Undead and Undermined

Chapter THIRTY-TWO



So off I went, hopping on 94E and then 61S to Hastings. As I whizzed past the disturbing number of strip malls along the Woodbury/Cottage Grove stretch, I reminded myself that lying in general was bad, but lying to yourself was suicidal. So I wasn’t deluding myself: I was glad to have an excuse to get out of there.

Not that I didn’t want to be around my friends, or my husband. But too much had happened in just a few hours . . . and that wasn’t counting my yuck-o time-travel adventures. Something mundane like checking on my mom was comforting, even though I was checking on her to make sure the Antichrist hadn’t kidnapped her and my brother, or stabbed them with her Hellfire sword, or read Bible passages to them, or cajoled them into spending Thanksgiving Day working in a soup kitchen.

Ugh, T’giving. I almost forgot. I’d almost managed to forget. Gads, I hated that holiday. And for the record, I hated it long before it was trendy to despise the celebration of the genocidal slaughter (was that redundant?) of Native Americans whose dumbest move had been feeding Pilgrims so they didn’t starve, instead of filling them with arrows.

It seemed to me that, call me paranoid, Thanksgiving was a holiday custom-made to piss me off. Traditional family gatherings? What traditional family? What family, for that matter? Even if my Dad had really, really wanted to see me over T’giving, the Ant always talked him out of it. My mom refused to celebrate the genocide of innocent native etc., etc. Jessica’s parents had, thank God, died in November, so she really didn’t like November holidays . . . that wasn’t completely true; she had no problem with Veteran’s Day, come to think of it.

Laura’s adopted family celebrated by not being home and not eating together as a family . . . soup kitchen central, which is lovely on paper but the reality is, you’re on your feet all day serving cheap food to desperate people. I did it once and, yes, I’m a selfish cow, but never again. I ended the day slinking home and considering suicide by too much dark meat.

Boo-hoo, right? Yeah. I’m aware of how all that sounded. And I could make new traditions with my husband and brother/son, and Jessica and Dee-Nick’s new baby, and Tina and Marc. But that would involve maturity, thoughtfulness, and making a concerted effort not to loathe T’giving, and the whole thing just sounded exhausting.

Despite my pissy fulminations, my spirits rose when I pulled onto Fourth, my mom’s street, and headed toward her neat and clean two-story. Hope my mom had finally gotten around to baby-proofing . . . BabyJon would be walking before much longer. Probably. I should really crack a baby book one of these days. I had no idea what milestones to obsess about with other sisters/moms.

Just the fact that BabyJon was with my mother was cool, and odd. In the early days, Mom had had zero interest in babysitting her dead husband’s love child. (He, Laura, and I all had the same dad.) But sometimes unavoidable vampire shit came up and she’d grudgingly comply so I could help the Antichrist kill a serial killer, or rescue Sinclair from a dungeon full of evil librarians and pissed-off werewolves.

But as the weeks turned to months the l’il shitbox had charmed her . . . he was a very good baby, and only cried when he was hungry or cold. Cute as all hell, too. Mom had actually volunteered to take him for the weekend the day before Laura and I disappeared . . . I hadn’t had to ask her. Which turned out great, seeing as how I went to hell the next day. But I digress.

Now I needed to see him, wanted to hold him and study his cute fat baby body, and marvel at the infant who technically wasn’t my son, the baby I knew would grow into an admirable man in the future. The only son I would have, ever.

Was part of my problem with Jessica’s pregnancy simple jealousy? I had to admit that it was . . . I was selfish, but not deluded.

And I’ll admit it: I missed him! Granted, once he was around for a couple of hours and had shat his way through all the diapers in the bag and barfed pea puree all over my sweater and then wriggled to Sinclair’s Cole Haans and slobbered Enfamil drool into them, I would no longer miss him. But right now, I did. So here I was.

I pulled up to my mother’s small house in Hastings, a cute city right on the Mississippi River. My mom’s house was in Cowtown, a holdover from when the area was a big field full of (you guessed right) cows.

Minor digression: what is it with people letting animals dictate major roadways or sites for major cities? In Boston they paved the cow paths, saying, “Hey, if it’s good enough for slow-witted grain-grinding bovines, it’s good enough to hold the city for the next four hundred years,” and called it I-93.

In Mexico, they observed an eagle eating a snake while perched on a cactus and said, “Guys! You guys! We should totally build Tenochtitlan here!” and bam! Up went another enormous city. Because of the cactus. And, I guess, the snake. After all, what are the odds of seeing a cactus and a snake in the desert, with a desert eagle?

Don’t even get me started on the whole let’s-build-the-nation’s-capital-in-the-middle-of-a-steamy-swamp thing about DC. I just . . . I don’t know. People think I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and they’re right, but I’d never build a ginormous city without, you know, first doing some research.

Okay. Digression over. I sprang from my car, almost jogging around it in my haste to see mom and son/bro, but skidded to a halt the minute my feet touched her front walk.

A man was there. On the sidewalk right before the big glass-cut front door. Kissing my mother. Tongue kissing my mother. On her own sidewalk! And why was a strange man leaving my mom’s house before dawn? Was I witnessing . . . oh my God . . . was this a booty call? Was my mother his booty call?

Before I even knew I’d taken a step, I had my fingers sunk into his left shoulder. “I don’t care who you are, you’ve never been closer to being murdered in a really grisly way.” I yanked. He flew. Mom shrieked.