4
Loved ones may be upset by your unexplained three-day absence. If you’re not comfortable talking about your newly risen condition, try plausible explanations like a severe stomach flu, emergency dental surgery, or temporary amnesia.
—From The Guide for the Newly Undead
When the phone started ringing at around seven A.M., I realized the wisdom of sleeping in a soundproof coffin.
“It’s jealousy, sweetheart, nothing but pure jealousy,” Mama was saying when I pressed the receiver to my ear. Mama had dispensed with phone greetings years ago, when I started giving her reasons I couldn’t stay on the phone as soon as she said hello. “Mavis Stubblefield has had it in for me ever since I beat her in the Miss Half-Moon Hollow Pageant in 1967. She’s been waiting for years to get back at me, and now she’s gone and fired you. Jealousy.”
“Yeah, Mama, I’m sure that’s what it’s all about,” I said, straining to see the clock.
Wait, why wasn’t Mama screaming at me for disappearing? Why wasn’t she reliving the twenty-six hours of labor she suffered only to birth a child who didn’t call her every day? Why wasn’t she reminding me that it was seven A.M. and I was still unmarried? In my head, I cobbled together an explanation, which was impressive considering the whopping two hours of sleep.
“Mama, did you get a phone call this morning?” I asked, burrowing under the quilts. “A really early phone call?”
“Oh, yes, honey, from your Gabriel,” she chirped, as if she and the sexiest man not-quite-alive were exchanging recipes before dawn. And when did he become “my” Gabriel?
“He explained…well, I can’t remember what he said exactly, but I understood that you needed some time to yourself after you were so unfairly let go. I’m just happy that you found someone so charming to spend your time with.”
“Mmm-kay,” I murmured, deeply sorry that I’d cast aspersions on the ethics of mind wiping. I owed Gabriel a fruit basket and a membership in the Blood Type of the Month Club.
“Since you’re free today, why don’t you meet Jenny and me for lunch?” Mama asked.
“I don’t think I’ll be getting out much today, Mama.”
Mama gasped. “Why, honey, are you sick? Broke? Hurt?”
“Mama!” I shouted over the din of loving maternal intrusion. “Just come over, after dinner, and we’ll talk.”
Mama’s (s) mothering instinct could not be denied. “Do you want me to bring anything? I could make a pot pie.”
“No food. After dinner. Bring Daddy.” I hung up before she could answer.
How was I going to explain this to my parents? I foresaw a good deal of blaming and wailing in my immediate future. I pulled the pillow over my face in a lame attempt to suffocate myself. And then I remembered I didn’t need to breathe. Dang it.
“Don’t worry, pumpkin, I locked the doors. No one, meaning your mama, is going to barge in,” Jettie said, materializing at the foot of my bed. I shrieked, launching the pillow through her.
“Can you knock or put a bell around your neck or something?” I grumped. “Maybe rattle some chains before you walk into a room?”
“It’s good to see you’re still a morning person,” Jettie teased, tossing the pillow back at me. “Don’t worry, honey, if your Mama comes over, I’ll just give her the usual. Cold chills, goose bumps, a vague feeling of unease, as if she’s left the iron on. Nobody sticks around with that stuff going on.”
“Thanks, Aunt Jettie,” I said, falling asleep before the blankets settled over me.
As the sun set, my eyes snapped open. I felt great. Energized. Refreshed. All of the things those fancy mattresses are supposed to do for you. I bounded out of bed and threw the curtains back to bring in the moonlight. I wondered where I could get some of those fancy blackout shades that hotels use. I made a mental note to look up vampire redecorating Web sites.
I heard a knock at my front door, and my good mood dissipated. Mama was early. Knowing there was no time to get dressed, I trotted down the stairs and prepared for the parental pajama critique.
“Yoo-hoo?”
I skidded to a stop. Mama never said “yoo-hoo.”
