“The heck you are,” she said, shaking a wooden spoon at me. “I asked you twice how many pork chops you wanted.”
“I was giving it some thought. And I’ll take two.”
Bree, Jannie, and Ali were trying unsuccessfully to hide their smiles.
“Two it is,” she said, and passed me my plate.
We said grace, thanked God for our many blessings, and prayed for Damon to have safe travels in the morning.
“What time’s Damon get in?” Jannie asked, cutting her chop.
Bree replied before I could, saying, “He’s getting the nine o’clock jitney to Albany. Train leaves at ten twenty. He changes in New York City and gets here around quarter to five. He’ll be home in time for supper.”
That thought made me very happy. I knew Damon loved being away at school, but I loved having my firstborn home under my roof.
“Speaking of suppers, Ali, do you know what tonight is?” Nana Mama asked.
“The night I have to wait until I finish Walking Dead?” he grumbled.
F
or a second there I thought my grandmother was going to lay into him as only a former high school vice principal can, but instead she said softly, “No.”
In the silence that followed, I watched my son’s head twist toward Nana Mama, who’d cradled her chin in her interlaced wrinkled fingers and watched him as if she were magically summoning his attention.
Then she smiled and said, “If you really think about it, the event we celebrate tonight was part of the very first zombie story, the best ever.”
Chapter
87
Outside, down the street, in the back of the dark van that now sported a sign advertising a bogus paint company, Marcus Sunday was alone and listening in on the Cross family dinner conversation. Acadia Le Duc was long gone.
Sunday rolled his eyes as Nana enticed her grandson into the story of the Last Supper by selling it as a critical scene in a zombie tale, all the while feeling repulsed by the fact that Dr. Alex’s entire clan was in there munching on fried pork chops.
Sunday hated pork. The whiff of a chop sizzling or a hock boiling set him on edge. So did the odor of bacon. Those thoughts took him back to the months after his father’s death and the skeptical West Virginia state police detective who’d kept nosing around the Mulch farm, acting as if young Thierry Mulch was somehow responsible for his old man’s having a heart attack and falling in among his pigs and having his remains gnawed to broken bones. It had taken DNA tests just to identify the old man.
The detective’s name was Alan Jones, and Detective Jones had tried everything to get young Mulch to admit his involvement in his father’s death, even bringing up the fact that his mother had abandoned the family and his father had recently shot down his idea of going to college to study, of all things, philosophy.
But eighteen-year-old Thierry had been too smart for Detective Jones, razor-focused on the long term. He had never once lost his cool, even when the detective had questioned his decision to sell his father’s farm to a coal mining company that had been after the property for years, and to sell all the pigs.
“Why would you give all this up?” Detective Jones kept asking.
And every time, Mulch had told him the same thing: “Because I hate pigs and because I can.”
Because I can. Wasn’t that the reason you did anything in life? Sunday mused. For a moment he flashed on the industrial pig farm where he’d dumped Preston Elliot’s body. Would there be anything left of him to find?
No, he thought. Impossible. His father had died in a sty holding twenty-four pigs and there had been little to analyze beyond shattered bones and teeth. There had to have been at least a thousand pigs in that barn where he’d dumped Preston Elliot. Maybe more. By now they’d long shit out the computer genius and rolled in it, the way pigs do.
Then Sunday startled from his thoughts and realized that Ali Cross was talking about him.
“Dad, if Jesus was a zombie,” Ali was saying, “do you think he smelled like the one in here the other night, like that guy who came to my school?”
“You mean Thierry Mulch?” asked Cross.
“That was his name, Dad!” Ali cried. “Thierry Mulch. He really smelled bad, like Damon’s basketball shoes. Must have been all that pig poop he grew up in.”
Sunday flashed on a pretty redheaded girl who’d heaped scorn and laughter on him again and again during high school. He saw her again as an older woman pleading for the life of her husband and children.