The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,157

base of her throat.

“Here,” she said. “Something…new…hard to swallow…”

They sat quietly for a while, holding hands.

“Patricia…” Slick said. “Bring…Buddy Barr tomorrow…I want to…change my will…I want to…be cremated…”

“Of course,” Patricia said.

“And make sure…I’m not alone…”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Patricia said.

And she didn’t. Someone from book club was with her all the way to the end. On Thanksgiving day, when Slick started having trouble breathing, and her oxygen count began to fall, and she lost consciousness for the last time, Kitty was there, reading to her from In Cold Blood. Even after the crash team burst into the room and surrounded Slick and crowded Kitty into a corner, she kept reading silently, just moving her lips, whispering the words from the book like a prayer.

* * *

—

A few days after Slick’s funeral, Ragtag started walking in circles. Patricia noticed he’d follow rooms around their edges, always turning to the left, never to the right. He sometimes bumped into doors on his way through them. She took him to Dr. Grouse.

“I’ve got two pieces of bad news for you,” he said. “The first is that Ragtag has a brain tumor. It won’t kill him today or tomorrow, and he’s not in any pain, but it’s going to get worse. When it does, bring him here and we can put him to sleep.”

The second piece of bad news was that the tests to find the tumor cost five hundred and twenty dollars. Patricia wrote him a check.

When she returned home, she told Blue. The first thing he said was, “We need to get Korey.”

“You know we can’t do that,” she told him.

She didn’t think they could do that? They’d paid for Korey to stay at Southern Pines for eight weeks, and she had a whole program of therapists and counselors and doctors, and they all kept telling Patricia she had trouble sleeping, and seemed restless, anxious, and unfocused, and it would be unwise to pull her out prematurely. But when she’d visited the day before, Korey had seemed clear-eyed and calm, even though she didn’t say much.

“Mom,” Blue said, talking like she was hard of hearing. “Ragtag is older than me. You got him for Korey’s first Christmas. If he’s sick, he’s going to be scared. He needs her.”

Patricia wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that they couldn’t interrupt Korey’s program, that the doctors knew best. She wanted to tell him that Ragtag wouldn’t know whether Korey was there or not. She wanted to tell him that Korey mostly ignored Ragtag, anyway. Instead, she realized that she wanted Korey to come home very badly and so she said, “You’re right.”

They drove to Southern Pines together, and signed out her daughter against the advice of her doctors, and brought her home. When Ragtag saw her, he began to bang his tail against the floor where he’d been lying.

Patricia kept her distance while Blue and Korey hung all over Ragtag that weekend, soothing him when he barked at things that weren’t there, driving to the store and getting him wet food when he wouldn’t eat dry, sitting with him in the backyard or on the sofa in the sun. And on Sunday night, when things got bad, and Dr. Grouse’s office was closed, the two of them sat up with Ragtag as he walked around the den in circles, barking and snapping at things they couldn’t see, and they talked to him in low voices, and told him he was a good dog, and a brave dog, and they weren’t going to leave him alone.

When Patricia went to bed around one, both kids were still sitting up with Ragtag, patting him when his wanderings brought him close, speaking to him, showing him patience that Patricia had never seen in them before. Around four in the morning she woke up with a start and crept downstairs. The three of them lay on the den sofa. Korey and Blue were on either end, asleep. Ragtag lay between them, dead.

They buried him together around the side of the house, and Patricia held both of them while they cried. When Carter came by the