Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men (12 page)

“It can’t be that bad—” Jolene ripped back the curtain. “Whoa.”

“Yeah,” I deadpanned.

“It will look different,” Jolene promised. “After the rose and the ruffles and everything are put on. It’ll look different.”

“I don’t think ruffles are going to improve the situation.”

“I know,” Jolene whispered. “I know it’s horrible. I’ve worn that dress in six of my cousins’ weddings, including my cousin Raylene, who chose black taffeta for a July ceremony. Nobody looks good in it. That’s the whole point. Parade the bridesmaids out in this dress, make them look like cows—”

“Hey.” I glared at her. “There’s no need to agree with me quite so much.”

She ignored me. “So that when you walk down the aisle, you seem gorgeous by comparison. That’s the real tradition behind the dress.”

“You’re already gorgeous by comparison,” I hissed.

“Thanks,” she said, glowing briefly. “But it’s the one concession I’ve made to the pack about the wedding. I’m not marryin’ a were. I’m havin’ a nighttime ceremony to accommodate the vampire guests. I’m not marryin’ in the boneyard.”

“Boneyard?”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask. I went against almost every McClaine family tradition to marry Zeb. This is the one thing I agreed to.” She paused when I arched an eyebrow. “That you have to wear. You can get me really, really drunk at my bachelorette party and take embarrassin’ pictures,” she promised.

“I was going to do that anyway,” I snarked.

Aunt Vonnie bustled into the room with a bolt of lime-green chiffon. My lack of enthusiasm was clearly an affront to her craft.

“I haven’t stayed open past six in thirty years of business,” she reminded me.

“I really appreciate it, Miss Vonnie,” I said with all the cheer I could rally dressed like an extra from
Footloose
. “And thank you for making the dresses. They’re just … stunning.”

Aunt Vonnie easily picked up on my shifting eyes and twitchy lips. Or maybe I was pushing it with the empty double thumbs-up.

I have got to learn how to lie.

“Every McClaine bride since 1984 has chosen the ‘Ruffles and Dreams’ for her bridesmaids.” She sniffed, turning back to the sewing room. “It’s very popular here in
town. I’ve made this dress in thirty-two colors for more than one hundred weddings.”

“Well, that certainly explains the Hollow’s unusually high divorce rate,” I muttered.

“I heard that!” Aunt Vonnie yelled from the back. I was going to have to watch myself around werewolves and their superhearing.

I turned to Jolene. “There will be pictures. Oh, yes, pictures and male strippers.”

“I accept your terms,” Jolene said solemnly.

“Get me out of this thing.” I sighed, angling the ridiculously placed zipper toward her. “Can I at least see the wedding dress?”

“I ordered it special on the Internet!” she squealed as she ran into the back room.

“Still need help with the zipper!” I called after her. I turned and caught a look at myself in a mirror.
“Gah!”

Seriously, how does a veteran seamstress sew a zipper so that you need Go-Go Gadget arms to reach it? I spun in circles like a dog chasing its tail. I heard shuffling and giggling as Jolene tried on her wedding dress.

She emerged from the dressing room a vision in an elaborately beaded white Edwardian gown. And despite the universal laws of wedding dress ordering, the standard size four actually fit her perfectly. The cut emphasized her tiny waist and gave her the ideal hourglass silhouette. Every move sent a burst of sparkles from the beading. Her skin seemed clearer, brighter, creamier, her eyes a truer green.

“I hate you. You’re completely gorgeous, and I hate
you,” I grumbled, feeling even more dumpy in my half-basted peach death shroud.

“Thanks.” She sighed dreamily.

“Meanwhile, I’m still dressed like this and …” I sent a glance at my watch.

“The engagement party!” she cried. “I almost forgot!”

“Well, that’s probably just your brain’s protective response to the prospect of seeing Mama Ginger,” I said as she dashed off.

“Hey, I’m still in this … thing!” I yelled after her.

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room and you’re completely underdressed? That feeling would have been welcome at the Lavelle-McClaine engagement fete.

Claiming that the McClaine family was hogging all of the prewedding revelry, Mama Ginger threw together a last-minute “celebration” of Zeb and Jolene’s engagement. Engagement parties are a rarity in the Hollow, generally thrown by swankier families at the Half-Moon Hollow Country Club and Catfish Farm. Mama Ginger pulled a fast one when she listed the venue address on the invitations. Since few of us spent a lot of time at Eddie Mac’s, where local rednecks went to find their future former spouses, we were not familiar with the exact street number. Floyd and Mama Ginger had special access to the back room there as members of the pool league.

