“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.>“No,” he admitted, covering his face with his hands. Whether it was from shame or to protect his eyes from my vampire death glare, I have no idea. “You know her. You know what she does with announcements like this. We’re talking Valium and screaming, taking to her bed for weeks at a time. I knew there was no way she’d accept you, much less Jolene and her family. I’m just trying to get through the wedding without her making a scene. I saw what it did to Jolene when my parents threatened not to come. Can you imagine how she would handle Mama’s werewolf meltdown? How much that would hurt her? Once we’re married, Jolene will realize that she’s better off with my family not liking her anyway.”
“Don’t you think your family will notice something’s off when the bride’s side mows through the buffet?” I asked.
“Oh, my family will be too drunk to notice,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Why do you think we’re having the open bar?”
“That’s not—actually, that’s brilliant.”
“I’ve tried everything to get Mama to behave, to be decent to Jolene,” Zeb said. “She says she’ll straighten up and be nice, and then I get a phone call from Jolene, crying about whatever Mama’s said now. I’ve told her to ignore Mama, but she just can’t. She can’t stand having someone not like her. And I’m exhausted. I’m tired of being the go-between. Why can’t she just handle this stuff herself?”
I arched my brows at the angry, exasperated tone Zeb was using. He seemed to shake it off after a moment, rubbing his hands over his patch and then moving them to pinch the bridge of his nose.
“In a few months, this will all be over,” he said.
“Because you will have succumbed to chronic stress headaches and bottle-rocket trauma?” I asked, taking one of his hands and gently pushing at the pressure point between his thumb and forefinger.
When he smiled, the skin around his visible eye crinkled. “Because in a few months, we’ll be married. And we can enter the witness-protection program.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, quirking my lips as I stared at him.
“What?”
I shrugged. “It’s just weird. Normally, I’d be the first person you’d call when something like this trailer deal comes up. But now it’s Gabriel. I think you’re entering into a functional adult relationship with someone besides me. I guess the wedding is the final sign that we’re growing up.”
“I don’t know how I feel about it,” Zeb said absently. He was looking at me intently; his good eye seemed glazed over, unfocused. This was not the way Zeb normally looked at me. This was the way Zeb looked at mint-condition, still-in-the-package GI Joe Battle Force dolls.
Since he was dealing with a traumatic injury, I was willing to attribute this bizarre behavior to a concussion. “It doesn’t suck.”
“It does a little bit.” He cupped the back of my head in his hand, bringing my face almost uncomfortably close to his. For a weird moment, it felt as if he was going to kiss me. Which, for our relationship, was highly unusual. I leaned away, pulling his hands from my neck.
Gabriel came in and found the two of us staring at each other, Zeb’s hands in mine. Zeb dropped his hands to his sides and looked vaguely guilty.
“If you weren’t Jane’s best friend and engaged to a beautiful and violently monogamous woman, I might find this upsetting,” Gabriel commented dryly.
6
Werewolf fathers insist on preapproving proposals of marriage. In fact, it’s rumored that the human tradition of “asking for a woman’s hand” came from a human who failed to ask for betrothal permission and actually lost his hand.
—Mating Rituals and Love Customs of the Were
“Why did I try to make more friends?” I muttered, shielding my eyes from my reflection in the Bridal Barn’s fitting-room mirror. “This is what comes of having girlfriends.”
If the picture of Jolene’s chosen bridesmaid’s dress was bad, the live version was horrifying. Basted together, the putrefied peach piecework was not just unflattering, it was insulting. My hips looked wider than my shoulders; wider than the dressing-room door, in fact. My preternaturally pale skin looked cheesy and almost blue. I actually looked dead, which was a first. At no time had I ever wished harder that vampires couldn’t see themselves in mirrors.
After much groveling on both sides, Zeb and Jolene made up, which meant I was still trapped in bridesmaid-dress hell. I took cold comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone. I would be walking down the aisle with Jolene’s legion of cousins. The McClaines went with a “lene” theme in naming this generation’s females: Raylene, Lurlene, identical twins Charlene and Darlene, then triplets Arlene, Braylene, and Angelene. It was pronounced “Angel-lean,” by the way. That’s a mistake I didn’t make twice. All of them were gorgeous, redhaired, and green-eyed, with ridiculously high cheekbones. And all of them pretty much hated me. First, I was an outsider, which could have been overlooked if I was not also a vampire. Compounded by the injustice of my position as best maid despite being a relatively new friend, this created another sense of clan shame among the cousins. The fact that Zeb and Jolene chose me to avoid a blood feud among Jolene’s cousins escaped them.
Despite the snubbing of her firstborn, Lurlene, from the best-maid spot, Jolene’s aunt Vonnie was finally persuaded to keep her shop open after dusk so I could come in for a fitting. I’m pretty sure the indignity of having to rework her schedule for a vampire is what put the burr up her butt.