“I told you, you’re going to come to work at the quilt shop with me,” she insisted.
“No. Just no.”
Her lip trembled as she heaved a sigh and stared at the ceiling. Oh, crap. She did the same thing when I announced that I was attending college three hundred miles away and finally severing that pesky umbilical cord. That was the Christmas I got my first quilted vest. You have to admire a woman who exacts revenge through handicrafts. “What’s wrong with working at the quilt shop?”
“Nothing!” I cried.
“Do you have something better planned?” she demanded.
“No,” I said. “But I have planned not to work at the quilt shop.”
I looked to Daddy for help, but he was staring out the window with a puzzled expression.
“What’s this interesting news, then?” Mama demanded. “You said you had interesting news.”
I groped for some plausible fib. Fortunately, this was the moment Daddy noticed the absence of Big Bertha. “Janie, where’s your car?”
“Oh, it broke down the other night,” I said, a little too quickly. “It’s in a shop over in Murphy. That’s kind of what kept me held up for the last couple of days.”
Daddy scrutinized my face. I made a comprehensive study of the crown molding. I’ve never been able to lie to my father. I rat myself out before I can be accused of anything. The one time I smoked pot in college, I called Daddy the next morning to confess because the idea that he could find out any other way made me want to throw up. After expressing extreme disappointment and making me feel two feet tall, he promised not to tell Mama, because she would have made me leave school to enter rehab that very minute. It’s not exactly a healthy dynamic, but it’s the only one we have.
I managed to shush the two of them long enough to describe Big Bertha’s post-Shenanigans breakdown. Mama proceeded to skin Daddy for not performing routine maintenance on “that old hunk of junk.” Over the din, I gave a heavily edited version of my long walk home that night. I decided to omit the part about being shot or identifying the drunken hunter. I did not like Bud McElray. At the same time, I didn’t want my cousins Dwight and Oscar to beat Bud bloody with a sock full of batteries. Is that considered forgiveness?
I also skirted around the “got turned into a vampire” portion of the proceedings. Again, I’m a huge coward. I told them I’d been so caught up in the wounds to my pride I just couldn ’t face anybody. I had holed up at an undisclosed location to think.
Technically, that wasn’t a lie. It was stretching the truth to the breaking point, but it wasn’t a lie.
“But we’re your family,” Mama huffed, stretching the word out to “faaaamily” in a way that set my fangs on edge. Being faaaamily justified a lot of things in Mama’s book, including signing me up for an online matchmaking service without my consent and attempting to wax my eyebrows while I was napping. “Who are you going to turn to if not your family? That’s why you need to come stay with us, Janie. You need someone to take care of you.”
“I’m twenty seven years old!” I cried. “I can take care of myself! I don’t need you folding my laundry and pouring my Cheerios every morning.”
Jettie appeared at my left and whispered. “I can take their car keys if you want me to, pumpkin.”
“You think I want to prevent them from leaving?” I whispered back.
“Who are you talking to?” Mama demanded, turning to my father. “John, she’s talking to herself.”
“I’m not—” I started, then reconsidered the wisdom of reintroducing my parents to dear departed Aunt Jettie, who never liked my mother anyway. “Yes, I am. I’m talking to myself.”
“And you won’t even think about coming back home?” Mama asked.
“Mama, you remember what it was like when I lived at home. I think one of us would go insane,” I said. “And I don’t think it would be you.”
“Well, if you’re going to be that way, I’m not going to stay here and be insulted.” She exhaled her “You don’t care how much I worry about you” martyr’s sigh. She tucked her handbag under her arm in a prim gesture and made her way to the door.
“John?”
Daddy shot me a bewildered look and rose. “We’ll talk soon, honey.”
“’Bye, Daddy.” I kissed his cheek. “Love you.”
He squeezed my hand and winked at me. “Love you, too, pumpkin.”“John!” Mama yelled from my front porch. As Daddy walked out, Mama poked her head back inside. “Just pop that pot pie in the oven to reheat at three-fifty for thirty minutes.” Then she disappeared, leaving me and Aunt Jettie gaping after her.
I flopped down on the couch. “I’m adopted, right? Or maybe Dad had some torrid affair with a brilliant but sensible humanities professor. I was the result of their passion, and Dad forced Mama to raise his bastard child as her own?”
“Nope,” Jettie said, shaking her translucent head. “She’s your mother. I asked. Plus, you do look a bit like her. When you’re angry, you both get these tense lines around your mouth…Look, there they are.”
