Undead and Undermined

Chapter TWENTY-SIX



“Well, finally,” was how Jessica chose to greet me. Nice. “I’ve been waiting all night. Literally all night. The sun’s coming up pretty soon.”

I was in no mood for discussing the hours I’d been in transit, or dead. “If you’d come with, you wouldn’t have had to wait,” I sniffed back. I was in zero mood for attitude. Too bad, because Jess had a belly full of it.

Tina and Sinclair had their heads together in one of the parlors, Marc was out parking the Ferrari in the garage, and Nick was getting the RV gassed again. I’d run right into the house to change my clothes and update my footgear. Tina had been a dear, but who packs flats with everything? Everything?

“Could have come with? Are you kidding me? A six-hour drive and me eight months pregnant? And knowing you and the King of Dick, you were banging all the way back to St. Paul, and there’s only one bathroom in the Mystery Machine.”

“Lame,” I announced, though I was giggling. “Was your plane in the shop?”

“Plane?”

“Your private—you don’t have a private plane in this timeline, do you?”

“In this economy?” Jessica looked horrified.

“Okay, that makes sense, but the private plane was cool. Though the Mystery Machine was an acceptable substitute. And Nick—”

“I knew,” my (ugh!) stepmother announced from behind Jessica, “she’d be as big as a house when she got pregnant out of wedlock. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Oh, yuck!”

“Don’t be like that,” Jessica said. “You don’t have to be a jerk all the time.”

“You’re one to talk,” I snapped back to the Ant. I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself the way I did when I found out Garrett was alive. Betsy Taylor learns from her mistakes. Of all the people, though! Mother Teresa was dead and the Ant was alive?

“Mother Teresa’s dead, right?” I whispered to Jessica.

“It’s disgusting,” my annoyingly alive stepmother continued. She was the only person I knew who could skulk as well as she mocked. “Flaunting that belly when she should be flaunting a wedding ring. And that sweater is too small. And all wrong for her complexion, which is too dark.”

“You got knocked up to get married!” I cried, amazed, as always, at the Ant’s selective memory.

“I did not!” Jess and the Ant said in unison.

“And your complexion’s fine.”

Jess blinked. “What?”

“Disgusting,” the Ant said. She was everything a man could want: her hair was too dyed and too tall, her electric faux silk dress was too faux, her pantyhose was all wrong for open-toed sandals, her faux fingernails were too red, she wasn’t especially smart, she wasn’t especially nice, and she used sex to get what she wanted.

Not in a romantic hey-Sinclair-let’s-stay-in-bed-all-night-and-find-new-ways-to-hurt-each-other way. In a darling-let’s-leave-your-seventh-grade-daughter-behindwhen-we-go-on-vacation-so-we-can-make-Disney-World- just-for-the-two-of-us way.

Now, which one of her odious personality traits was I forgetting? Oh, yeah. She was a bigot, and a snob.

“Not you,” I clarified, irritated. “You. What do you want, anyway? Shouldn’t you be off in your too-expensive, too-big house neglecting your son BabyJon, the sweetest baby God ever made, whom you do not deserve? Or making my poor idiot of a father’s life a living hell? And speaking of hell, your rotten daughter made the top of my shit list tonight, so I’ll be bouncing her skull off the fireplace bricks for a while.”

“Don’t you touch her!” the Ant snapped. “She’s more powerful than you’ll ever be, and prettier.”

“Liar!” I screamed. That was just—oooooh, low blow. Taller, maybe. I’d be okay with taller, maybe.

“Betsy!” Jessica screamed back. Oh, shit. Was labor rearing its ugly head? This was too much to ask of anyone, but especially me.

“Now look what you did,” I snarled in the Ant’s direction. “You’ve made her water blow up, or something.”

“Betsy.” Jessica’s color-of-green-Play-Doh fingernails sunk into my wrist and I yelped. “Who are you talking to?”

“What the hell does that—” I pointed at the Ant, who was checking her shoulder pads for dandruff. “It. Her. That. Ish! Don’t stare too long, you’ll go blind. My stepmaggot. Antonia. Nice try, but pretending she’s not there never works.”

“Antonia’s dead, Betsy.”

“Moron,” my dead stepmother added.