Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25)(67)

Mr. Tavares nodded and gave me a tight smile. “It’s good to see you again, Ollie. I thought after Thanksgiving we might start seeing your face around here more often.”

I had a sudden flashback to Mr. Tavares practically walking in on Will and me. I forced a fake laugh.

“Oh, and Will,” he said mildly. “I know tonight was a bit of a special situation, but please remember our rule about not closing bedroom doors.”

Will blinked at his dad like he’d spontaneously combusted or something. Swallowing, he gave a stiff nod, and walked me to my car.

The whole way, he stared into the distance without a word.

“You okay?” I asked.

“We don’t have a rule about not closing bedroom doors for friends. Only for girls. Me and the guys hang out with the door closed all the time.”

Oh. Uh-oh. “I’m sorry …”

He shook his head. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. I’ll just … see if he brings it up again.”

His words were reassuring, but his face said otherwise. Will did not want to go back inside that house.

I hesitated at the car. Part of me wanted to hang around to make sure Will wasn’t having an internal breakdown, but if we stayed out here for too long wouldn’t that look even more suspicious? What if his dad felt the urge to come out here and tell us to wrap it up? “Okay. Well could you please text me in a bit, then? To let me know if he does bring it up again or not?”

Will nodded. “Sure. And you text me later to let me know you’re okay, all right?”

Oh. Of course. For the briefest moment I’d forgotten about Aunt Linda. Then it came flooding back, fresh as if I’d only just found out. But I was not going to cry. Not now. It could wait approximately eight seconds. “Yeah. All right.”

All right.





20


Home felt like a graveyard.

I was given the rest of the week off from school, which was a relief because I had developed a startling habit of crying without warning. Sure, I cried about Aunt Linda, but then I also cried at a dog adoption advertisement on TV, sobbed because I realized I’d be missing a math quiz on Thursday when I hated math, and bawled for about twenty minutes drinking orange juice one morning because it made me think of how Saint Nick used to give oranges to poor children and how some people never get oranges while I’d taken them for granted my whole life.

I wasn’t the only one crying, either. It’s what Mom did most of the day now. She’d gotten over that initial, way-too-optimistic reaction quite quickly. I didn’t like seeing my mom cry, but it was less unsettling than her unnaturally loud laughter on that first day. Dad was less of a crier, but he didn’t smile once. We were somber through the funeral preparations, and through the funeral itself on Friday, and while we went through the motions of living, trying to figure out what that looked like now.

For my parents, at least, living looked like doing everything they could to help Uncle Roy and the kids. Which, that Sunday, meant cooking up an army’s worth of soup, lasagna, and casseroles for them to freeze and reheat as needed.

“Ollie, can you fill the rest of these Tupperware containers?” Mom asked. She was covered in splatters of tomato sauce, had a splodge of gooey cheese in her eyebrow, and one of her sleeves was rolled up haphazardly. Her eyes were puffy from crying on and off half the morning, and her hair hadn’t been washed in a few days now, so she wore it scraped in a messy bun.

“Yeah, of course.” I took over for her and started scooping casserole into various-sized containers. “How about you go take a minute upstairs before we bring this all around?”

She hesitated, and Dad walked into the kitchen and made shooing motions with his hands. “You have your orders. We’ll cover things in here.”

Silently, she nodded and disappeared, leaving Dad and me alone in the kitchen.

He started to load the dishwasher. “Thanks for being such a champ with helping out your mother and me.”

“No problem.”

“Really, you’ve been a champ all year.”

I paused and looked over my shoulder. He was bent over the dishwasher, hiding his face, but his voice had sounded unusually tight.

I clipped the lid onto another container and added it to the cooler we’d been stacking all the food into. “Well, when someone you love needs you, you step up, right?”

When Dad finally turned back around, his eyes were glossy. “Right. Yeah. That’s right.”



At Aunt Linda’s—well, I guess I shouldn’t call it that anymore … it was Uncle Roy’s now, right?—the kids were set up in the living room in front of Coco. I didn’t know if Uncle Roy realized it was a movie about deceased family members in the afterlife, but I didn’t want to trigger anything by bringing it up. Who knows, maybe he thought it’d be helpful for the kids to watch it to process the last week.

Uncle Roy thanked my parents over and over again for the food. It turned out every family in the whole town had had the same idea, though, because his freezer was already so overflowing there was no way to cram any more food in. In the end, they decided to fill the cooler with ice, and set it up in the corner of the kitchen as a second refrigerator.

All three adults seemed to be actors in an improv play. Not very convincing ones, either. They smiled like they’d learned how to from written, step-by-step instructions. They talked about anything, anything but Aunt Linda, but she was in everything they said anyway. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. Because he’d been crying. The kids go back to school and preschool on Monday. Because they, too, had taken the week off to mourn, and were now expected to somehow return to life like there wasn’t an enormous gaping hole in the middle of it. Ah, no, I didn’t get around to watching the series finale. Because he used to watch the show with Aunt Linda—she’d told me—and I guess he didn’t know how to watch it knowing she’d never find out how it ended.