When I finished, he nodded, and then someone came for him from behind the curtains and lights, and I was left alone again, knowing I hadn’t said enough.
Kelly never came home from the hospital. She died without regaining consciousness. Many times since then I’ve wondered what she would have said to me if she’d awakened, what advice she would have given, what warning, how she would have passed the torch.
I wasn’t there when she died. Ron was. He called me early the next morning to tell me. He sounded drained; his voice was flat and thin. “Oh, Ron,” I said, foolishly, and then waited for him to tell me what to do.
“I’d like you to come over,” he said. “The boys are having a hard time.”
I haven’t left since. I haven’t been back to my apartment even to pick up my things; none of my former possessions seems worth retrieval. I had no animals to feed, no plants to water, no books or clothes or furniture or photographs that mean anything to me now.
Kelly kept her house orderly. From the first day, I could find things. The boys’ schedules were predictable, although very busy; names and phone numbers of their friends’ parents, Scout leaders, piano teachers were on a laminated list on the kitchen bulletin board. In her half of the master bedroom closet, I found clothes of various sizes, and the larger ones, from before she lost so much weight, fit fine.
The first week I took personal leave from work. Since then I’ve been calling in sick, when I think of it; most recently I haven’t called in at all and, of course, they don’t know where I am.
Ron is away a good deal. The work he does is important and mysterious; I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’m proud to be able to help him do it.
But he was home that first week, and we got used to each other. “You’re very different from the man I knew in college,” I told him. We were sitting in the darkened living room. We’d been talking about Kelly. We’d both been crying.
He was sitting beside me on the couch. I saw him nod and slightly smile. “Kelly used to say I’d developed my potential beyond her wildest dreams,” he admitted, “and she’d lost hers.”
I felt a flash of anger against her. She was dead. “She had a choice,” I pointed out. “Nobody forced her to do anything. She could have done other things with her life.”
“Don’t be too sure of that.” His sharp tone surprised and hurt me. I glanced at him through the shadows, saw him lean forward to set his drink on the coffee table. He took my empty glass from my hands and put it down, too, then swiftly lowered his face to my neck.
There was a small pain and, afterwards, a small stinging wound. When he was finished he stood up, wiped his mouth with his breast pocket handkerchief, and went upstairs to bed. I sat up for a long time, amazed, touched, frightened. No longer lonely. No longer having decisions to be made or protection to construct. That first night, that first time, I did not feel tired or cold; the sickness has since begun, but the exhilaration has heightened, too.
Ron says he loves me. He says he and the boys need me, couldn’t get along without me. I like to hear that. I know what he means.
SELLING HOUSES
Laurell K. Hamilton
As mentioned in the introduction, Laurell K. Hamilton is the bestselling author of the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels—the twenty-first of which will be published in 2015. She also authors the Merry Gentry series about a Princess of Faerie who must cope with the intrigues of her own kind while dealing with life in a world where humans know faeries exist. Hamilton lives in Missouri, with her husband and her daughter.
Hamilton sets “Selling Houses” in Anita Blake’s world, but it has nothing to do with the novels’ characters. Instead, the author considers what more mundane folks do now that vampires are legally alive. What if, for instance, you sold real estate?
The house sat in its small yard looking sullen. It seemed to squat close to the ground as if it had been beaten down. Abbie shook her head to clear such strange notions from her mind. The house looked just like all the other houses in the subdivision. Oh, certainly it had type-A elevation. Which meant it had a peaked roof, and it