by Molly Harper
“He really hates the recorder,” I said, my tone apologetic.
“The recorder hates him back,” she retorted. “That is the sum total of my report. Well done so far this year, to you both. I do, however, feel that I should inform you that Mr. and Mrs. Les Stratton have contacted me, both at my school phone number and on my personal landline, requesting updates on Danny’s progress. Because they are not listed as Danny’s legal guardians, I refused to release that information. I don’t care that my mother was a friend of Marge’s mother or that Les’s fishing buddy serves on the school board. I will not be bullied into violating school policy or my personal ethics.”
I kept my face still and calm, even when the gears in my head started to turn. “Would you mind if I ask when they contacted you?”
“Yesterday morning,” Miss Steele told me.
Yesterday morning, after they’d received the notice from the judge informing Marge and Les that they were not supposed to contact the school, much less demand copies of Danny’s academic records. Surely their lawyers had told them that. Had they not understood, or did they just not care?
Frankly, I would almost welcome the intrusion if their crap decisions kept them from taking Danny away from me.
“And if they proceed with their threat to subpoena school records as part of their custody case, I would like you to know that the only review the court will see from me is my usual report of sufficient classroom performance and adequate behavior. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“Thank you, Miss Steele.”
I rose, and she shook my hand, with more strength than you would expect from a woman approaching her eighties. “I never did like Les Stratton,” Miss Steele muttered as I walked out of her class. “He’s managed to be a pompous ass since birth.”
Of all the places I’d expected support, Miss Steele was startling, to say the least. Snickering, I caught up to Kerrianne in the hallway. She looked tired but bemused as she linked her arm through mine.
“How’s Danny doing?”
“Talkative, occasionally threatening to his classmates, but intellectually salvageable. How was your conference?” I asked.
Kerrianne smirked. “Oh, the usual. Braylen’s a joy to have in class, but could I please do something about her reading those Percy Jackson books tucked inside her grammar textbook while the rest of the class is diagramming sentences?”
“You would think the teacher would be happy that Braylen is reading, instead of, say, diagramming obscene sentences on her desk with a scented marker.”
Kerrianne snorted. “Well, the other students can see Braylen doing it, which is openly challenging Mrs. Morgan’s authority. Also, it’s disrespectful, even if Braylen is doing well in the class. So we’re going to have to talk about it.”
We paused as another woman shouted, “He drew what on another boy’s face in Sharpie?” from a nearby classroom.
“It could be worse,” Kerrianne conceded.
Nodding, I agreed. “It could be worse.”
As we approached the bake-sale table, I couldn’t help but notice that my brookies were still piled up on the worktable, not set out for sale. In fact, they were piled up next to the crumpled masking tape and table decorations, as if Chelsea and Casey were about to toss my contribution out with the trash.
Really?
I’d spent—hell, Jane had spent—the better part of two hours baking those damn brookies, and they couldn’t be bothered to set them out? When the rest of the table was damn near empty? I’d known some of these vipers for years. Years. And now they wouldn’t take my damn bake-sale contributions? Because I was a vampire? Were they afraid I’d slipped something into the brownie batter? Or was it just my general condition that “contaminated” the food?
“Hold my purse,” I told Kerrianne, striding toward the table.
“Nothing good ever followed that statement,” Kerrianne whispered harshly.
“Chelsea, Casey, is there a reason my brookies are on the back table, instead of being set out for sale?” I asked sweetly. “It seems like you’ve sold just about everything else.”
Chelsea was about to speak, but Casey interjected, “I guess no one’s in the mood for brownies tonight.”
A few heads turned our way. Parents gathered in the entryway, who had been muttering to themselves about their kids’ progress reports, were now staring at the spectacle of Libby Stratton getting her brookies thrown back in her face. I was grateful, for once, that I was incapable of blushing, because my face would be on fire.
I glanced down at the platter to the left labeled “Brownies,” which was practically decimated. “Mmm-hmm.”
“We can bag them up so you can take them home,” Casey offered.
