The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,158

next evening and the two of them sat down to tell Korey and Blue they were getting a divorce, Carter laid out how it was going to go.

“This is the way things are going to be,” he said. He’d told Patricia that kids liked certainty and he was the better qualified of the two of them to map this new reality for them. “I’ll be keeping the house on Pierates Cruze and the beach house. I’ll pay for your school and college, you don’t have to worry about that. And you can stay here with me for as long as you want. Because this is your mother’s decision, she’ll be looking for a new place to live. And it may not be very big, and it may be in another part of Mt. Pleasant. She’ll only have the one car, so you probably won’t be able to borrow it to go see your friends. Your mother may even need to move to a new city. I’m not saying these things because I’m trying to punish anyone, but I want you to have a realistic idea of how things are going to change.”

Then he asked them who they wanted to live with during the week. They both surprised Patricia by saying, “Mom.”

IN COLD BLOOD

February 1997

CHAPTER 42

Patricia pulled into the cemetery and got out of her car, tote bag swinging. It was one of those sharp winter days when the sky looked like a great blue dome, white around the bottom, darkening to a saturated robin’s-egg blue at the top. She walked along the winding road that ran between the grave markers and stepped onto the grass when she got to the right row. The dry grass crunched beneath her shoes as she walked to Slick’s stone.

Her inner thigh throbbed like it always did when she walked over uneven ground. Korey felt the same kind of pain, too. It was something they shared. But Patricia refused to accept it was permanent for Korey. They’d already started going to see specialists, and one doctor thought a blood transfusion and a series of synthetic erythropoietin would help Korey produce more red blood cells and that might eliminate the pain. They planned to start as soon as school was out. They only had enough money for one of them to try this treatment. That was fine with Patricia.

Everyone was broke. Leland had declared bankruptcy just after the new year and was selling houses for Kevin Hauck on commission. Kitty and Horse had lost almost everything and were chopping Seewee Farms into parcels, selling it off piecemeal to keep the lights on. Patricia didn’t know how much Carter had sunk into Gracious Cay, but judging by how many times her lawyer had to remind him to send the child support checks, it was a lot.

Everyone assumed James Harris had seen the crisis coming, packed up, and skipped town. No one asked too many questions. After all, tracking him down would be a lot of work, and bringing him back would only lead to awkward questions and no one actually wanted to hear the answers. At the end of the day, some rich white people lost their money. Some poor black people lost their homes. That’s just how it goes.

Patricia had driven out to Gracious Cay in January. The construction equipment had been taken away, and now the frames of the houses stood alone, stark and unfinished, like towering skeletons eroding in the weather. She drove the paved road through the center of the development all the way back to Six Mile. Mrs. Greene had moved to Irmo to be near her boys while they finished high school, but some people were moving back. A gaggle of little children bounced an old tennis ball off the wall of Mt. Zion A.M.E. She saw cars parked in a few driveways and smelled wood smoke coming from a handful of chimneys and settling in the streets.

Before she died, Slick had been working on gifts for everyone and Maryellen had driven around distributing them in December. Patricia had unfolded her pink sweatshirt and held it up to her front. It featured a picture of the baby Jesus asleep in the manger which was, for unknown reasons, beneath a sequined Christmas tree with a real bell on top. In cursive script it read, Remember