The Single Undead Moms Club

  “I’m so sorry, Marge.”

  “I don’t even know how to respond to that anymore. I’ve heard it so many times today,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at me, eyes shimmering with tears. “Is this how it felt for you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But at least Rob’s death was an accident. Knowing that someone hurt Les, that’s got to be so much worse.”

  “I just don’t understand how this happened. I keep asking, who would want to hurt Les? And the police were here, and they asked so many questions. I didn’t know how to answer so many of them. He was behaving so strangely, ranting about you, making phone calls that he didn’t want me to hear. I just don’t know what happened to him in the last few months. I feel like the man I married died a long time ago.”

  Tentatively, I reached out and patted her cool, dry hand. She didn’t take mine, but she didn’t flinch, either. I considered that progress. “I don’t know what the police told you, but I didn’t have anything to do with this, Marge. I am sorry about what happened to Les,” I told her. “I was angry with him, toward the end, but I would never wish that on him.”

  “I know that,” she assured me. “I know I said some things right after you were turned—things I regret. But deep down, I know that you couldn’t hurt Danny or Les or me. We just needed time to adjust. If we’d just had more time, maybe Les would have . . .” Marge’s voice trailed off as twin tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s going to have to be a closed-casket funeral. Did the police tell you that? There was so much damage. Even so, I don’t think it would be a good idea for Danny to be there. That’s just too much to ask of a little boy. Have you talked to him yet?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know how to explain to him.”

  “I could help you with that,” she offered. “Maybe it would help, coming from both of us.”

  “I think so, too,” I said. “We can tell him tomorrow night. You could come over, maybe help him with bathtime and bedtime stories. That might help both of you.”

  Marge’s thin, unpainted lips trembled into something that resembled a smile. “I would really appreciate that.”

  14

  Confrontations with other parents are going to happen—at your child’s school, at the ball field, at the mall. The important thing to remember is that thanks to the prevalence of security cameras and smartphones, you’re probably being recorded. So footage of your retribution will be held against you in a court of law.

  —My Mommy Has Fangs: A Guide to Post-Vampiric Parenting

  Jane told me to lie low, to let the Council investigators look into Les’s murder.

  And I intended to follow her instructions, at least in spirit. She was already a smidge displeased with me for doing a mourner’s run over to my mother-in-law’s without talking to her. But since she hadn’t specifically told me not to condole with Marge, she couldn’t exactly get mad at me. Well, she could, but she chose not to.

  Finn called, offering—hell, pleading—to help me manage this new crisis, but I sent his calls straight to voice mail. I had decided, for once, that I would listen to Jane’s advice about Finn and keep my distance. Finn’s charming little fibs had grown to a tsunami of lies I just couldn’t ignore. And while I wanted to believe that he felt something for me, everything he’d ever said or done seemed too carefully calculated, an orchestra of manipulation that left my head reeling and my heart sore.

  Telling Danny that evening that his papa was gone had not been easy, even with the added consolation of his mamaw coming over to make his favorite dinner—spaghetti and cut-up hot dogs. Danny had been too young to understand when Rob died, and my resurrection hadn’t exactly helped him comprehend a grave one couldn’t escape. He didn’t quite grasp where his papa had gone and why he wouldn’t be back.

  “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.

  “I’ll get it!” Danny yelled, abandoning his LEGO kingdom to run toward the foyer. Lightning-quick, I hopped over the bannister and landed between my son and the front door. Danny, now accustomed to his mother zipping around the house at vampire speed, merely skidded to a halt before we collided. Through the front-door glass, I could see a strange man standing on my stoop.

  “Sweetheart, what have we said about opening the door without an adult?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder at the stranger. Should I even answer the door? I wondered. What if it was more bad news? What if he was from the Council or, worse, the family court? What if he was some friend of Les’s looking for a confrontation?

  Danny chewed his lip and considered. “Not to do it.”