It was a surprise party, as in “Surprise! You’re wearing three-inch heels, but your party’s being held at a place
where the table linens come from wall-mounted dispensers.”

I should have suspected something when the invitations encouraged us to “dress up.” This may have been a counterattack following the Great Wedding Date Change. A week after the wedding invitations were sent out, Mama Ginger decided that her allotted 100 were not enough. Apparently, her open distaste for the bride didn’t preclude Mama Ginger’s right to invite every person she’d ever met to her only son’s wedding. She convinced a neighbor who sold stationery out of the back of her dad’s gas station to help Mama Ginger design her own version of the invitation, featuring a Precious Moments bride and groom. Mama Ginger sent it out to another 150 distant relatives and passing acquaintances, so that instead of assuming the risk of inviting 100 carefully selected strangers to their farm, the McClaines now risked exposing their secret to 250 people even Mama Ginger might not recognize face-to-face or sober.

When Mimi and Jolene got wind of this maneuver, their only logical defense seemed to be moving the wedding up a week without planning to tell Mama Ginger until the last minute. And it would have worked, if Misty Kilgore, whose husband was shooting the wedding photos, had kept her mouth shut in line at the Piggly Wiggly.

Mama Ginger responded with a world-class hissy fit, further exacerbated when she was told that anyone who was not on the original mailing list would be turned away at the McClaines’ gate by large male cousins. This steely-spined
response by Mimi McClaine forever secured my loyalty and devotion. Mama Ginger’s countermove was to tell Misty Kilgore that the wedding was off, prompting Mr. Kilgore to rip up the contract and schedule another wedding that weekend. Since there were no local photographers available, it was decided that Jolene’s cousin Scooter, who had a lazy eye
and
astigmatism, would be taking the pictures. It was safe to say at this point that Jolene had lost all control of the wedding-planning process.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to be standing under a guttering neon Budweiser sign wearing a strapless black dress and hair that took an alarming amount of time and pins. Vampires don’t fare well in redneck establishments. There tend to be a lot of easily breakable wooden objects and, well, rednecks. And Eddie Mac’s just happened to be the county’s main supplier of T-shirts showing a cartoon vampire being stomped on by the Statue of Liberty.

“Oh, hello, Jane, honey!” Mama Ginger cried, rushing past Jolene and the recently de-eye-patched Zeb. She wrapped her arms around me in an inescapable viselike grip and swung me around in time to the jukebox’s blaring “Islands in the Stream.” “There’s my girl! How are you?”

“Fine,” I said, smiling politely, even as Jolene’s face fell at this blatant display of favoritism. Behind her back, Mimi sent Mama Ginger a poisonous glare.

“Mr. Lavelle,” I said, smiling politely at Zeb’s father. Floyd Lavelle hadn’t had a civil word for me since I refused to fetch him a beer at a Labor Day barbecue.
I was seven, and even then, I didn’t know my place. He grunted in what passed for a greeting and headed for the bar.

“Now, I made my special pimento cheese balls because I remember how much you like them,” Mama Ginger said, pinching my cheek. “You’re so skinny.”

“OK, that hurts,” I said, prying her carmine-tipped pincers from my face. “This is Gabriel. He’s a friend of mine and Zeb’s, oh, and a groomsman.”

Mama Ginger caught sight of our joined hands. Her sharp brown eyes narrowed at Gabriel. She mumbled, “How nice,” and turned on her heels.

Mama Ginger continued to greet her guests, most of whom were bar regulars. Jolene might as well have been furniture for all the attention she was paid. For example, the little banner Mama Ginger had hung simply said, “Congratulations, Zeb,” leaving room for possibilities. To add insult to gastronomical injury, the bar’s “special event package” provided a crock pot of beer weenies, a grocery-store sheet cake, and lots of beer on tap. That was it. For fifty people. Fortunately, Mimi McClaine saw this coming and called in werewolf reinforcements.

