The Single Undead Moms Club (Half Moon Hollow series Book 4) Page 9

  Wade backed out of the space with the Fred Flintstone shuffle, then started his bike. Under the roar of his engine, he was muttering some rude words he thought I couldn’t hear. I smiled, waving as I opened my door.

  I sighed, starting my own engine. I wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened, but it made me smile. I never talked to people like that, much less attractive men. I was not a firecracker. One of the things my late husband had liked most about me was what he called my “sweet nature,” which boiled down to me not complaining about his shenanigans and letting him do whatever he wanted. I did not simultaneously flirt with and insult attractive men on motorcycles. It was Wade’s fault, I told myself. Becoming a vampire couldn’t have changed my nature this much. There was something “special” about his personality that activated the rude, reckless bits of my DNA.

  Maybe I should have let that chivalrous vampire slap him around after all.

  5

  You will have to find a way to make compromises with your child’s living relatives. It’s a difficult process, but remember, one day those difficult relatives will be dead, and you will not.

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

  I was probably the first vampire ever to say this, but God bless the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead. By the time I arrived home, Jane had already heard about Kaylee’s defection through the Hollow gossip mill and had sent a trusted Council-approved sitter to my house to wait for Danny to wake up. Petite, with chicory-colored skin, wide brown eyes, and a cloud of dark, perfectly spiraled curls framing her face, Kerrianne Union was the divorced mom of a fifth-grader at Danny’s school. Her mother, Diana, lived with her, so she was free in the mornings to come over and help Danny get ready for school, then carpool both kids.

  I’d met Kerrianne in passing at a few school events, but I’d always been in such a rush that I hadn’t made time to get to know her. But now, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee clutched between her hands like a predawn lifeline, Kerrianne was brusque and no-nonsense, like Mary Poppins in a “Purple Rain” T-shirt.

  “I won’t be starting this early every day,” she told me. “But I figured you’d feel better goin’ to bed knowin’ who’s taking care of your baby.”

  “You’re not wrong,” I told her while I packed up. “I really do appreciate your coming over at the last minute.”

  “Well, a job is a job, and the Council is a good employer to have,” she said, stirring her coffee even as I leaned away from the brew. I was sure it smelled heavenly to her human nose, but to me it smelled like Danny’s socks marinated in raw sewage. “They don’t trust anybody, so once you pass their crazy stringent background checks, you’re golden. They pay a fair wage, and they pay on time. I earn enough from part-time work that I can take care of my daughter.”

  “And you don’t mind working for vampires?”

  “Aw, hell.” Kerrianne snorted. “They’re not any more evil or violent than the average human. At least they’re up front about what they want. And did I mention they pay on time? That’s a big priority for me.”

  “You mentioned,” I said, laughing softly as I taped up a box of kitchen stuff.

  “I don’t mind working for you. I figured you seemed pretty nice at those PTA meetings, and you’d probably carry that through to your unlife. From what I’ve seen, people who were assholes when they were alive stay assholes when they’re vampires. Besides, we’re on the prize solicitation committee for the Pumpkin Patch this year, so we might as well get to know each other.”

  “Argh.” I groaned. The prize committee was in charge of calling area businesses and asking for special lots for the festival’s raffle and silent auction—gift certificates, free services, and, occasionally, special perks like sports tickets. I’d served on the committee last year. It was like being a telemarketer, only a telemarketer who was asking for really annoying loans. People started ducking me at the grocery store. I took a bottle of Faux Type O out of the fridge and glugged it down without warming it. “That is the worst.”

  “I know.” She sighed. “And personally, I’m a little uncomfortable with the word ‘solicitation.’ ”

  “I can still say no,” I insisted. “I can use my scary vampire powers and tell them I’m unavailable this year.”

  “Your scary vampire power is getting out of volunteer ‘opportunities’? I’m not sure if that’s lame or awesome.”

  I giggled, spitting a dribble of blood over my chin.

  “Whoops, party foul. Don’t waste good blood, hon,” Kerrianne said, shaking her head. “Don’t be that girl.”

