Vampire Blood by Kathryn Meyer Griffith Page B

puffy.
    “You’re going to say now that you can’t afford it, right?”
    “Yep,” he said testily. “Rates kept going up and up. Couldn’t see paying that much a month on a gamble.”
    He wouldn’t be eligible for Medicare, either, until next year. Jenny shook her head sadly as she maneuvered the station wagon down the road. She hated driving his car. It reminded her of a tank. A rusty, noisy tank.
    Thank goodness, the farmhouse was only about a mile away.
    “Dad, at your age you need it.”
    No answer.
    “Well, at least, next year there’ll be Medicare. You’ll have coverage, then.”
    “Charity,” he snarled from the corner as they bumped down the road. “Never have taken charity, never will. I got my pride, Jenny.”
    His pride. Forever his damn pride.
    “Dad, Medicare isn’t charity. You paid taxes all your life. It’s your due.”
    “Still charity,” he grumbled again. “Don’t need it.”
    Jenny sighed aloud, tired and sick of worrying about her wayward, persnickety parents. She wasn’t allowed to tell them how to live their lives; all she could do was worry to death about the both of them, while they drove her slowly, completely insane.
    “Sure, Dad. Is pride going to stop the pain you’re feeling right now?” she threw at him. “You need to go to the hospital. We have money. Maude paid us in advance, so we can afford it.”
    “She didn’t have to do that, just because she felt sorry for us.” Resentment tinged his voice. “Won’t stand for peoples’ pity, neither.”
    Jenny finally lost her temper. “She didn’t—,” but her father cut her off.
    “I don’t want to go to the dern hospital! You hear me! Just take me home. This is your father, Jenny, telling you this. Just obey your father like a good child.” His eyes closed, his mouth puckered in anger. Jenny had rarely seen him so agitated.
    It shook her.
    Jenny’s face hardened, and she simply nodded.
    She didn’t utter another word until she’d deposited him inside his front door and helped him into the house. After she’d aided him in cleaning his cuts and scrapes with a warm soapy washrag, and they’d fought over whether his arm was broken or not, she helped him to bed.
    Making him as comfortable as she could, she prepared him something to eat. He refused to touch it. He was asleep by the time she’d covered the food and stashed it away in the refrigerator.
    Outside, the storm clouds had accumulated swiftly, hiding the sun. Distant peals of thunder echoed miles away, growing louder, coming closer.
    Before she left, she squeezed his car into the rickety garage behind the farmhouse and made sure his doors and windows were closed and locked. He always left them wide open. Then she strolled home across the field to her trailer.
    The walk helped her. It cleared her head.
    The wet scent of rain wafted achingly on the warm air. Black-edged clouds were coming in now like a stampeding crowd of wild stallions. Jenny could smell the salty ocean mingled in with the tang of the dying grass. It was amazing how quickly the bright summer’s day had changed into a hazy, darkening late afternoon.
    She was so infuriated at her father she could have screamed.
    Instead, she stopped to caress and murmur loving words to Black Beauty and Lightning, her dad’s two swaybacked bony horses.
    They’d come up eagerly to her the minute she climbed the pasture fence. Jenny gently mounted Lightning’s broad back and let him take her home at a slow walk. Black Beauty happily cantered behind as the clouds grew more menacing above them.
    She peered into the gathering white mist. It was strange, the mist. She’d never seen anything quite like it. Thick as split-pea soup, treacherous as it swirled around the horses hooves.
    She kept Lightning to a sedate trot, even though he wanted to frisk, and wouldn’t let him jump anything. Poor old beast, she thought, as she pushed Black Beauty’s velvety nose away from his flank playfully. The two horses never