TWO
Trying to shake the thought I’d had right out of my head for some reason, I gave my head another little shake. “No one’s said a word to me about any new vampires.”
Giving her eyes a little roll, Jen scoffed. “Or, maybe they have, but you’ve just had your nose too deep in a book to even hear them! I swear, I tried saying something to you about the new people yesterday, but you were so far into your book that you didn’t even seem to hear me, so I just gave up.”
“Well, I’m listening now, so please just tell me about the ‘new people.’”
After glancing at the time displayed on her phone again, Jen said that basically, they were just “a bunch of new vampires” who were coming to live on the farm. I asked why, and she continued.
“See, remember how your dad was saying all that stuff a few months ago about how lately, there’s been all these new exiled vampires from all around the country showing up to join the Warrens?”
I didn’t remember that, but then again, maybe I’d been told but just had my nose buried in a book at the time.
Not even waiting for me to respond to what she’d asked me, Jen continued. “Well, anyway…so, your dad was thinking that with all these new vampires joining the Warrens lately, we should probably beef up our ranks, too. And also, your dad’s been thinking that we need some ‘fresh blood,’ pun definitely intended, here on the farm anyway. Just with there being a bunch of single people around, and just with it being hard for vampires to meet other vampires, and all that other junk.”
Over the years, we had had a slow but steady trickle of single vampires coming to live on the farm. Some of these single vampires were “transfers” from other Watcher communities around the country, and some of them were vampires who simply wanted to become Watchers. However, with such a shallow dating pool on the farm, and with the difficulties of dating humans in Sweetwater, not many of these single vampires had found partners for life, and some of them were unhappy about this and hoped for an influx of new people at some point in time.
I asked Jen where all the “new vampires” were coming from, and she said, “all over.”
“I heard some are coming from California, some from Colorado, and some from Indiana…and some even from all these other different places that I can’t even remember.”
“Okay…and what’s the age range of all these new vampires? Or, well, I know vampires can look twenty but actually be six hundred years old and all that; so, I guess I mean, what’s the age range of these vampires in terms of looks? Do you know?”
Jen shrugged. “No clue, but for my sake, I’m hoping there will be some mid-or-older-twenty-something-looking vampires in the bunch, and for your sake, I hope there’ll be some older teenager or early twenty-something-looking vampires. Whether we both get lucky on this or not, I guess we’ll find out soon.”
Just then, a large truck began rumbling up the long dirt driveway. When it began rounding the circle part of the drive, I could see that it was a moving truck, with the words U Move It printed in orange lettering on the side.
More than a little confused, I looked at Jen. “My dad thought a moving truck was an appropriate vehicle to transport the new vampires to the farm in?”
Jen burst out laughing. “No, silly. That’s the truck Mel and Matt rented to move all their stuff to the new house.”
Despite all my reading and “book learning,” as Jen liked to call it, I could sometimes be a little slow to “get” things, especially right after being pulled out of an engrossing reading session, like I just had been. This was obviously one of those “slow” times, and now I felt absolutely stupid for having thought even for a second that my dad would have moved the new vampires to the farm by way of a moving truck. I also felt absolutely stupid that the more obvious thought, that the moving truck was carrying some of the new vampires’ possessions, hadn’t been my first thought.
After laughing a little more, Jen asked me if I’d forgotten about Mel and Matt’s big move. “They’re doing part of it tonight, and the rest tomorrow. Remember?”
I remembered hearing something recently about Mel and her vampire husband Matt making a move from the “main house” to their very own new house on the property, but if I’d been told exactly when they were going to move, I’d long since forgotten.
The move was taking place because three months earlier, after being married for only six months, Mel and Matt had suddenly become new parents of three little boys, all biological brothers, ages one, two, and three. Mel and Matt had both always wanted to adopt, and this was part of the reason that Mel had chosen to become a vampire before ever having any biological children of her own. However, she’d only planned on adopting “one, maybe two” kids, and Matt had always thought along the same lines. So, when they’d gotten a call that three brothers were available for adoption and would likely be separated if a home for them couldn’t be found soon, they’d had some thinking to do. They hadn’t ended up thinking very long, though, and had traveled to Moxon to adopt the boys the very next day.
Since then, although everything with the adoption had went smoothly and Matt and Mel’s new family was thriving, they’d been having thoughts that maybe they wanted their very own house on the farm, despite the fact that the main family house was absolutely massive, more like a “log cabin mansion” than anything. “It’s not even so much that space is an issue,” Mel had told me. “It’s just that Matt and I want our own space.”
I could definitely understand that, especially since even as large as it was, the main house could feel simply overfilled with young kids sometimes with Matt and Mel’s three boys added to my parents’ own two boys. “The greatest hazard in this house has officially become wiping out on little metal cars,” Carol had said to me one day, and she wasn’t wrong.
After some deliberation, a few weeks earlier, Mel and Matt had finally decided to move into one of the thirty or so other houses on the vast property, and I remembered being filled in about this. However, the fact that it was moving day was coming as news to me.