I opened the front door. There was a pair of shapely legs sticking out from under a ridiculously large pink-wrapped gift basket. My world just kept getting weirder and weirder.
“Hello?”
“Hi!” the legs said. “I’m Missy Houston of the Newly Undead Welcoming Committee, Kentucky division.”
My uneasiness at letting a strange vampire into my home battled the manners Mama had pounded into my marrow. Manners, marrow, and Mama won out. “Would you like to put that down?”
“Thanks. Inhuman strength or not, this thang’s heavy,” she huffed, putting the mega-basket on my foyer table. Missy was wearing a perky petal-pink Chanel knockoff suit with a matching faux-Coach purse and heels. Even the headband in her perfectly flipped champagne-colored hair was pink. It was comforting to know that I didn’t have to give up pastels in my afterlife. I looked washed-out in black.
“It’s so nice to meet a newcomer,” Missy trilled in her melted-sugar twang, more Texas than Kentucky. (We tend to abuse our long I sounds as opposed to…all the sounds.) Missy shook my hand in a digit-crushing grip. Unsure of whether this was some sort of test, I resisted wincing and squeezed right back.
“Jane Jameson,” I said, keeping a bland smile plastered across my face. “How did you know I’ve been…”
“Turned? Vayamped out? Recruited to the legion of soulless bloodsuckers?” She trilled again at my perplexed expression. “Oh, shug, you’ve got to keep your sense of humor about being undead. Otherwise, you’ll just go toppling over the abyss into madness.”
Yet another throw-pillow saying to be stitched.
“I can sense the location of other vampires, their energy,” Missy explained. “Newbies tend to give off mega-waves when they rise. That’s why I’m in charge of the welcome wagon.”
“Makes sense.” I nodded. “Haven’t I seen you before?”
“On my billboards, most likely. Up until two years ago, I was one of the top-selling real estate agents in the tricounty area. I went to a convention in Boca Raton. I had one too many margaritas, met a tall, pale, and handsome man in the bar, and woke up a vampire.”
“I was mistaken for a deer and got shot,” I offered.
“Oh.” Finally, she was speechless. It didn’t last long. “I have always loved this house. Great upkeep, considering the age. They just don’t make them like this anymore. High ceilings. Huge kitchen. Wonderful windows. Great natural light, even though you can’t really appreciate that now. Original hardwood floors?”
I nodded, watching Aunt Jettie materialize at her writing desk. I glanced over to Missy, who was still appraising my floors as her needle-thin heels clicked on the polished wood. She didn’t notice the dearly departed Wildcats fan scowling in the corner.
“Well, this is just a little welcome gift from the local branch of the council,” Missy was saying. “Sort of an orientation in a basket. SPF 500 sunblock, iron supplements, floss, a six-pack of Faux Type O, a bottle of plasma-protein powder, and the numbers of every vamp-friendly blood bank in the tristate area. There’s also a copy of The Guide for the Newly Undead.”
“There’s a handbook?” I asked, plucking it from the pink-wrapped cornucopia. “Thank God.”
Aunt Jettie cleared her throat and rolled her eyes toward Missy.
“Well, this is very sweet,” I said. “I really appreciate it. I’m sure I’ll see you at the next pot luck or something.”
Missy laughed, swinging her tiny pink bag onto her arm. “You’re gonna be a hoot at the meetings, I can tell.”
Meetings? I was just kidding.
A few more minutes of polite chitchat, and Missy was firmly ensconced in her black Cadillac. After watching her taillights depart through the window, I turned to Aunt Jettie. “What was with the facial charades?”
“I just can’t stand Little Miss Matching Everything.” Jettie sneered as I toted the basket into my cheerful yellow kitchen with blue gingham curtains and set it on the white tile counter next to the cookie jar shaped like a cheeky raccoon. Jettie perched next to the sink. “Back when she was living, she tried to talk me into listing this place with her. Said that maybe I needed to go into one of those nice assisted-living places. The little snot.”
