I didn’t have the energy to scheme and spin myself as the ideal single vampire mom anymore. I just wanted some sort of peace.
I was slipping Danny’s stuffed monkey—the one he insisted he didn’t need to sleep with anymore, though Banana Bob always seemed to find his way into the bed—into his sleepover bag when I heard the doorbell ring downstairs.