Now, under normal circumstances, in a normal town, that comment probably wouldn’t have stung. But here in the Hollow, bake sales were a big fund-raising business. Why? Because no treat was left behind. If a male Hollow resident saw that his wife’s or girlfriend’s cupcakes were about to be left on the bake-sale table, he would step in and buy leftover treats. It was a little bit like that scene in Oklahoma! where the cowboys bid for their sweethearts’ picnic baskets to publicly declare themselves a couple. It secured extra cash for the charity raising money, helped the lady in question save face, and gave the men a chance to beat their chests a little bit. In previous years, it hadn’t been an issue, because my triple chocolate chip cookies always got snatched up. But now . . .
I smiled sweetly, fangs fully extended, making Casey recoil. “You know what? Why don’t you take those bags of baked treats, wrap them up in craft paper, tie them with a pretty raffia bow, bend over, and shove them up your—”
A rough hand wrapped around my bicep, squeezing gently. “Actually, I was just thinkin’ a brownie would hit the spot.”
I looked up to see Wade giving Chelsea and Casey his best “aw, shucks, ma’am” grin. While Casey had drawn back, patting the worktable behind her to check for her purse, Chelsea’s smile ratcheted up several degrees, and she stepped closer to the bake-sale table, leaning over ever so slightly to give him a better view of her V-necked cleavage.
“Oh, well, then you’ll have to try my brownies, Wade, double fudge,” Chelsea practically purred. I arched an eyebrow. Chelsea was married to the main morning DJ for the local Christian-music station. Despite her husband’s cheerful on-air persona, I sincerely doubted that “Brother Happy” would be at all happy with the way Chelsea was staring at Wade’s tattooed arms. Frankly, I didn’t like the way she was staring at Wade’s tattooed arms.
“Actually, I got a hankerin’ for cookies and brownies all wrapped into one, so why don’t ya just give me those brookies back there?” Wade drawled.
“That’s fine.” Chelsea, a bit deflated, asked, “How many?”
Wade pulled his wallet from his back pocket, letting the chain that kept it in place slap against his thigh. “All of ’em.”
Chelsea’s baby-blue eyes bugged out. And I’m sure mine were twice as big.
“All of them?” I whispered as Wade dug cash out of his wallet. “Wade, that’s fifty dollars’ worth of brookies.”
Wade dropped the bills into Chelsea’s hand. “And?”
“I’m not going to let you spend fifty dollars on my cooking,” I hissed. “That’s throwing good money after bad.”
“I’m sure they’re gonna be delicious,” Wade said, just a little too loudly. The few parents who weren’t side-eyeing the proceedings had turned around to watch Wade’s transaction. I watched helplessly and accepted my less-than-stellar offering in return.
Wade stretched his hand out to me. “You ready to go, darlin’?”
The angry vise grip I had on my jaw was the only thing that kept it from dropping open. And Chelsea looked like she was about to fall over from shock. For all intents and purposes, according to Hollow tradition, Wade Tucker had just openly declared that I was his girl.
Stunned silent, I cleared my throat and slipped my hand into Wade’s warm human hand
. He took the brookies in his free hand and led me past Kerrianne, whose equally shell-shocked expression was giving way to a sinister grin.
“See you later,” she whispered sotto voce. “And you’re gonna give me details, woman.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I murmured. As soon as I figured out what the hell had just happened.
Once we cleared the front door, my shoulders sagged from the tension of my ramrod posture. I sighed, rubbing my free hand over my face. Wade’s hand slipped around my waist, and he guided me toward my minivan.
“I can’t believe I keep letting them get to me, when I’ve got so many other things to worry about. I can’t believe I baked those damn brookies. Do you have any idea how bad brownies smell to a vampire’s nose? I feel like I’ve been rolling around in toxic sludge for the past couple of hours.”
“Ah, screw ’em,” Wade told me, nudging me against the hood of my van and dropping the brookies gently to the ground. “I’ll eat every one of those damn brownie-cookie things.”
He was standing so close, bracketing my legs with his thighs and pinning me to the van. I laughed when he took my hands in his, lacing our fingers together as his hair fell forward over his forehead. “So I guess I’ll be picking you up from the hospital when you get sick from cocoa overload.”