“Why couldn’t she see you? I thought seeing ghosts is one of the benefits of being undead.”
“I didn’t want her to see me,” Jettie said.
“Well, she brought treats, so she’s not half bad in my book,” I told her, removing the ginormous pink bow. As my stomach rumbled, I read over the label of Faux Type O. From what I had heard, it was the Rolling Rock of artificial bloods. Light and palatable, with a smooth finish and 120 percent of your recommended daily allowance of hemoglobin.
“A stranger drops fake blood on your doorstep, and you’re going to drink it?” Jettie asked. “I thought we had a nice long talk about stranger danger when you were seven.”
“There’s a safety seal.” I held it up for her inspection. “It’s either this or I go hunting for hitchhikers to feed on.”
Jettie covered her eyes, but she was able to see through her hands. I was not exactly thrilled at the prospect of snacking on the blood equivalent of Cheez Whiz, but I needed to get used to it. There was no way I was feeding on live victims on a regular basis. I couldn’t stand the thought of hunting when I was living. Obviously, that was some sort of cruelly ambiguous psychic foreshadowing.
What the hell. If it was gross, I had a package of fudge Pop Tarts that I could rub on the raw hamburger in my fridge.
Faux Type O came in little plastic jugs that reminded me of milk bottles. I popped the top and sniffed. It wasn’t bad, vaguely yeasty and salty. Jettie came in for a closer look.
“Do you mind?” I asked as she picked up a pencil and poked at my right upper fang. I brought the bottle to my lips, pinched my nose, and swallowed. It rolled past my lips, thick and smooth. I didn’t gag, which I took as a good sign.
“How is it?” Jettie asked.
“Not bad,” I said, rolling the remnants off my tongue. “It has a kind of Diet Coke aftertaste, artificial and beefy.”
“You make it sound just delightful,” Jettie snorted as I drained the bottle. I wiped my mouth and tossed the bottle into the recycling bin.
“So, you’re dead,” I said. “I wasn’t together enough last night to ask, what exactly do you do all day? Besides hide my keys.”
“I listen to your phone calls. Make you feel like you’re being watched. Move things around. Create cold spots.” At this point, I glared at her. Unmoved, she levitated my dish of Hershey Kisses just to show she could. “Sometimes I visit other spirits around town. You wouldn’t believe how haunted the Hollow is.”
“Oh, I think my mind is opening up to the possibility,” I said dryly. “Give me a for instance?”
“Well, the golf course. If people realized how many dead men in ugly pants are wandering around there, they wouldn’t go near it,” she said, smirking like the proverbial cat with a canary and/or cream. “Including your grandpa Fred.”
“Aw, I loved Grandpa Fred,” I said, pouting, which was difficult considering the fangs. “I hate to think of him wandering the earth for eternity in plaid polyester.”
“Oh, he’s fine, honey.” She waved a hand. “Happy as a clam. And even happier now that we’ve been seeing each other.”
“You mean you’re seeing him as in dating him? I honestly don’t know what to say to that.” I shook my head.
“I can’t help it if your grandma married all of the good-looking men in town. We were bound to cross paths sometime,” Jettie said, shrugging.
She had a point. To recall childhood memories of my grandmother, I didn’t need the scent of oatmeal cookies or Ivory soap, just Designer Imposter Chanel No. 5 and hearing the phrase, “Darling, I’ve met the most wonderful man.” My grandma Ruthie, Jettie’s sister, had been married four times, so many times that I started calling every old man I saw at the grocery store Grandpa. Mama put a stop to that after Grandpa Number Four, Fred. He was a nice man. Shame about the lightning strike.
