Nice Girls Don't Bite Their Neighbors (31 page)

“I think that’s why your grandmother never really got this place. She saw it as something to show off, to lord over other people, even when it was falling apart at the seams. She never saw it as a place where a family lived. You get that.”

I smiled and ducked my head, only to feel the cool pressure of his hand on my shoulder.

“I’m very proud of the person you’ve become. I think we would have gotten along just fine, if I’d lived. No matter what your grandmother might have told you, I always liked a girl with spunk.”

Grandpa John winked at me and pinched my cheek as he faded out of sight.

“Thanks, Grandpa.”

It is vital to foster loyalty in your childe. You will need your childe someday, whether it’s a year or a century from now. A loyal childe will heed the sire’s call no matter where the childe is. A resentful childe will take time to make himself or herself comfortable while he or she enjoys your misfortune.

—Siring for the Stupid:
A Beginner’s Guide to Raising Newborn Vampires

T
ime is a funny thing. The weeks leading up to the wedding seemed to be moving at fast-forward, what with blowing up a school bus, evicting a dead grandparent, and building relationships with dead grandpas. But somehow, walking down the makeshift aisle we’d constructed on the back lawn of River Oaks seemed to take forever.

For the rehearsal, Daddy was at my elbow, half leading, half dragging me. I’m sure that in his head, he was already compensating for the support I would need, negotiating the grass in my dress. Gabriel was waiting for me, and I just couldn’t seem to get to him fast enough.

Iris was standing near the arbor that would be wrapped in flowers and ribbon while we were sleeping the next day. She was carefully reviewing the ceremony notes with Jolene’s uncle Creed, who performed all marriage rites in the pack as the eldest of the clan and a justice of the peace. Reverend Neel was a good man, but his liberalities only stretched so far. And I found the idea of being married by a notary public sort of depressing. It was a special honor for a werewolf to extend such a gesture of friendship to a vampire, and without Jolene’s intervention, it wouldn’t have happened.

Jolene’s parents were there, along with the aunties who could stomach my presence. I had to find some way to thank them for replicating my dress. And for a werewolf, that means feeding them. All of the nonvampires would be enjoying a big batch of Mama’s homemade lasagna at her house while Gabriel was led to his bachelor-party doom. I think I was supposed to go to my room and pretend to be a virgin for one more night.

Mama couldn’t have been more pleased with Iris’s work, including the arrangement of a slightly more traditional wedding party than Jolene and Zeb had. Andrea was my maid of honor, and Zeb was my best man. Dick was the best man for Gabriel’s side, with Jolene and Jenny in the supporting roles. I tried to get Jamie to serve as ring bearer, but he refused to carry the little pillow. Instead, he was the groomsman in charge of leading Fitz to the bride’s family row and keeping him from chasing squirrels during the ceremony.

After sitting through countless prolonged weddings
that left my butt numb and my nerves frayed, I wanted to keep the ceremony itself short and sweet, and Gabriel agreed. I walk up the aisle, we say the vows, we walk down the aisle together. No staring into each other’s eyes while soloists warble that what the world needs now is love, sweet love. No special readings from Corinthians or Shakespeare. And no unity candle. Open flames and veils tend to make vampire brides very nervous.

The good news was that this simplified the rehearsal considerably. And since everybody in the wedding party had been through the process before, they knew where to stand, where to face, and how to hold their flowers. And they knew the special “step-together-step-together” rhythm required to time their aisle walk appropriately to the processional.

If I could just get Uncle Creed to call me Jane instead of Jean, we’d be in business.

Iris considered us sufficiently rehearsed and gave us all our wedding-day itineraries. Mine said, “Show up at sunset, get dressed, relax.”

“I think I love you,” I told her.

She shrugged. “I get that a lot. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go pry your mama off of Uncle Creed before she talks him into an altar call or something.”

She scurried away, clipboard in hand, and Gabriel pressed a kiss to my mouth. “This is your last night as a single woman. What do you plan on doing?”