Matt soon parked the moving truck in front of the house and got out, giving Jen and me a wave. From where we still stood in the side yard, we waved back, and then glanced at the time displayed on her phone screen again.
“Okay, I’ve really got to run if I want my shower. ‘First impressions last,’ you know. Have you ever heard that expression? ‘First impressions last.’ My Grandma Phyllis told me that once. And when it comes to first impressions with possibly-hot new vampires coming to live on our farm…well, let’s just say that I want to be fresh as a daisy, and four thousand times as beautiful.”
I cracked a smile. “Only ‘four thousand’ times? Why so arbitrary a number? Why not ten thousand times as beautiful as a daisy?”
“Well, yes, that, too. I do want to be ten thousand times as beautiful as a daisy. Basically. I just want to be infinitely beautiful. How’s that for a big word? Grandpa Bucky taught it to me. I want to be infinitely beautiful.”
Smiling, I said I’d let her get to it, and off she went, dashing into the house for her shower.
Being that the day had been extremely muggy, stiflingly hot even inside the creamery, I wasn’t exactly fresh as a daisy myself, let alone ten thousand times as beautiful. My long hair, which I’d pulled up into a messy bun that morning, had become overly messy, with several limp strands falling in my face. The bun itself was falling from the top to the back of my head, and I knew for certain that I had a little mint chip ice cream somewhere in my hair, because I’d absentmindedly wiped some from my fingers against the side of my head while tucking a stray strand behind one ear that day. As far as my face, I felt a little greasy, and as far as what I was wearing, I was definitely a mess. My denim Capri pants were streaked with white paint from when I’d helped paint an outdoor fence a few weeks earlier, and the side of my t-shirt was smudged with grease from when I’d accidentally brushed against the hinges of one of the coolers in the creamery that afternoon. To top it all off, I hadn’t even yet bothered to remove my maroon creamery apron after work, and the front of it was smudged with probably no fewer than a dozen different flavors of ice cream.
Because of all this, I contemplated running in the house after Jen to take a shower myself in my master bathroom, wanting to at least look presentable just on the chance that any of the new vampires were attractive. However, Matt was pulling empty cardboard boxes from the truck, and I felt compelled to ask if I could help by bringing some of them inside.
He thanked me but said no, he had it covered. “You could watch the boys for Mel and me for a few minutes, though. That would help us a lot.”
Right then, Mel’s car began coming up the driveway, and I said sure.
“I might need to head inside and grab a shower in ten minutes or so, though. Is that okay?”
Matt said that was perfectly fine. “That’ll be plenty of time for Mel and me to get all the boxes upstairs without tripping over the boys. After that, they can be part of helping to pack up.”
After parking behind the moving truck, Mel freed the boys from their car seats one by one, and they began speeding over to me one by one, with the littlest of them more toddling than running. Smiling, I knelt with my arms open to catch them, and was soon nearly tipped over by an avalanche of three little nephews hugging me at once.
All of them had hazel eyes and dark golden blonde hair that just happened to match Matt’s eyes and hair exactly; and, making them look almost like triplets just separated by age, all three boys had dimples that came out when they smiled, which they’d been doing more and more recently. When they’d first arrived at the house, thin and pale, they hadn’t smiled at all, and had instead just cried near-continuously for a few days, with the oldest boy asking for his mommy. Heartbreakingly, she’d been murdered by the boys’ biological father several months earlier, and after that, the boys had been placed with some distant relatives who’d turned out to be horribly negligent, often not feeding the boys all day. As for the boys’ father, wanting to avoid the death penalty, he had pleaded guilty to the murder and was now serving a life sentence somewhere out of state.
In the present, boisterous and rosy-cheeked, the boys were a picture of happiness and health, thanks to Mel and Matt’s attention and love over the previous few months. They’d even started calling Mel and Matt Mommy and Daddy, and they called Jen Aunt Jen. However, being that they were still so young and couldn’t always pronounce things properly, Aunt Jen usually came out sounding more like Ah-Zhen, which was how I’d used to say it as a baby, I’d been told. As for me, I was called Sissy, which was as close to Chrissy as the boys were able to get. This pronunciation of my name never failed to melt my heart every time I heard it.
Soon when the boys had grown tired of trying to tip me over by way of hugging me, they began playing with Wanted, who’d been sleeping on the front porch before they’d arrived. Being that he was an older dog with severe arthritis in both hips, sleeping was how he spent most of his time. However, when the boys were around, he usually perked up a little. When my mom arrived home from work with my two little brothers every day, Wanted usually even got up to greet them with his tail wagging.
Once Mel and Matt had gotten all the empty cardboard boxes inside the house, they took the boys in with them. I went to follow, intending to head upstairs for my shower, but then remembered that I’d left my book on the bench in the side yard, along with my phone. After going over to grab them, I turned to head back to the house, just in time to see some kind of an old-fashioned muscle car, windows down, heading up the driveway. The driver had a strong, square jaw and was wearing dark sunglasses, and even from a pretty fair distance, I could see that he wasn’t just hot, but knock-me-over-with-a-feather-level hot.