“It’d be worth it if it took that miserable look off your face.” I could feel his breath against my mouth, like I could swallow his words, breathe him in.
“You know what buying all those brookies means in the Hollow, Wade. You know what people are going to think, especially after Roy seeing us in the parking lot the other night—which, by the way, seems to be a bit of a pattern with us. And I don’t want things to become . . . difficult for you and Harley because you’re getting lumped together with me.”
“Darlin’, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I ain’t exactly the Hollow’s idea of a model citizen. If you think people give you the cold shoulder around here, you should see how quick they clam up when the tattooed guy comes strolling into the Quik Mart. Besides, ya don’t have a husband to step in and defend your bakin’ honor. I thought you’d appreciate the help.”
“I do, I just . . . It’s been a while since anyone . . . I do appreciate it.”
“You never really talk about him. Your husband.”
“And you don’t talk about Harley’s mom,” I countered.
“Should we?”
No. Absolutely not. I did not want to hear about the beautiful woman who had given birth to Harley and walked away, breaking Wade’s heart. Because then I might have to track her down and break her face. “I don’t know. Isn’t it sort of early to share our tales of woe?”
“We’ve survived a Bigfoot birthday party and made out against your minivan at a shoppin’ center. I’d say we’re due some backstory. Did ya love him?”
“I thought I loved him, in the beginning. I was young, and I was stupid, and I thought that being loved by someone meant that they stuck around, that you didn’t fight with them all of the time. I didn’t exactly have a great role model on which to base a comparison. I married him because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. We dated for more than a year. He proposed to me at one of his family’s famous Fourth of July barbecues. Just knelt down in front of me and sixty or so of his nearest and dearest and shoved a ring at me. And then compounded the pressure by saying the ring was my birthday present. How was I supposed to say no?”
“Ya say, ‘No, thank you, I don’t wanna marry you because I don’t think I love you,’ ” he said, doing a very poor job of impersonating me.
“Well, when you are a woman in her twenties living in a small town and you have been dating a man for a year, if he proposes to you in front of his family, you have to have a pretty good reason for saying no. Like ‘he’s a compulsive-gambling hoarder who parades around in my underwear when I’m at church.’ Something like that. I knew we didn’t have a lot of passion between us, but I thought we had a firm foundation, one of those slow and steady couples who make it for the long haul. You know? But the longer we were married, the more he became like his father, and the more he expected me to be like his mother . . . and I knew I’d made a mistake. But we had Danny, and I . . . just made the best of it. And then he passed away, and I’m still not sure how to feel about it.”
Wade was still giving me side-eye.
“OK, Mr. Judgy, how did you end up president of the Cranky Single Parent Club?” Apparently, my need to protect myself from information was outweighed by my need to redirect his focus.
“Well, I wish I could say it was some great tragic romance like yours.” He smirked at me. I scratched my nose with my middle finger, which he seemed to find hilarious, given the way he cackled. “But ta be honest, Lisa Ann was just some girl I dated for a couple of months. Nothing serious, just ‘Hey, you’re here, I’m here, and our parts match up.’ ”
“Ew.”
“You asked.”
“I should have clarified which details I was asking for,” I mumbled.
“Sooner or later, we just lost interest,” he said. “I stopped callin’, and she moved on. But a couple weeks later, she shows up with a pink plus sign on a stick. She didn’t believe in ‘options,’ said she was keepin’ it. I had my doubts, I’m not going to lie. But when a Tucker screws up, he pays the price. So I gave her money for the doctor’s appointments, baby things, vitamins. Hell, I even asked her to marry me. She said no, thank God. And she got real quiet at the end, just when I was really starting to think of that bump under her tank top as a real little person. She just shut herself off. Wouldn’t tour the hospital. Wouldn’t take those breathin’ classes. Wouldn’t talk about what was gonna happen after he got here.
“That baby was born, and he was a Tucker, all right. There was no denying him. Not that I would have anyway. I took one look, and that was it. I was in love with my boy, and it was deeper than anything I’d ever felt in my life.”
