Living Dead in Dallas

sympathetically.
    “Thanks, Terry, I’m fine. Just sorry about Lafayette.”
    “Yeah, he wasn’t too bad.” From Terry, that was high praise. “Did his job, always showed up on time. Cleaned the kitchen good. Never a bad word.” Functioning on that level was Terry’s highest ambition. “And then he dies in Andy’s Buick.”
    “I’m afraid Andy’s car is kind of . . .” I groped for the blandest term.
    “It’s cleanable, he said.” Terry was anxious to close that subject.
    “Did he tell you what had happened to Lafayette?”
    “Andy says it looks like his neck was broken. And there was some, ah, evidence that he’d been . . . messed with.” Terry’s brown eyes flickered away, revealing his discomfort. “Messed with” meant something violent and sexual to Terry.
    “Oh. Gosh, how awful.” Danielle and Holly had come up behind me, and Sam, with another sack of garbage he’d cleaned out of his office, paused on his way to the Dumpster out back.
    “He didn’t look that . . . I mean, the car didn’t look that . . .”
    “Stained?”
    “Right.”
    “Andy thinks he was killed somewhere else.”
    “Yuck,” said Holly. “Don’t talk about it. That’s too much for me.”
    Terry looked over my shoulder at the two women. He had no great love for either Holly or Danielle, though I didn’t know why and had made no effort to learn. I triedto leave people privacy, especially now that I had better control over my own ability. I heard the two moving away, after Terry had kept his gaze trained on them for a few seconds.
    “Portia came and got Andy last night?” he asked.
    “Yes, I called her. He couldn’t drive. Though I’m betting he wishes I’d let him, now.” I was just never going to be number one on Andy Bellefleur’s popularity list.
    “She have trouble getting him to her car?”
    “Bill helped her.”
    “Vampire Bill? Your boyfriend?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I hope he didn’t scare her,” Terry said, as if he didn’t remember I was still there.
    I could feel my face squinching up. “There’s no reason on earth why Bill would ever scare Portia Bellefleur,” I said, and something about the way I said it penetrated Terry’s fog of private thought.
    “Portia ain’t as tough as everyone thinks she is,” Terry told me. “You, on the other hand, are a sweet little éclair on the outside and a pit bull on the inside.”
    “I don’t know whether I should feel flattered, or whether I should sock you in the nose.”
    “There you go. How many women—or men, for that matter—would say such a thing to a crazy man like me?” And Terry smiled, as a ghost would smile. I hadn’t known how conscious of his reputation Terry was, until now.
    I stood on tiptoe to give him a kiss on the scarred cheek, to show him I wasn’t scared of him. As I sank back to my heels, I realized that wasn’t exactly true. Under some circumstances, not only would I be quite wary of this damaged man, but I might become very frightened indeed.
    Terry tied the strings of one of the white cook’s aprons and began to open up the kitchen. The rest of usgot back into the work mode. I wouldn’t have long to wait tables, since I was getting off at six tonight to get ready to drive to Shreveport with Bill. I hated for Sam to pay me for the time I’d spent lollygagging around Merlotte’s today, waiting to work; but straightening the storeroom and cleaning out Sam’s office had to count for something.
    As soon as the police opened up the parking lot, people began streaming in, in as heavy a flow as a small town like Bon Temps ever gets. Andy and Portia were among the first in, and I saw Terry look out the hatch from the kitchen at his cousins. They waved at him, and he raised a spatula to acknowledge their greeting. I wondered how close a cousin Terry actually was. He wasn’t a first cousin, I was sure. Of course, here you could call someone your cousin or your aunt or your uncle with little or no blood relation at all. After my mother and father had died in a flash flood that swept their car off a bridge, my mother’s best friend tried to come by my Gran’s every week or two with a little present for me; and I’d called her Aunt Patty my whole life.
    I answered all the customers’ questions if I had time, and served hamburgers and salads and chicken breast strips—and beer—until I felt dazed. When I glanced at the clock, it was time for me to go. In the ladies’ room I found my replacement, my