  I glanced pointedly at the door and back to him, and realization seemed to dawn on his face. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh,” I deadpanned. “Hey, the moon is supposed to be full tonight. Why don’t you go to the kitchen and see if you can spot Sasquatch in the backyard.”

  “You’re just trying to keep me from seeing who’s at the front door, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” I told him.

  “Fiiiine.” He sighed mightily and slumped toward the kitchen.

  I stepped closer to the door, considering the man on the other side of the glass.

  He smiled, a wide, friendly, not at all hostile expression, like we were old friends reunited. He had wavy blond hair, a long nose, high cheekbones, and light blue-green eyes. Now that I could get a closer look, I could see the telltale pearlescent perfection of vampire skin. The stranger had been turned in his late thirties, and he was handsome, in that same “devil in a Sunday suit” manner as Finn. You could tell from the twinkle in his eyes that he was a charmer, the kind of guy who could talk you into a used car, a timeshare, and Amway and have you thanking him for the opportunity.

  I unlocked and opened the door, careful to keep my foot propped against it so he couldn’t push in on me. “Yes?”

  His grin seemed to broaden even further but in a sincere way. He was beaming so brilliantly I was going to need sunglasses soon. “Liberty.” There was no question in his tone. He knew that I was Liberty Stratton, which was odd, considering how few people knew my embarrassing birth name.

  “Can I help you?”

  Behind him, a sedan careened into my driveway, practically on two wheels. The driver, Finn, slid to a stop and hopped out.

  “The hell?” I muttered, making the stranger snort.

  “Max, this is not what we talked about! She’s still pissed at both of us! She’s not going to appreciate you—”

  “Max?” I asked.

  “Max Kitteridge,” he said. “You look so much like your mom. Her hair and her nose, that stubborn little chin. I saw enough of that whenever I tried to tell her what to do. You’ve got my eyes, though.”

  I glanced down and back at my son, who was peering around the kitchen doorway at the stranger. He seemed to be evaluating the man for potential bad-guy beardness, staring him down with my eyes. Danny’s eyes. Max’s eyes. The same shade of blue-green with the ring of navy around the pupil.

  When I whipped my head back toward the door, Max smiled at me, and those eyes almost disappeared into crinkly laugh lines. It pissed me off. That after all these years, my father could smile like that at me and act like he was happy to see me, when he hadn’t bothered with a visit in thirty years.

  “I thought vampires couldn’t have kids,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I was with your mom, and then I was turned. I came back. I tried to contact her after you were born.”

  I stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign language. How was it possible that after all these years, I was looking at my father? And where in the ever-loving hell had he been since the day I was born?

  “She was a smart girl, your mom, always picked up on the little cues that no one else got,” Max said. “And when she realized what I was, she didn’t want me around. She was scared, and I couldn’t blame her. Nobody knew about vampires then, and who would want one around their baby girl? She told me to leave, that it was safer for you if I was nowhere near you. She made me promise to stay away from you. And if nothing else, I kept my promise to her.”

  Finn huffed behind him. “Max, she’s not ready.”

  Max still pointedly ignored his old friend. “I followed your life over the years. I hadn’t spent a lot of time here, but I still had contacts in town. They’d take pictures for me, let me know when you had something big coming up—graduations, your wedding. If it was at night, I’d slip into the crowd so I could feel like I was part of it, too.”

  The words were spilling out of him, like he’d been rehearsing them for years, patient and slow, but now they were running away with him. I thought back to any of the “big events” in my life and realized how pitifully few crowds he’d had to slip into—my high school graduation, my community-college graduation, my wedding; that was pretty much it. I felt sort of bad for his bored spies.

  “Danny, I was there at the hospital on the night you were born.” Max peered around me, trying to get a better look at my son.

  “Really?” Danny asked, stepping closer.