Constantly thinking and talking about food is what makes werewolves some of the world’s greatest chefs and restaurateurs. For example, Jolene’s uncle Clay owned one of the best lunch places in town. His personal food philosophy was “Meat, meat, and more meat,” which might explain the shop’s specialty: a sandwich piled high with two pork tenderloins, Black Forest ham, and bacon. Within a half hour, several aunties and uncles arrived
with huge platters of cold cuts, barbecue, salads, cupcakes, and cookies, which the bar crowd fell on like hyenas on a fresh zebra carcass.

I sidled up to Mimi, who was watching the proceedings from a very dark corner. Her irises were constricted in a distinctly nonhuman manner. I slipped an arm around her waist, stroking a soothing hand along her spine. “Will you adopt me?”

“Will it piss off Ginger?” she muttered.

I nodded. “Probably.”

“I’m trying to be as patient as possible, but if that witch doesn’t ease up on my baby, I may not be held accountable for my actions.”

We watched as the buffet was moved off Pool Table 3 so Herb Baker’s Friday-night group could proceed with their usual game.

I whispered, “I’ll help you hide the body.”

Mimi winked at me and snuffled my cheek. “You’re a good girl.”

It was at this point, after her third rum and Coke, that Mama Ginger decided to make a toast. Ish. She tinkled a napkin dispenser against the side of her glass to get our attention, which, given the noise level, only worked for those of us with superhearing. Finally, she asked that someone unplug the jukebox. Actually, she told Dick to “unplug that damn thing before I put a foot through it.”

“Now, settle down, you all. Settle down. I have something to say.” She sighed, letting loose what appeared to be a silent belch. “Well, none of us thought this day
would come.” She put her arm around Floyd, who was propped up next to her on a bar stool, just this side of pleasantly buzzed, just south of the hostile-outburst zone. “And if anything, we always thought, well, hoped, that Zeb would be marrying Jane.”

The entire room fell silent. Hell, the world stopped spinning. Mimi shot me a mortified look. Jolene turned a sort of pale blue-gray. Zeb seemed oblivious to the fact that his future wife had just been insulted. In fact, he smiled at me and winked, which seemed to make Jolene’s uncles’ faces contort into sock-puppet shapes.

“You know, those two have been friends since they were in preschool. They were always together, always so close. We worried about him being best friends with a girl. I mean, his daddy nearly died when he caught them playing with Cabbage Patch dolls. And Jane never dated anybody for very long. Anybody.”

Dick snorted, earning him an elbow to the ribs from me. Mama Ginger flinched at the sudden movement and wobbled a little against the bar. “We all just assumed she’d give up on other guys and come back to Zeb. Jane wore the prettiest blue dress to the prom. I still have the boutonnière she gave Zeb, pressed in my Bible. I just always thought that Jane would give me the most beautiful grandbabies. They say sometimes it skips a generation …”

Mama Ginger warbled, “We all just love Jane so much. We’ve always said she was the daughter we always wanted. She’s always been a part of the family—”

“But now, we’re just so happy to be welcoming Jolene into that family,” I said in a loud, explicitly cheerful voice.

“Oh, yeah, Joanne,” Mama Ginger said, sobering enough to glance in Jolene’s direction but not, apparently, to get her name right. “She seems like a nice enough girl.”

Jolene watched her future mother-in-law expectantly, waiting for some semblance of a welcome, a compliment. Instead, Mama Ginger smiled brightly and announced, “Well, let’s eat, everybody!”

Jolene’s face fell. I tried to make eye contact, tried to make some sort of connection to show her I was on her side, that being Mama Ginger’s favorite was about as desirable as being the prettiest pig at the fair. But her own mother had wrapped a protective arm around her and ushered her into a quiet corner. I fought against my instincts to soothe and smooth ruffled feathers and backed out of sight toward the back door.

I slammed the door against the chatter and the smoke. I sank against the building, ignoring my natural aversion to touching whatever was growing on the peeled aluminum siding. I cringed as Gabriel poked his head out the door. His look of concern melted into an absurd smile. “This is just—”

“Yeah.” I laughed. He wrapped his arms around me, rubbing my bare arms to ward off the chill. The brisk motion took on a slow circling pattern as I wrapped my fingers around his collar and pulled him toward me. His mouth was so cool and clean and soft on mine, reminding me that there were normal places and people in the world. Normal, at least, by my standards. It was every great kiss you’d ever imagined, only we were
surrounded by junker cars and leaning against a molding air-conditioning unit.

I leaned my forehead against his. “I will repay you in unspeakable physical favors if you can erase any trace of this party from my memory.”