Historical or not, I’d lived in this house since I was about seven, and I’d visited it often before then, so I loved it. It was just a big old family home, too big for Granny and me, I guess. It had a broad front covered by a screened-in porch, and it was painted white, Granny being a traditionalist all the way. I went through the big living room, strewn with battered furniture arranged to suit us, and down the hall to the first bedroom on the left, the biggest.
Adele Hale Stackhouse, my grandmother, was propped up in her high bed, about a million pillows padding her skinny shoulders. She was wearing a long-sleeved cotton nightgown even in the warmth of this spring night, and her bedside lamp was still on. There was a book propped in her lap.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hi, honey.”
My grandmother is very small and very old, but her hair is still thick, and so white it almost has the very faintest of green tinges. She wears it kind of rolled against her neck during the day, but at night it’s loose or braided. I looked at the cover of her book.
“You reading Danielle Steele again?”
“Oh, that woman can sure tell a story.” My grandmother’s great pleasures were reading Danielle Steele, watching her soap operas (which she called her “stories”) and attending meetings of the myriad clubs she’d belonged to all her adult life, it seemed. Her favorites were the Descendants of the Glorious Dead and the Bon Temps Gardening Society.
“Guess what happened tonight?” I asked her.
“What? You got a date?”
“No,” I said, working to keep a smile on my face. “A vampire came into the bar.”
“Ooh, did he have fangs?”
I’d seen them glisten in the parking lot lights when the Rats were draining him, but there was no need to describe that to Gran. “Sure, but they were retracted.”
“A vampire right here in Bon Temps.” Granny was as pleased as punch. “Did he bite anybody in the bar?”
“Oh, no, Gran! He just sat and had a glass of red wine. Well, he ordered it, but he didn’t drink it. I think he just wanted some company.”
“Wonder where he stays.”
“He wouldn’t be too likely to tell anyone that.”
“No,” Gran said, thinking about it a moment. “I guess not. Did you like him?”
Now that was kind of a hard question. I mulled it over. “I don’t know. He was real interesting,” I said cautiously.
“I’d surely love to meet him.” I wasn’t surprised Gran said this because she enjoyed new things almost as much as I did. She wasn’t one of those reactionaries who’d decided vampires were damned right off the bat. “But I better go to sleep now. I was just waiting for you to come home before I turned out my light.”
I bent over to give Gran a kiss, and said, “Night night.”
I half-closed her door on my way out and heard the click of the lamp as she turned it off. My cat, Tina, came from wherever she’d been sleeping to rub against my legs, and I picked her up and cuddled her for a while before putting her out for the night. I glanced at the clock. It was almost two o’clock, and my bed was calling me.
My room was right across the hall from Gran’s. When I first used this room, after my folks had died, Gran had moved my bedroom furniture from their house so I’d feel more homey. And here it was still, the single bed and vanity in white-painted wood, the small chest of drawers.
I turned on my own light and shut the door and began taking off my clothes. I had at least five pair of black shorts and many, many white T-shirts, since those tended to get stained so easily. No telling how many pairs of white socks were rolled up in my drawer. So I didn’t have to do the wash tonight. I was too tired for a shower. I did brush my teeth and wash the makeup off my face, slap on some moisturizer, and take the band out of my hair.
I crawled into bed in my favorite Mickey Mouse sleep T-shirt, which came almost to my knees. I turned on my side, like I always do, and I relished the silence of the room. Almost everyone’s brain is turned off in the wee hours of the night, and the vibrations are gone, the intrusions do not have to be repelled. With such