All of Grandma Ruthie’s husbands had died under weird circumstances. A milk truck hit Grandpa John, my real grandpa, back in the days when milk was actually delivered door-to-door. Grandpa Tom had a heretofore-unknown allergy to rhubarb and had an anaphylactic reaction while Grandma was baking her famous strawberry-rhubarb pie. Grandpa Jimmy died from a brown recluse bite on the inside of the throat. His doctor’s article on the improbability of such a bite was published in several medical journals. And poor Fred, struck down on the twelfth hole at the Half-Moon Hollow public golf course. It’s a wonder Grandma hadn’t been questioned by the police or at least gotten a cool nickname like the Black Widow.
Of course, that would probably be in poor taste, given what happened to Grandpa Jimmy.
That was why I was allowed to go to the Wacky Rivers Water Park with Rae Summerall on the day of Jimmy’s funeral. Apparently, Mama realized that it wasn’t normal for a little girl to have a designated funeral dress. After Fred, she told Grandma it was time to slow her prolonged death march down the aisle. Grandma had been dating a very nice man named Bob for the last five years. They’d been engaged for four and a half.
Bob was proof that medical science could keep pretty much anyone alive. He’d had his gall bladder, one of his lungs, part of his pancreas, and his prostate removed. He spent more time in the hospital than out. Why was this sweet man engaged to my Grandma? I can only imagine that he actually wanted to die, and he saw marriage to her as his only way out.
“As long as Ruthie keeps killing off husbands, I’ll have an active social afterlife.” Jettie preened.
“That’s just gross.” I shuddered. “But maybe your committing postmortem infidelity will distract Mama and Daddy from my nifty new nocturnal lifestyle.”
Jettie blanched. “Your parents are coming here? Now? Oh, honey, that’s not going to go well.”
“Thanks, that helps,” I told her, stuffing the pink bow and cellophane into the trash. “I bet you ten bucks Mama shows up with a pot pie.”
Mama’s almost-from-scratch chicken pot pie was my favorite B.D. meal. All crusty and filled with cream-of-chickeny goodness. I already missed it, though I did have seven of them in my freezer. Mama operated under the assumption that I was eight years old and incapable of feeding myself. It was physically impossible for her to cross my threshold without some form of nourishment. She once offered me cheese crackers from her purse while we were standing in my kitchen.
Like Grandma Ruthie, Mama attributed Jettie’s leaving me River Oaks to senility. Obviously, it would have been much better to leave the family manse to my sister, Jenny, who would be able to care for the house properly. Crafty, thrifty, and the proud owner of an industrial-grade glue gun, Jenny made Martha Stewart look like a bag lady. And she fulfilled each of my mother’s daughterly requirements by being (a) elected cheerleading captain in high school, (b) married to a chiropractor right after graduating from paralegal school, (c) the mother of two boys, Andrew and Bradley. They were barely children, really, more like hyper badgers in Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts.
Nonetheless, Jenny assumed that bearing fruit of her loins meant that all family possessions funneled to her. After I moved into River Oaks, I found dozens of little preprinted “Jenny” stickers marking a good deal of the antiques. In anticipation of Aunt Jettie dropping dead, Jenny had surreptitiously tattooed furniture, figurines, and family portraits, with the little blue dots to claim dibs on what she saw as her share of the inheritance. Fortunately, Aunt’s Jettie’s iron-clad, very specific will prevented what I’m sure would have been a posthumous robbery. But I was still finding stickers in strange places. I had no idea how she managed to stick them without me seeing her.
She was like a greedy ninja.
From the front walk, I could hear Mama haranguing my father about this big old place and how a single girl like me couldn’t keep up with mowing the lawn or cleaning the gutters. The house didn’t actually have gutters, but to point that out would tip them off to my super-hearing.
“Jenny could have turned this into a real showplace,” Mama was saying as they climbed the front steps. “And Jane, well, she never had any sense for decorating. And I just worry about her being out here all alone.”
“She can take care of herself, Sherry,” Daddy said, his tone weary. He seemed more and more weary these days when dealing with Mama.
