The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires(34)
In the long silence, water overflowed Miss Mary’s twitching eyelids and ran down her face. She licked her lips, and Patricia saw that a white film coated her tongue. Her skin looked thin as paper, her hands felt cold as ice. Her breathing sounded like tearing cloth. Slowly, Patricia watched her bloodshot eyes lose their focus, and she realized telling the story had set Miss Mary adrift. Patricia started to pull her hand from Miss Mary’s, but the old lady tightened her fingers and held firm.
“Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,” she croaked. “They never stop taking and they don’t know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.”
Patricia waited for Miss Mary to say something else, but her mother-in-law didn’t move. After a while, she pulled her hand from Miss Mary’s cold fingers and watched the old woman fall asleep with her eyes still open.
A black wind pressed down on her house.
THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
July 1993
CHAPTER 12
Deep summer suffocated the Old Village. It hadn’t rained all month. The sun cooked lawns to a crunchy yellow, baked sidewalks white-hot, made roof shingles soft, and heated telephone poles until the streets smelled like warm creosote. Everyone abandoned the outdoors except for the occasional midafternoon child darting across spongy asphalt streets. No one did yard work after ten in the morning, and they saved their errands until after six at night. From sunup to sundown, the whole world felt flooded in boiling honey.
But Patricia wouldn’t run errands after the sun started to go down. When she had to go to the store or the bank, she raced to her sunbaked Volvo and blasted the air conditioner while sitting miserably on the scorching front seat until she could tolerate touching the burning hot steering wheel. She insisted that Blue take the garbage cans out to the street before dark, no matter how much he complained about dragging them to the end of the driveway under the relentless, burning sun.
After sundown Patricia stayed close to home. When Korey or Blue got picked up for sleepovers, she watched from the front porch until they got into the cars, closed the doors, and drove safely off the Cruze. Even when their central air conditioning finally broke and the air-conditioner man told them they should have called earlier and it would be two weeks before he could get parts, Patricia insisted on locking every window and door before they went to bed. No matter how many fans they had running, every night, everyone sweated through all their sheets, and every morning Patricia stripped every single bed and made them up again fresh. The dryer ran nonstop.
Finally, James Harris saved their lives.
The doorbell rang during supper one night and Patricia went to answer, not wanting Korey or Blue to open the door after dark. James Harris stood on her porch.
“I just wanted to check in and see how everyone was doing after the big scare,” he said.
Patricia had thought she might not see him again after she’d overreacted the night the man got on their roof and shouted at him, as if he were the danger rather than the person trying to get into the house. She’d felt ashamed to think the worst of someone for no reason, so seeing him on their porch as if nothing had happened filled her with a profound sense of relief.
“I’m still kicking myself I wasn’t here,” Carter said, standing up from the table and shaking James’s hand when she led him into the dining room. “Thank God you came by. The kids say you were the man of the hour. You’re always welcome in our home.”
James Harris took this literally, and Patricia soon found herself listening for his knock as Korey ate the last roll or Blue complained that he couldn’t possibly finish his zucchini in this heat. Night after night she’d find James Harris on their front porch and they’d exchange comments about that month’s book club book, or he’d ask what the latest update was on getting the air conditioner fixed, or how Miss Mary was doing, or he’d tell her he’d gone to church with Slick and Leland. Then she’d invite him inside for ice cream.
“How does he know exactly when dessert’s going on the table?” Carter complained after James’s fourth visit, hopping up and down on one foot while peeling off his sweaty socks in the bedroom. “It’s like he can hear our freezer door open all the way down the street.”
But Patricia liked having him there because Carter had only managed to keep his promise to be home before dark for two days before he started staying late at work again. Most nights she ate alone with the children, and because Korey was going to two-week soccer camp at the end of the month and apparently had to spend the night with every single one of her friends before she left, most nights it was just her and Blue at the supper table.
Around the fifth night James Harris stopped by Patricia started leaving the windows open later, and then she started leaving the upstairs windows open overnight, and then the downstairs windows, and before long she just left the screen doors on their latches, and the house throbbed softly with fans sitting in open windows all day and night.
The other reason she was glad James Harris came by was because she didn’t know how to talk to Blue anymore. All Blue wanted to talk about was Nazis. She’d helped him get an adult library card and now he checked out photograph-packed Time-Life books about World War II. She found his old spiral notebooks covered in drawings of swastikas, SS lightning bolts, Panzer tanks, and skulls. Whenever she tried to talk to him about his summer Oasis program or going to the Creekside pool, he always countered with Nazis.