Bloodsucking fiends: a love story

up the loft, Jody tried to prepare Tommy for what he was about to experience. "She doesn't like men. My father left her for a younger woman when I was twelve, and Mother thinks all men are snakes. And she doesn't really like women either, since she was betrayed by one. She was one of the first women to graduate from Stanford, so she's a bit of a snob about that. She says that I broke her heart when I didn't go to Stanford. It's been downhill since then. She doesn't like that I live in the City and she has never approved of any of my jobs, my boyfriends, or the way I dress."
    Tommy stopped in the middle of scrubbing the kitchen sink. "So what should I talk about?"
    "It would probably be best if you just sat quietly and looked repentant."
    "That's how I always look."
    Jody heard the stairwell door open. "She's here. Go change your shirt."
    Tommy ran to the bedroom, stripping off his one-sleever as he went. I'm not ready for this, he thought. I have more work to do on myself before I'm ready for a presentation.
    Jody opened the door catching her mother poised to knock.
    "Mom!" Jody said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. "You look great."
    Frances Evelyn Stroud stood on the landing looking at her youngest daughter with restrained disapproval. She was a short, stout woman dressed in layers of wool and silk under an eggshell cashmere coat. Her hair was a woven gray-blond, flared and lacquered to expose a pair of pearl earrings roughly the size of Ping-Pong balls. Her eyebrows had been plucked away and painted back, her cheekbones were high and highlighted, her lips lined, filled, and clamped tight. She had the same striking green eyes as her daughter, flecked now with sparks of judgment. She had been pretty once but was now passing into the limbo-land of the menopausal woman known as handsome.
    "May I come in," she said.
    Jody, caught in the half-gesture of offering a hug, dropped her arms. "Of course," she said, stepping aside. "It's good to see you," she said, closing the door behind her mother.
    Tommy bounded from the bedroom into the kitchen and slid to a stop on stocking feet. "Hi," he said.
    Jody put her hand on her mother's back. Frances flinched, ever so slightly, at the touch. "Mother, this is Thomas Flood. He's a writer. Tommy, this is my mother, Frances Stroud."
    Tommy approached Frances and offered his hand. "Pleased to meet you…"
    She clutched her Gucci bag tightly, then forced herself to take his hand. "Mrs. Stroud," she said, trying to head off the unpleasantness of hearing her Christian name come out of Tommy's mouth.
    Jody broke the moment of discomfort so they could pass into the next one. "So, Mom, can I take your coat? Would you like to sit down?"
    Frances Stroud surrendered her coat to her daughter as if she were surrendering her credit cards to a mugger, as if she didn't want to know where it was going because she would never see it again. "Is this your couch?" she asked, nodding toward the futon.
    "Have a seat, Mother; we'll get you something to drink. We have…" Jody realized that she had no idea what they had. "Tommy, what do we have?"
    Tommy wasn't expecting the questions to start so soon. "I'll look," he said, running to the kitchen and throwing open a cabinet. "We have coffee, regular and decaf." He dug behind the coffee, the sugar, the powdered creamer. "We have Ovaltine, and…" He threw open the refrigerator. "Beer, milk, cranberry juice, and beer – a lot of beer – I mean, not a lot, but plenty, and…" He opened the chest freezer. Peary stared up at him through a gap between frozen dinners. Tommy slammed the lid. "… that's it. Nothing in there."
    "Decaf, please," said Mother Stroud. She turned to Jody, who was returning from balling up her mother's cashmere coat and throwing it in the corner of the closet. "So, you've left your job at Transamerica. Are you working, dear?"
    Jody sat in a wicker chair across the wicker coffee table from her mother. (Tommy had decided to decorate the loft in a Pier 1 Imports cheap-shit motif. As a result it was only a ceiling fan and a cockatoo away from looking like a Thai cathouse.)
    Jody said, "I've taken a job in marketing." It sounded respectable. It sounded professional. It sounded like a lie.
    "You might have told me and saved me the embarrassment of calling Transamerica only to find out that you had been let go."
    "I quit, Mother. I wasn't let go."
    Tommy, trying to will himself invisible, bowed his way between them to deliver the