Read Online Vampire Blood by Kathryn Meyer Griffith - Free Book Online Page B

rummaged behind. They were pitifully bare.
    A mouse couldn’t live on what’s in these cabinets, she fretted.
    He’s probably waiting for Mom to come back and shop ... or to starve, whichever comes first, Jenny thought sourly.
    “What do you eat around here, anyway? Air?” Jenny yelped over her shoulder. Her dad grumbled something unintelligible from the other room.
    “When are you going to go to the grocery store, Dad?”
    “Hate those new-fangled supermarkets,” her dad’s voice finally replied, weakly; she had to strain to hear him. He spoke louder, “All that frozen stuff. Whole suppers and even desserts. Stacks of frozen peas, meat pies and tatertots. Miles of glass cases so covered in ice you can barely see into ‘em. Open them up and all this cold vapor hits you right in the face. Brrrrr. Nothing’s sacred, anymore, Jenny,” he lamented. “Food looks like colored cardboard.”
    “Tastes like cardboard, too.” Jenny chuckled, and shouted, “You know you got eight cans of corn in here?”
    “I like corn,” her father’s retort came.
    “I give up. Where is the coffee?”
    “Bottom left shelf by the blender.”
    As Jenny made the coffee in the old percolator, she found herself staring dreamily out the window above the kitchen sink. The white frilly curtains fluttered in the early morning breeze.
    Woolgathering again; then she caught herself.
    How many times when she was a child had she watched her mother do just the same thing? In this house. At this very window. A prisoner yearning for all the world outside had to offer and all she couldn’t have.
    In this house, Jenny kept expecting her mom to come sauntering in any minute, humming in that absentminded way she had. She heard floors squeaking above her somewhere, she could have sworn a door closed upstairs in one of the other rooms, but no one else was here. A dripping faucet somewhere stopped as if a human hand had turned it off suddenly. Water.
    For some strange reason, it reminded Jenny of her mother’s crystal bottle of holy water.
    Mom, why do you have that bottle of holy water? Jenny, the child, had asked a long time ago, staring up at the beautiful crystal bottle on her mother’s dresser.
    Never know when you’re gonna need it, that’s why, child, she’d responded patiently. There’s so much evil in the world, and only God has the power to defeat it.
    Her mother had always been a good Catholic. She’d believed in God. She’d gone to church every week and everything. Jenny wondered if she still went to church these days.
    It was as if there was a ghost roaming the house, but her mother was alive, somewhere in town. Not dead. It felt strange with Mom gone. Even the smell of liquor had faded away.
    Jenny stared out the window, her hands frozen over the coffee pot, haunted with memories: the heady summer morning breezes and the lilt of long-ago voices.
    Outside the window, children frolicked. Two taller boys in patched jeans and a short girl with braids.
    “Jenny Penny, can’t catch me!” one of the boys hollered.
    “You wanna bet?” she cried back and took chase. The girl was laughing as she disappeared around the corner of the house and into the sunlight behind the boys.
    A young pretty woman with a kerchief over her red hair stood by her wash line observing them go with a half-smile on her lips, wooden clothespins in one of her work-roughened hands. The soft breezes tugged at stray wisps of her hair. She looked tired to Jenny. Her face was sad, and her printed cotton housedress frayed. She shaded her eyes with her other hand, watching for a short while. Finally, she went back to her wash, shaking her head. Mom.
    From a distant recess of her mind, Jenny recalled something her mother had said when Jenny had been a child.
    When I was a girl, I dreamed of being a nurse one day in a big city hospital. Helping people and living in a fancy house with bay windows and one of those four season sun porches in the back, a hesitant, melancholy