  “I think we’re going to get along fine,” I said, holding my bottle up.

  Smiling, she clinked her mug against my bottle. “Just fine.”

  Danny adjusted to the move, Kerrianne’s presence, and his first day of school like he did all things: quickly and with enthusiasm. He loved his new room in the Victorian’s “tower,” his new big-boy planet-themed sheets, and sliding down the stairs on his butt. He also insisted that it was the perfect place for us to live because a Bigfoot lived in the backyard.

  “I’ve been watching it for the last couple of nights through my bedroom window,” he told me solemnly. “I could see him, clear as anything. Last night, he waved at me!”

  This claim might have seemed like cause for some concern for the average mom, but this was not the first time my Bigfoot-obsessed son had sworn he’d seen a hominid creature from a distance. His insistence that he’d seen a Sasquatch while camping with his grandpa the previous summer led to Les insisting that “the boy needs less reading and more man’s work.” My response was to buy Danny a children’s book on cryptids and a “Caution: Bigfoot Crossing” sign for his bedroom door.

  But there were other adjustments that weren’t so easy. Danny didn’t understand why I couldn’t spend more time with him now that I was “feeling better.” As much as he liked Kerrianne and her daughter, Braylen, he didn’t understand why they drove him to school in the mornings instead of me. He missed baking with me, a B.C. activity we’d both enjoyed thoroughly, but I was too afraid of how the food smells might affect me to give it a try. And I was even more afraid of explaining it all to him for fear of scaring him.

  Danny was a sunny kid, so it was difficult to suss out when something was bothering him. But it didn’t shock me to find him on the porch a few nights later, staring at fireflies dancing in our new front yard one evening, instead of sitting at the kitchen table with Braylen, practicing his math flash cards like usual. Kerrianne was at the stove, her dark hair wound into a high, loose bun as she stirred something that involved neither wheatballs nor tofu. This alone would make her Danny’s favorite sitter ever.

  I shuffled into the kitchen with the Knight’s Castle monthly financials under my arm, desperately seeking a caffeinated blood blend called Plasmaspresso. It was the only thing that brought me up to Danny’s level first thing in the evening.

  “He’s out on the front porch, Miss Libby,” Braylen told me, her big brown doe eyes solemn. Braylen was a sweet girl, tall for her age, with a cute overbite that she would eventually grow into. “He did not have a good day at school. You should ask him about lunch.”

  “He was on a four today,” Kerrianne added. I drew my lips back in a wince. The kids’ daily behavior was rated on a scale of one to five, pushing up their rating with the severity of their disruption. One meant no problems. Five meant a call home from the principal’s office. Danny had never been past a two.

  “Wow,” I marveled. “What did he do?”

  Braylen pinched her lips together, as if she couldn’t bear to tattle.

  “Honey, I need to know what I’m walking into here,” I told her, my tone gentle.

  “He may have thrown a cup of applesauce at Mrs. McGee when the class was getting ready for snack time.”

  “That is . . . What?” I stormed out to the porch. “Daniel Robert Stratton, what on earth?”

  But I stopped
in my tracks when I saw the tears streaking down his cheeks. My son did not cry unless something was bothering him deeply. Though my crazed, angry “Hulk Mom” instincts demanded that I track down the source of those tears and SMASHSMASHSMASH it out of existence, I dialed down my righteous (irrational) mom anger and plopped down on the step next to him.

  “Danny, what happened at school today?”

  Danny tucked his face against his knees and shook his head.

  “Danny, why did you throw applesauce at Mrs. McGee?” I asked gently.

  Mrs. McGee was a grandparent volunteer who had been lurking around the building since I was in elementary school. She wasn’t exactly a cuddly, cheerful soul. And she didn’t seem to like children all that much. Her own grandkids had graduated from high school years before. I wasn’t sure why she even bothered volunteering, other than to fill her empty hours. Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded tossing an applesauce at her myself a time or two, but I was sure that wasn’t the most responsible thing to tell one’s delinquent son.