My father. What can I say about the man who read with me every night from birth? And I’m not talking Good Night, Moon or Pat the Bunny. I’ll bet I’m the only person on earth to hear two Lincoln biographies before my first birthday. Daddy was the head of the history department at the local community college. It colored his parenting techniques.
Daddy was the one who persuaded Mama not to enter me in the Little Miss Half-Moon Hollow pageant. He was the one who declared that it was wrong to put me at another family’s table at my sister’s wedding. If not for his regrettable taste in middle names, he would be Father of the Century.
“Hi, baby,” he said as I opened the door. He kissed my cheek, smelling of old books and Aqua Velva. Before I could answer, Mama was shoving a hot foil-wrapped bundle into my hands and checking my furniture for dust.
“Don’t you worry, honey, everything will be fine,” she said, bustling through my kitchen to check for dirty dishes.
Setting the pot pie aside, I led Mama into the living room before she could start alphabetizing my spice rack. And then we started our usual passive-aggressive conversational volley.
“Don’t you worry about not being able to find another job,” Mama said, wiping her fingers down my mantel.
My internal response: That hadn’t occurred to me, Mama, but thank you.
“Nobody I’ve talked to thinks being fired was your fault.”
Exactly how many people have you talked to?
“I’ve already talked to DeeDee about you working down at the quilt shop with me.”
Oh, good merciful St. Jude on toast.
After Jenny and I hurtled from the nest, Mama took a part-time job at A Stitch in Time, a shop that sold fabric and quilting supplies. In the five years she had worked there, I’d received quilted vests for every birthday and Christmas.
I hope this gives you some idea of what I was dealing with.
I couldn’t visit my mother at the shop for more than a few minutes at a time. I had allergic reactions to fabric sizing and old women asking me when I was going to settle down. Working there would be my damnation to whatever circle of hell is dedicated to busybodies and fabric artists.
“Oh, Mama, I don’t think that would be possible. Ever.”
Aunt Jettie appeared at my right, laughing her phantom butt off. I growled at a decibel level below human hearing.
“Let me help,” Jettie whispered. I shook my head imperceptibly. She rolled her eyes and faded out of sight.
“Mama, I think you and Daddy need to sit—”
Mama sighed. “Now, Jane, I don’t want you moping around this big old place by yourself. I think, for the time being, you should move back in with Daddy and me.”
St. Jude had just jumped from the toaster to the frying pan. I made a sound somewhere between a screech and a wheeze. Sensing my distress, Daddy said, “Oh, Sherry, leave the girl alone. Can’t you see she’s got something to tell us?”
“Oh, um, thanks, Daddy,” I said, motioning for them to sit on the couch. Mama fluffed the pillows and beat unseen dust from the cushions before making herself comfortable.
Jettie popped up behind the sofa. It was so weird that they had no idea she was standing less than a foot behind them. “Tell them you’re pregnant with a married minister’s baby, then say, ‘Just kidding, I’m a vampire,’” she suggested.
“Not helping,” I whispered.
“What’s that, honey?” Mama asked, buffing fingerprints off my coffee table.
“Well, I have some interesting, exciting news,” I said, stalling.
“It’s about that Gabriel, isn’t it?” Mama squealed. “You’re engaged?”
“Mama, I’ve only known him for three days!” I cried.
Mama made that tsk/sigh combination sound only mothers can master. “Well, are you at least seeing him? Have you tried dressing a little more feminine? Making an effort? You know, you’re not getting any younger.”
I snorted. I wouldn’t be getting any older, for that matter. “Mama, I don’t think you—”
“You’re never going to get married if you don’t lower your standards a little bit.”