“You’re lucky you’re dead already,” I said, chucking a throw pillow at her. It went right through her torso and bounced off the TV cabinet.
“So, you didn’t tell them,” Jettie observed as I stomped into the kitchen, my bare feet slapping loudly on the tile.
“Nothing gets by you,” I muttered, whipping the aluminum foil cover off Mama’s pot pie. “I just couldn’t. Did you see the looks on their faces? They’re already freaked out by the whole ‘unemployed spinster daughter who lives alone’ thing. I don’t think I want to add ‘dead’ and ‘drinks blood’ to the mix right now.”
“You have to tell them, Janie,” Jettie said, in a firmer tone than she normally takes with me. “‘Did you hear Jane’s a vampire?’ is not something you want your parents to overhear at the Coffee Spot.”
“I will tell them at some point. I just need to get a better fix on my powers, my schedule…”
“Fraidy-cat,” Jettie muttered.
“Poltergeist,” I shot back. The pie was still warm, the gloriously flaky golden crust buckling under my fingers as I scooped out a bite. But it smelled off, as if the cream of chicken had expired. And the onions were strong enough to make my eyes water.
“Honey, you don’t want to do that,” Jettie said. “Look, there are strings attached to this pot pie.”
“I haven’t eaten solid food in three days,” I told her.
“I don’t know if I can watch this,” Jettie said, blanching. “Pot pie is not a finger food.”
“Shhh.” I shoveled the rich, warm pie into my mouth, expecting the pleasant childhood memories I normally associated with the meal to come flooding back to me. Pot pie was one of the few meals Jenny and I could agree on, so Mama made it often. The meals tended to be tension-free because my mouth was full and I couldn’t argue with anybody.
Instead of the homey flavors of my childhood, I tasted dirt. Ash. Dirt. Gym clothes. I spat the casserole out and yelled something along the lines of “Bleh! Blech! Blah!” and ran for the wastebasket. After I’d tossed up whatever was left in my stomach, I wiped my tongue with a blue gingham dishtowel.
“It tastes…Bleh, it tastes like disappointment and feet. It tastes like you cooked it.” I shuddered.
Jettie frowned. “I don’t see why that comment was necessary.”
“The truth hurts.”
“So, no solid food, then?” she asked brightly. “I guess I’ll just empty that box of Hostess Cupcakes into the trash. You can’t eat them after all.”
“Now, see, that’s just mean.”
5
While it’s tempting to try to resume your normal social activities with still-living friends, you must understand that some people will have difficulty adjusting to your new condition. Warning signs that loved ones may be planning to stake you include a sudden interest in carpentry and staring at your chest to gauge where your heart is located.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
My visit with Zeb didn’t start out much better than the pot-pie episode.
Unable to determine where my car might be, I walked to the 1970s-era brick ranch house Zeb rented on Jefferson Street.
Zeb had moved out of his parents’ home as soon as it was legal. He even lived on Jettie’s couch for two months while he saved enough to land this little piece of shag-carpeted heaven. Zeb’s family? Well, let’s just say that they make the Osbournes look like a bunch of teetotaling Nobel laureates.
Is it any wonder that the one-bedroom-and-semiprivate-bath life appealed to my Zeb? The house was far from what you would consider homey. He had lived there for five years and was still using orange plastic milk crates as a coffee table. The only sign that someone actually lived in the house was the yard gnome smirking next to an overgrown hosta. We stole the gnome from my neighbor, Mrs. Turnbow, our junior year of high school and dubbed him Goobert McWindershins. There were wine coolers involved. Mama found out about it and made us take Goobert back to Mrs. Turnbow. We reclaimed him the week after Zeb moved to Jefferson Street and left twenty five dollars in her mailbox.
I knocked on the door. No response. I walked around the corner of the house and opened the gate. A vaguely canine shape streaked up and stopped just short of me. My pitifully ugly dog, Fitz, whimpered, circled, and sat, staring at me. A low growl sounded from his throat, and my heart broke. My own dog didn’t recognize me. I could handle unemployment, a strict new diet, and Mama’s hissy fits. But this had me teetering on the edge of an undead nervous breakdown.
“Fitz, it’s me,” I said, holding my hand out for him to sniff. He stared at me. This dog freaks out and runs to the door every time a Domino’s commercial comes on TV, so his mental processes are not the swiftest. I agonized as he considered, then finally bounded up to lick my face. I screeched with joy and let him knock me to the ground.