  “Danny, talk to me.” I rubbed a hand down his arm. Slowly, he lifted his head and pierced me with his big blue-green eyes.

  “Mom, Mrs. McGee said you were a monster. What did she mean?”

  I was going to drown Mrs. McGee in applesauce. “What did Mrs. McGee say, honey?”

  “We were making family trees in class on big pieces of construction paper,” he said. “Everybody was so busy that Mrs. McGee came in to help us, ’specially with writing the names.”

  I nodded. I’d known about this assignment. Miss Steele had asked the parents to send in a list of relatives and their correct name spellings to help the kids construct their trees.

  “I spent a lot of time drawing my trunk, so I was one of the last ones to get done. Everybody else was getting ready for snack time. Mrs. McGee was writing the names on my tree, and she kept talking about how one side of my tree was almost empty. And how it was a ‘shame’ that you didn’t have more names for me, because you didn’t even know who your daddy is. And she said it would have been better if you just left your side blank and gave me to Mamaw and Papa. She said that you went looking for, uh, ‘ankneesyfix,’ instead of what God wanted you to do. You should have just died, but you’d gone and turned yourself into a monster. And that’s when I threw my applesauce at her.”

  “Danny.”

  “Well, Charlie left it out on my desk for me! It was right there! And she was asking for it, Mom. She was being mean.”

  “I’m not disagreeing with you, hon. But why didn’t you just go to Miss Steele if Mrs. McGee was hurting your feelings?”

  “Miss Steele was busy helping Anna with her tree. And I was so mad I just didn’t think to get up and tell her.”

  “Hmm.” I buried my nose in Danny’s hair, praying for the strength and patience to deal with this situation correctly.

  “What did Mrs. McGee mean, Mom? What’s a ‘ankneesyfix?’ ”

  I took a deep breath, even as my fangs ached to stretch from my jaw, to tear and bite into the evil old biddy. I couldn’t help but feel this was my fault on several levels, not just because of my undead altered state but because of my inability to fill out my half of Danny’s family tree. I barely had information on the parent I did know. And I could only imagine how it felt for Danny to put question marks in place of his grandfather’s name. I allowed myself to feel just a momentary flash of guilt and hurt. Guilt because I couldn’t give Danny a second set of grandparents to love and spoil him, hurt over one more reminder that my father had run off, leaving me with those blank spaces.

  But Danny didn’t care about me or my abandonment issues. He needed answers now.

  “I think she means that Mom’s different now. And she doesn’t know how to deal with it.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know how Mom got real sick a while ago?”

  Danny nodded, wiping at his cheeks. “Yeah, when you went to the hospital and you were so tired all the time?”

  “Well, I was very sick, and I wasn’t getting well. And I found some people who could help me feel all better. But to do that, I had to change.”

  “Change, like, how?” he asked, leaning into me while I stroked his back.

  I took a deep, unnecessary breath and braced myself. “Honey, I’m a vampire.”

  I waited for him to wrench away from me, to cry or yell or laugh. But all he did was snuggle against my arm and grumble, “Yeah, duh.”

  Well, that was anticlimactic.

  “Do you know what that means?” I asked.

  Danny stayed silent, and when I poked his arm, he said, “You’ve told me it’s rude to say ‘duh’ more than once, Mom.”

  “It’s rude to say it once, Danny.”

  “Oh, sorry. But yeah, I know what it means.”

  “So you figured that out already, huh?”

  “Well, yeah, you were only coming out at night, and you haven’t eaten anything in a week. We talked about vampires during Undead American Appreciation Week at school last year. I’m a kid, Mom, I’m not stupid.”

  “Fair point,” I said. “Remind me to start spelling things around you again.”

  “I’m learning to read.”

  “Well, there goes my whole parenting strategy.” I sighed dramatically, making him roll his eyes.

  He picked at the cuff on my blue thermal shirt. “Is it fun, being a vampire?”