“Mama—”
“Don’t you want to be settled? Get married? Have a fami—”
“Mama!” I shouted. “I’m not engaged. I’m not dating anyone. I—I…”
Time slowed. I could read every muscle, every pore in my parents’ faces. Daddy’s eyes were narrowed, considering me carefully. Worry crinkled the lines at the edges of his eyes. Mama’s mouth was drawn, clearly expecting some sort of bad news beyond “your daughter was fired in a spectacularly public manner that will be chewed over for months.” Their emotions came in stinging slaps of scent. Confusion, disappointment, irritation, sadness, impatience, a sour haze that was making my head ache. And that was just from Mama. My eyes burned with unshed tears. How do you tell someone that their child has died? How do you explain when that child is sitting in front of them, seemingly alive? How do you tell your parents that you’ve moved beyond them on the evolutionary scale? And that your mama’s going to need to serve O negative alongside her Thanksgiving gravy?
Well, I didn’t. Because I’m a great big coward.
“I’m not ready to date anybody right now, Mama,” I said, swiping at my eyes. “And I’m not going to move back home. I just need some time to focus on finding a new job and figuring out what I’m going to do next. I’ll be fine.”
“I told you, you’re going to come to work at the quilt shop with me,” she insisted.
“No. Just no.”
Her lip trembled as she heaved a sigh and stared at the ceiling. Oh, crap. She did the same thing when I announced that I was attending college three hundred miles away and finally severing that pesky umbilical cord. That was the Christmas I got my first quilted vest. You have to admire a woman who exacts revenge through handicrafts. “What’s wrong with working at the quilt shop?”
“Nothing!” I cried.
“Do you have something better planned?” she demanded.
“No,” I said. “But I have planned not to work at the quilt shop.”
I looked to Daddy for help, but he was staring out the window with a puzzled expression.
“What’s this interesting news, then?” Mama demanded. “You said you had interesting news.”
I groped for some plausible fib. Fortunately, this was the moment Daddy noticed the absence of Big Bertha. “Janie, where’s your car?”
“Oh, it broke down the other night,” I said, a little too quickly. “It’s in a shop over in Murphy. That’s kind of what kept me held up for the last couple of days.”
Daddy scrutinized my face. I made a comprehensive study of the crown molding. I’ve never been able to lie to my father. I rat myself out before I can be accused of anything. The one time I smoked pot in college, I called Daddy the next morning to confess because the idea that he could find out any other way made me want to throw up. After expressing extreme disappointment and making me feel two feet tall, he promised not to tell Mama, because she would have made me leave school to enter rehab that very minute. It’s not exactly a healthy dynamic, but it’s the only one we have.
I managed to shush the two of them long enough to describe Big Bertha’s post-Shenanigans breakdown. Mama proceeded to skin Daddy for not performing routine maintenance on “that old hunk of junk.” Over the din, I gave a heavily edited version of my long walk home that night. I decided to omit the part about being shot or identifying the drunken hunter. I did not like Bud McElray. At the same time, I didn’t want my cousins Dwight and Oscar to beat Bud bloody with a sock full of batteries. Is that considered forgiveness?
I also skirted around the “got turned into a vampire” portion of the proceedings. Again, I’m a huge coward. I told them I’d been so caught up in the wounds to my pride I just couldn’t face anybody. I had holed up at an undisclosed location to think. Technically, that wasn’t a lie. It was stretching the truth to the breaking point, but it wasn’t a lie.
“But we’re your family,” Mama huffed, stretching the word out to “faaaamily” in a way that set my fangs on edge. Being faaaamily justified a lot of things in Mama’s book, including signing me up for an online matchmaking service without my consent and attempting to wax my eyebrows while I was napping. “Who are you going to turn to if not your family? That’s why you need to come stay with us, Janie. You need someone to take care of you.”
“I’m twenty seven years old!” I cried. “I can take care of myself! I don’t need you folding my laundry and pouring my Cheerios every morning.”
Jettie appeared at my left and whispered. “I can take their car keys if you want me to, pumpkin.”
“You think I want to prevent them from leaving?” I whispered back.
“Who are you talking to?” Mama demanded, turning to my father. “John, she’s talking to herself.”
