"Maybe I'm developing a cousinly concern for you." He raised one eyebrow.
"Maybe pigs will fly."
He laughed. "I'm trying to be more human," he confessed. "Since I'll live out my long existence among humans, apparently, I'm trying to be more ..."
"Likable?" I supplied.
"Ouch," he said, but he wasn't really hurt. Being hurt would presuppose that he cared about my opinion. And that was something you couldn't be taught, right?
"Where's the boyfriend been?" he asked. "I do so love the smell of vampire around the house."
"Last night was the first time I've seen him in a week. And we didn't have any alone time."
"You two have a fight?" Claude settled one hip on the porch railing, and I could tell he was determined to show me he could be interested in someone else's life.
I felt a certain amount of exasperation. "Claude, I'm drinking my very first cup of coffee, I didn't get a lot of sleep, and I've had a bad few days. Could you just scoot away and take a shower or something?"
He sighed as if I'd broken his heart. "All right, I can take a hint," he said.
"That really wasn't so much a hint as an outright statement."
"Oh, I'll go."
But as he straightened up and took a step toward the door, I realized I did have something else to say. "I take that back. There is something we have to talk about," I said. "I haven't had a chance to tell you that Dermot was here."
Claude stood up straight, almost as if he were prepared to bolt. "What did he say? What did he want?"
"I'm not sure what he wanted. I think, like you, he wanted to be close to someone else with a bit of fairy blood. And he wanted to tell me that he was under a spell."
Claude paled. "From whose magic? Has Grandfather come back through the gate?"
"No," I said. "But could a fairy have cast a spell on him before the gate closed? And I think you must know there's another full-blooded fairy on this side of the portal, or gate, whatever you call it." As I understood fairy morals, it was not possible to answer me with a direct lie.
"Dermot is crazy," Claude said. "I have no idea what he'll do next. If he approached you directly, he must be under extreme pressure. You know how ambivalent he is about humans."
"You didn't answer my question."
"No," Claude said. "I didn't. And there's a reason for that." He turned his back to me and looked out over the yard. "I like my head on my shoulders."
"So there is someone else around, and you know who it is. Or you know more about putting spells on than you're admitting?"
"I'm not going to talk about it." And Claude went inside. Within minutes, I heard him going out the back of the house, and his car passed by on its way down the drive to Hummingbird Road.
So I had gained a valuable piece of knowledge that was completely useless. I couldn't summon up the fairy, ask the fairy why he or she was still on this side, what his or her intentions were. But if I had to guess, I would have to say I was pretty sure that Claude wouldn't be this frightened of a sweet fairy who wanted to spread goodness and light. And a really nice fairy wouldn't have put some spell on poor Dermot that made him so discombobulated.
I said a prayer or two, hoping that would restore my normal good mood, but it didn't work today. Possibly I wasn't approaching prayer in the right spirit. Communicating with God isn't the same as taking a happy pill - far from it.
I pulled on a dress and sandals and went to Gran's grave. Having a conversation with her usually reminded me of how levelheaded and wise she'd been. Today all I thought about was her wildly out-of-character indiscretion with a half fairy that had resulted in my dad and his sister, Linda. My grandmother had (maybe) had sex with a half fairy because my grandfather couldn't make babies. So she'd gotten to carry and birth her children, two of them, and she'd raised them with love.
And she'd buried both of them.
As I crouched by the headstone looking down at the grass that was getting thicker on her grave, I wondered if I should draw some meaning from that. You could make a case that Gran had done something she shouldn't have ... to get something she wasn't supposed to get ... and after she'd gotten it, she'd lost it in the most painful way imaginable. What could be worse than losing a child? Losing two children.
Or you could decide that everything that had happened was completely at random, that Gran had done the best she could at the moment she'd had to make a decision, and that her decision simply hadn't worked out for reasons equally beyond her control. Constant blame, or constant blamelessness.
There had to be better choices.
I did the best possible thing for me to do. I put in some earrings and went to church. Easter was over, but the flowers on the Methodist altar were still beautiful. The windows were open because the temperature was pleasant. A few clouds were gathering in the west, but nothing to worry about for the next few hours. I listened to every word of the sermon and I sang along with the hymns, though I kept that down to a whisper because I have a terrible voice. It was good for me; it reminded me of Gran and my childhood and faith and clean dresses and Sunday lunch, usually a roast surrounded by potatoes and carrots that Gran put it in the oven before we left the house. She would have made a pie or a cake, too.
Church isn't always easy when you can read the minds around you, and I worked very hard on blocking them out and thinking my own thoughts in an attempt to connect to the part of my upbringing, the part of myself, that was good and kind and intent on trying to become better.
When the service was over, I talked to Maxine Fortenberry, who was in seventh heaven over Hoyt and Holly's wedding plans, and I saw Charlsie Tooten toting her grandbaby, and I talked to my insurance agent, Greg Aubert, who had his whole family with him. His daughter turned red when I looked at her, because I knew a few things about her that made her conscience twinge. But I wasn't judging the girl. We all misbehave from time to time. Some of us get caught, and some of us don't.
Sam was in church, too, to my surprise. I'd never seen him there before. As far as I knew, he'd never been to any church in Bon Temps.
"I'm glad to see you," I said, trying not to sound too startled. "You been going somewhere else, or is this a new venture?"
"I just felt it was time," he said. "For one thing, I like church. For another thing, a bad time is coming for us two-natured folks, and I want to make sure everyone in Bon Temps knows I'm an okay guy."
"They'd have to be fools not to know that already," I said quietly. "Good to see you, Sam." I moved off because a couple of people were waiting to talk to my boss, and I understood that he was trying to anchor his position in the community.