  “Sure. I feel so much better than I did before, which was the whole point. I can take care of you much better now. The only problem is, like you said, I can’t go out during the day, but that’s a small price to pay if it means I get to stay with you. It’s going to be different for a while, but we’ll work it out.”

  Danny stared at me, speculative. “Do you have fangs?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can I see?”

  This was the part I was dreading, Danny seeing me as something different, changed from the woman who baked him cookies and made his Halloween costumes. I was terrified that he would reject me, even if it was something as simple as being afraid of my fangs. But he had a right to ask questions and see the big picture. Biting my lip, I nodded and let them drop gradually, so it would feel less like I was springing something at him. Plus, in the corner of my brain, I still worried a little that moving my fangs too quickly would trigger some sort of instinctual feeding frenzy. But even when Danny reached up and touched his fingertip to the sharp point, I didn’t feel any temptation. I did worry about whether he’d washed his hands since he’d left school.

  “Are you going to try to bite me?” he asked, lifting my lip so he could get a better look at my canines.

  “No,” I said, pulling his hands away from my mouth. “Never.”

  “Can you still make me pancakes for dinner?”

  “I will try my hardest.”

  “What does blood taste like?”

  “Like meaty Diet Coke,” I responded, laughing when he made a face of absolute disgust. “I’m sticking to bottled fake blood for right now. It’s OK, but I definitely don’t want you trying it.”

  Danny shrugged. “OK, then. Can I have SpongeBob macaroni for dinner?”

  I stared at him. “That’s it?”

  He shrugged. “Yep. You’re not going away. You’re not sick anymore. And you’re not going to bite me. That makes me happy. I mean, I don’t like that I can’t see you during the day. But vampires can do cool tricks, right? Like turn into bats and stuff?”

  “No,” I told him. “That’s just in cartoons.”

  Danny crossed his arms over his chest and stuck out his bottom lip. The pouting force was very strong with this one. “Well, that stinks.”

  “But I’m super-fast and super-strong. When I get hurt, it heals right back up.”

  “Like Superman?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” I said. “Watch.”

  I stepped off the porch and took off at top speed, running a lap around the house and skidding to a stop in front of him.

  He launched to his feet
and cheered. “Cool! Can you fly?”

  “No, but watch this.” I bent at the knees and sprang up as fast and as far as I could, clearing the roof of the house and landing on the lowest sturdy branch of the oak tree by Danny’s bedroom window. Danny cheered and whooped, while I did a backward flip off the branch and landed gracefully on the ground.

  “I wish I could take you in for show-and-tell,” he said.

  “Well, it would be really entertaining until the sunlight made your mom burst into flames and traumatized the whole class.”

  “Probably,” he admitted, standing up and brushing the dust from his butt.

  “So we’re OK?” I asked, tugging at his hand until he fell into my lap. He squirmed, too old in his mind now for cuddles.

  “Yeah.”

  “And no more throwing applesauce at school personnel, OK? If you’re upset with an adult, you go to Mr. Walsh, or you come home and tell me and I’ll take care of it.”

  “Are you going to take care of Mrs. McGee?”

  “Well, not in the way that you seem to be implying. I’m not a hit man.”

  Danny’s eyes went wide and innocent. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Fine.” He sighed. At the front door, he paused. “Vampires don’t eat, right?”

  “Not solid human food, no.”

  “So you won’t be able to eat my Halloween candy?”

  “No.”

  “Or my Christmas-stocking candy?”

  I sighed, pursing my lips. “No.”

  “Or the ears off my chocolate Easter bunny?”

  “Daniel Robert.”

  “I’m just checking!” he exclaimed.

  “Sweetheart, I cannot eat your candy anymore,” I told him. He gave me a Cheshire cat grin. “Stop smiling so much.”

  “But I’m happy.”

  “Go get your dinner.”

  I clicked my tongue as he announced to Kerrianne that I’d approved of pasta shaped like a talking sea sponge. “I’m raising a future supervillain.”

  I pulled my cell phone from my pocket to call the principal. He’d given me his personal cell-phone number to call in case of issues like the one with Mrs. McGee.