I smiled with the silly sort of kinship only another parent would understand. “And Lisa Ann?”
“Checked out of the hospital the minute she was allowed, signed the papers sayin’ she didn’t want him. She told the nurses that I could give him up for adoption if I wanted to, but she was done.”
“And you never saw her again?”
“Naw. She moved to Nashville, last I heard, waitin’ tables in some karaoke bar. We don’t need her. A mama who’s going to ditch and run when things get tough? That’s worse than no mama at all. Besides, we do just fine on our own. Can’t say it doesn’t pay off. ’Cause in return, I get this.” He pulled a drawing from his back pocket. It showed a little boy and a bigger man, both with bright yellow hair, sitting on a motorcycle, big smiles on their faces.
“Aw, that’s beautiful. I got this.” I pulled out Danny’s drawing.
“Is that Bigfoot?”
I nodded. “Yes, it is.”
He guffawed. “That’s awesome.”
“But it never gets any easier, does it?” I sighed, looking at Danny’s “nighttime family.”
“Do ya ever get mad, that ya had to go through all this to keep your son?”
“I’m not one for ‘why me’s,” I told him. “I mean, why not me? When people hear that someone they know is sick, they want to hear something that person did to bring it on themselves. Something they did to deserve it, you know? Like ‘She was a two-pack-a-day smoker’ or ‘He worked with radioactive waste’ or ‘He’s the Nielsen family that kept According to Jim on for so long.’ They’re looking for something that will separate them from whoever’s suffering, because they need to tell themselves that it’s not going to happen to them. But honestly, I was a nonsmoker who stayed away from the sun and processed foods and hair dye. My only crime was faulty genes. There are times when I wonder if I’ve done the right thing. I mean, there were times when I was human that I was absolutely sure I was the worst mother in the world, but at least then, I didn’t pose a direct threat to my son. I question myself constantly.”
“That’s the job, the doubtin’,” Wade said with a shrug. “When Harley was a baby, ’bout two months old, I got him to sleep almost through the night through a combination of a warm bath, a big bottle, and a whole album’s worth of Kenny Rogers songs. I felt like the smartest man alive. And the very next day, he started hollering like he was about to explode. Nothing would soothe him. Late-onset colic, the doctor called it.”
“It happens sometimes,” I said.
“Well, it was friggin’ awful. The next six months were like one of those psychological experiments you see in horror movies, the ones with the sleep deprivation and the hallucinations? One morning, I stumbled into the pediatrician’s office—in my sweatpants and my huntin’ boots—after being up all night with Harley screamin’ his head off, convinced that my baby had one of those exotic diseases people catch in the rainforest. The doctor actually sent me down to the radiology department for a full workup—X-rays, scans, the whole bit. And while we were waiting for the results, I changed Harley’s diaper. I pulled his foot out of his onesie, and the doctor noticed that his big toe was just about purple. He had a ‘hair tourniquet’ wrapped around his big toe. It happens sometimes when hair gets trapped inside the baby’s pajamas in the dryer. The doctor cut the hair loose, and Harley stopped cryin’ all at once. I felt like the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. All that fuss over a damn hairball. And then I thought about all those hospital bills I was about to get, over some stupid hair. I will admit, I started cryin’, big boo-hoo sobbin’ right there in the middle of the exam room. It was not my manliest moment by a long shot. But the doctor patted my shoulder through the whole thing and gave me a piece of advice.”
“And what was that?”
“Bein’ a parent is a constant cycle of gettin’ yer ass handed to ya. Anytime you think you’re ahead of the game, that you got it all figured out, that’s when reality pops up and bites ya.”
“A man with a medical degree said that to you?”
“I’m paraphrasin’,” he said, shifting his shoulders.
I laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time someone—besides Jane—let me babble on like that. Wade actually listened to me, and he didn’t try to “fix” me. And while he did make the occasional grand gesture, like mass brookie consumerism, he recognized my need to handle things on my own. He didn’t try to tell me what I could be doing better or step in to take care of a problem for me. I could handle a little more of that in my life.