“Sleeping. Reading. Worrying about you and my childe and how you will be emotionally scarred by the cut-rate strip club Dick drags you to.”

“For your information, we’re not going to a strip club.” Dick sniffed. “We’re going to a casino.”

“How are you going to get Jamie into a casino? He’s underage!”

Dick shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

“You’re right, I don’t. Just don’t let anything happen to him, OK? Dick, I think it goes without saying that if anything happens to Gabriel to prevent him from making it to the altar tomorrow night, I will hold you responsible. And afterward, grown men will weep when they see what I’ve done to you.”

Dick snorted and kissed my forehead. “And yet you feel the need to say it anyway.”

“It’s a formality.”

Most of the guests had already departed for Mama’s dinner. As the boys loaded themselves into Zeb’s car, I bade Andrea and Jolene good night and kissed the twins. Jenny hugged me tight and promised to slip Mama a Xanax before I could rise the next night. I whistled for Fitz and went upstairs to take off my makeup and change into some sweats. The house was blissfully quiet, especially with Jettie and Mr. Wainwright off to complete some secret wedding-related task. I lay on my bed and closed my eyes, wondering if I was going to be able to sleep a wink that day.

Downstairs, I heard a soft knock on the door. Remembering the still-unidentified remains of Ray McElray, I grabbed a baseball bat from Jamie’s room and crept quietly down the stairs.

“Who is it?”

“Honey, it’s Daddy. Open up.”

I whipped the door open to find him grinning at me.

“Grab your purse, honey.”

“But I’m wearing sweatpants. Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise, and you’re dressed just fine,” he said, his eyes twinkling as he led me to the car. “Your mama’s letting me off the hook tonight so I can have some special time with my girl before she becomes an old married woman.”

“Watch it,” I warned him as we pulled out of the driveway and into town.

I kept up a constant stream of chatter about my father’s classes, his students, Mama’s compulsive cleaning of the house as she worked through her anxieties over the wedding. Daddy pulled his car toward downtown, onto Main Street, and finally, into the parking lot of the Coffee Spot.

I gasped. The Coffee Spot had been our special place since I was little. Daddy and I would leave early on Saturday mornings under the pretense of running errands, and then we’d camp in a corner booth for most of the day, talking and eating cheese fries. Mama never could figure out how running to the hardware store and the grocery store always ended with Daddy getting Velveeta on his shirt. Of course, those cheese-fry runs got fewer and farther between when I went away to school, and even farther when Mama saw Daddy’s cholesterol results. And they stopped altogether when I went on the liquid diet.

I turned to my father, who grabbed my hand and
squeezed it. “We are going to have one last shot at cheese fries.”

“But I can’t eat.”

He grinned. “No, but you can watch me eat. And you can have one of those bottled bloods. I called ahead and asked Marjorie to stock them for you. She misses you, you know.”

I sighed. “I really, really love you, Daddy.”

“Obviously,” he said, his eyes twinkling as we climbed out of the car.

“I’m sorry we haven’t had much time together lately,” I said as we entered the coffee shop.

Marjorie, who had been waiting tables at the Coffee Spot since it opened in 1956, whooped and pulled my face between her worn, bony hands.

“Look at you!” she cried, squeezing my cheeks in a death grip. Her iron-gray hair was coming loose from its top knot as she practically vibrated with excitement. “Oh, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you, Janie! And you’re getting married tomorrow! Look at that ring! I’m so happy for you.”

“Thanks, Miss Marjorie.”

“I can’t believe it’s been almost two years since I’ve seen you,” she said as Daddy and I slid into our usual booth, with the cracked green leatherette seats. Marjorie didn’t bother handing us grease-spotted menus. Daddy’s order never changed from cheese fries and a cherry Coke.

“I’m sorry. You tend to spend less time in restaurants when you don’t eat solids.”

“That’s all right, hon. Your daddy told me you like that Faux Type O. I’ll grab one for you and heat it up,” she said. “John, I’ll get your cheese fries going. I’ll be right back.”