  Max grinned. “Yeah. I waited in the lobby at the hospital until I heard you crying from all the way down the hall. You were a loud little thing.” He turned to me. “It’s not easy for us to be in hospitals, you know. Too many smells, the least of which is blood. And I think the nurses mistook me for a baby snatcher. But I got to hear my grandson’s first cries. It meant a lot to me, knowing that you had a good life, a nice, safe life. It was more than I could offer you.”

  I stared at him for a long time, silent, as all of the questions I wanted to ask, the demands, the insults, everything I’d ever wanted to say to my father in all those years alone, ran through my head.

  “I don’t think you can be my grandpa. You’re not old enough,” Danny said softly. I had to wonder what was going on in his little head. He’d only just lost his papa, and now some young guy shows up claiming to be his grandfather? I mentally added a higher total goal for Danny’s potential therapy fund.

  Max winked at him. “You’d be surprised, kiddo. And at least I don’t have a bad-guy beard.”

  Finn made a displeased noise in his throat.

  I straightened my shoulders and asked, “So you’re my father?”

  Max looked oddly proud as he said, “I am indeed.”

  “OK.” Quick as a snake, I raised my fist and punched him in his handsome, stupid face. He was clearly not expecting the blow and tottered back on his heels, clutching his bleeding nose as he crashed into the door.

  “Mom!” Danny cried. “You hit him! You said hitting isn’t OK ever!”

  “Well, sometimes it is, under special circumstances,” I told him.

  “You should say you’re sorry!” Danny said.

  Feeling a pang of hypocritical-mother guilt, I sighed. “I will, later. I promise.”

  “Feel better now?” Finn asked as Max groaned and I rubbed my healing knuckles.

  I nodded. “Oddly enough, yes. Get any closer, and you’re next.”

  Finn seemed disappointed but accepted the threat. “Look, I’ve known your dad since we were both human. We were turned by the same sire around the same time for a—”

  “If you say ‘misunderstanding,’ I will poke you in the eye,” I told him. “Why didn’t you come see me before, Max? Why did you wait until now? Do you have any idea how different my life could have been, how different Mom could have been, if you’d just shown up every once in a while?”

 
“I was trying to respect her wishes. And frankly, she was right. The way I was living my life, it wasn’t safe for you. I did send her money every month, but she just sent it back.”

  “And when she died, you didn’t think maybe you should send a note?” I demanded, thinking back to meeting Rob at the loneliest time in my life. Knowing my father might have changed the decisions I’d made. Then again, I might not have had Danny. I cleared my throat. “I really—I could have used a friend then.”

  “I was scared,” he admitted. “I didn’t know what your mom had told you about me. And the thought of you rejecting me, I couldn’t stand it. Sure, it was tough seeing you live your life from far away. But at least I could keep up the illusion of being involved. Knowing for sure that you wanted nothing to do with me? It was terrifying. Every time I’d almost talked myself into coming to you, I’d talk myself out of it all over again.”

  “And after you and Finn decided that he would turn me into a vampire?” I asked, glaring at my sire.

  Finn touched my arm, and I pulled loose from his grasp. “I was afraid that if he approached you right away, you would bolt, so I told him to keep his distance. And his patience ran out, officially, this week when he heard about your father-in-law. He was supposed to give me time to let you get used to the idea. But he jumped the gun.”

  “But you knew he was in the Hollow, and you didn’t tell me.”

  “You know, I am standing right here,” Max pointed out.

  We both whipped our heads toward him, glaring.

  Max raised his hands. “Carry on.”

  “I’m sorry,” Finn said. “I know that I misled you—”

  “Misled?”

  “Misinformed,” he amended.

  “Really?” My eyes narrowed at him.

  “But I hope that we can still try to make things work between us. So much of what I did was because I was trying to get more time with you. And not because of your ability but because I want you for you.”

  “I know I’m new to this parenting thing, but I am certain I am not supposed to be hearing this,” Max muttered. “Danny, let’s go into the kitchen, or maybe the backyard, out of earshot.”