“I’m not—” I started, then reconsidered the wisdom of reintroducing my parents to dear departed Aunt Jettie, who never liked my mother anyway. “Yes, I am. I’m talking to myself.”
“And you won’t even think about coming back home?” Mama asked.
“Mama, you remember what it was like when I lived at home. I think one of us would go insane,” I said. “And I don’t think it would be you.”
“Well, if you’re going to be that way, I’m not going to stay here and be insulted.” She exhaled her “You don’t care how much I worry about you” martyr’s sigh. She tucked her handbag under her arm in a prim gesture and made her way to the door. “John?”
Daddy shot me a bewildered look and rose. “We’ll talk soon, honey.”
“’Bye, Daddy.” I kissed his cheek. “Love you.”
He squeezed my hand and winked at me. “Love you, too, pumpkin.”
“John!” Mama yelled from my front porch. As Daddy walked out, Mama poked her head back inside. “Just pop that pot pie in the oven to reheat at three-fifty for thirty minutes.” Then she disappeared, leaving me and Aunt Jettie gaping after her.
I flopped down on the couch. “I’m adopted, right? Or maybe Dad had some torrid affair with a brilliant but sensible humanities professor. I was the result of their passion, and Dad forced Mama to raise his bastard child as her own?”
“Nope,” Jettie said, shaking her translucent head. “She’s your mother. I asked. Plus, you do look a bit like her. When you’re angry, you both get these tense lines around your mouth…Look, there they are.”
“You’re lucky you’re dead already,” I said, chucking a throw pillow at her. It went right through her torso and bounced off the TV cabinet.
“So, you didn’t tell them,” Jettie observed as I stomped into the kitchen, my bare feet slapping loudly on the tile.
“Nothing gets by you,” I muttered, whipping the aluminum foil cover off Mama’s pot pie. “I just couldn’t. Did you see the looks on their faces? They’re already freaked out by the whole ‘unemployed spinster daughter who lives alone’ thing. I don’t think I want to add ‘dead’ and ‘drinks blood’ to the mix right now.”
“You have to tell them, Janie,” Jettie said, in a firmer tone than she normally takes with me. “‘Did you hear Jane’s a vampire?’ is not something you want your parents to overhear at the Coffee Spot.”
“I will tell them at some point. I just need to get a better fix on my powers, my schedule…”
“Fraidy-cat,” Jettie muttered.
“Poltergeist,” I shot back. The pie was still warm, the gloriously flaky golden crust buckling under my fingers as I scooped out a bite. But it smelled off, as if the cream of chicken had expired. And the onions were strong enough to make my eyes water.
“Honey, you don’t want to do that,” Jettie said. “Look, there are strings attached to this pot pie.”
“I haven’t eaten solid food in three days,” I told her.
“I don’t know if I can watch this,” Jettie said, blanching. “Pot pie is not a finger food.”
“Shhh.” I shoveled the rich, warm pie into my mouth, expecting the pleasant childhood memories I normally associated with the meal to come flooding back to me. Pot pie was one of the few meals Jenny and I could agree on, so Mama made it often. The meals tended to be tension-free because my mouth was full and I couldn’t argue with anybody.
Instead of the homey flavors of my childhood, I tasted dirt. Ash. Dirt. Gym clothes. I spat the casserole out and yelled something along the lines of “Bleh! Blech! Blah!” and ran for the wastebasket. After I’d tossed up whatever was left in my stomach, I wiped my tongue with a blue gingham dishtowel.
“It tastes…Bleh, it tastes like disappointment and feet. It tastes like you cooked it.” I shuddered.
Jettie frowned. “I don’t see why that comment was necessary.”
“The truth hurts.”
“So, no solid food, then?” she asked brightly. “I guess I’ll just empty that box of Hostess Cupcakes into the trash. You can’t eat them after all.”
“Now, see, that’s just mean.”