Daddy chuckled at my shocked expression. “Marjorie’s always been an energetic gal.”

“What was I saying?”

“You were apologizing for abandoning your father while pursuing silly things like running your own business and maintaining a relationship. Oh, and training my grand-childe to be a good little vampire.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Aw, hell, Jane. I’m glad you’re so busy. I worried about you before, when you were working at the library. You always seemed to be waiting for your life to start. I just want to make sure this is the life you wanted. I wouldn’t want you to make a commitment to someone who didn’t make you happy.”

“Dad, are you giving me the Mr. Bennet premarital speech from
Pride and Prejudice
?”

“Well, you are doing a sort of theme wedding.”

“Nice. Don’t you think it’s a little late in the game for this conversation? Are fathers of the bride supposed to get cold feet?”

“Any man standing on the verge of giving a daughter away has cold feet. When Jenny married Kent, I had to stop myself from throwing her in the back of the car and making a break for Hershey, Pennsylvania. It’s nothing personal against Gabriel. He’s a perfectly nice fella. I’m just saying, I know your mom has put a lot of pressure
on you to settle down. I want to make sure you didn’t say yes because you’re afraid of being alone for the rest of eternity.”

“I’m not marrying him because I’m afraid of being alone. I’m marrying him because I don’t want live without him specifically. Because when I think about being without him, I feel sort of dizzy and sick, like I’ve been cut off from the tether that keeps me on the ground. That’s about as flowery and romantic as I’m going to get.”

He smiled, his eyes watering a little. “No, that was just right. Believe it or not, that’s exactly how I feel when I think about losing your mama.”

“That is hard to believe.” I snorted as Marjorie slid piping-hot fries, dripping in gooey orange nondairy cheese food, in front of my father.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do now that you’re all grown up.”

“Daddy, I’m thirty-one years old.”

“Yeah, but I could always come here and depend on you to listen to my stupid stories and humor your old man.”

“Well, you can still do that; you’ll just have an extra pair of ears listening. Gabriel really likes you, you know.”

“I guess I like him, as much as I could like the man who’s making me give away my baby girl,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t hand you over to a man I didn’t think deserved you, Janie.”

“Thank you, Daddy.” I paused, taking a sip of the warmed bottle of blood that Marjorie had dropped off at the table. “Why Hershey, Pennsylvania?”

He shrugged. “Jenny’s wanted to go there since she was a little girl, ever since she heard that the streetlamps are shaped like Hershey’s Kisses.”

“That’s sweet. What was my potential kidnapping destination?”

He reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Right here.”

I snorted. “Exotic downtown Half-Moon Hollow?”

“Well, you’re a lot stronger than me. I knew I couldn’t overpower you for long.”

My wedding night set clear and warm, with a fingernail moon sliding low over the horizon. Jolene came bounding into my room at sunset, hopping up and down on the bed, bouncing me off onto the floor.

I sat up and glared at her. “Andrea gave you espresso, didn’t she?”

“Nope!” she crowed. “But she showed me how to work the machine!”

“Augh!”
I groaned, covering my face with a pillow.

“Come on, Jane, it’s your weddin’ night!” she cried. “Get up! Get excited! Your mama’s already been outside most of the day, helpin’ Iris get everything all set up. It’s just gorgeous out there. Like somethin’ out of one of your movies.”

“Really?” I perked up, carefully retracting the sunproof shade so I could look out over the backyard. I gasped. When I’d gone to bed, it had looked like my backyard on any other night, just with lawn chairs lined up on it. Now it looked positively elegant, with a long
ivory aisle runner stretched between the rows of chairs to the arbor, which was covered in fluffy green moss and roses in shades of ivory, lavender, and yellow. Little wildflowers offset the overly formal look of the roses, making it seem as though some helpful soul had just walked through the gardens at River Oaks and picked a few blossoms. The chairs were looped with ivory bows. There were little glass globes with lit candles hanging from the trees and ivory paper lanterns.