How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf Read online

  My mother was originally Lynn Duvall, from Brownsville, Texas. She met my father, George Wenstein, at a seminar on recycling in 1975 in Chicago, and they’d been together ever since. Still clinging to the free-lovin’, consequence-free Age of Aquarius, the closest thing they’d come to a wedding was their naming ceremony, in which Mom redubbed my father Ash Wenstein. Years later, I was not the only person who found it appropriate that my father had the temerity to name my mother Saffron, a spice that sticks to your skin and clings there for days.

  Ash and Saffron had some very definite theories on how to raise a daughter. Those standards didn’t include little things such as religion, television, junk food, Western medicine, or pets. (The pet thing wasn’t an animal-rights issue. Dad was just allergic.)

  There were literally no walls in my childhood home, a barely refurbished old barn that served as the central building of my parents’ very own self-sufficient, ecologically responsible commune for forward-thinking, government-hating vegans. Dad dubbed it Sunrises but eventually changed the name because people kept dropping their drugged-out teenagers at the front gate. They seemed to think it was a rehab.

  People drifted in and out of the community constantly. And while I loved the laughter, the music, the energy that they brought to my home, I learned not to make friends. Kids would be gone in a few months’ time, their parents unable to make the transition into what my parents called “living responsibly.” Even those who fit in rarely stuck around longer than a few months, their restless natures keeping them on the road.

  Still, my days were filled with adventure and fun, whether it was my dad’s sudden decision to spray-paint the family VW van an Easter-egg purple or my mom toting me along to a nuclear-energy protest dressed as a radioactive Statue of Liberty. Every day brought something new, something exciting. And I adored my parents—their love, their generosity, and their attention to me. I loved being the center of their world.

  But what’s fun for a toddler can prove tiresome to a growing adolescent. I was home-schooled until age thirteen, when I realized that if I didn’t get into public school, I would never get into college. My mother was my teacher, keeping complex and detailed lesson plans on hand for when the county education officials inevitably showed up for their surprise inspections. And while her intentions were always good, her lessons rarely went past the planning stage. She’d decide that some cause needed her attention, and suddenly my understanding fractions or knowing the state capitals didn’t seem so important anymore. Most of the time, she’d leave me alone to do “independent study.” If my father hadn’t been a CPA in his pre-Ash life, I probably wouldn’t be able to balance my checkbook to this day.

  When I rode my bike to the Bowdry County Public Schools office and asked to enroll, I had no proof of my existence beyond my birth certificate and an essay entitled “Why I Need to Be Enrolled in Public School—Right Now.”

  Fortunately, the superintendent was walking by as I tried to explain my plight to his secretary. After he established that I wasn’t being neglected or abused, he told me that every child had the right to attend public school. He even offered to go to my parents’ house and explain my wishes to them. But I was so afraid of the idea of him seeing our strange, colorful little world, that he would find me a lost cause—or, worse yet, that he would drink my father’s “sun tea”—that I declined.

  That afternoon marked the first argument I’d had with my parents—well, with my mother. My father seemed to think that if my parents were going to encourage me to make my own choices, that should include supporting me when those choices included public school. My mother warned of dire consequences, peer pressure, the influence of uncaring and underqualified teachers, a revisionist curriculum that would only prepare me for life as a drone, and, worse yet, refined sugars in the cafeteria food. But she eventually signed the enrollment papers, and I was the newest student in Leland High School’s ninth grade.

  My mother wept as I dressed for my first day of classes, insisting on packing my lunch with honey-oat cookies, a peace offering. I dropped them into the garbage in the cafeteria and bought my first school lunch with birthday money from my loving, capitalist grandparents.

  When I look back, I realize that was the breaking point. I got to school and realized exactly how different I was from other kids my age, how unprepared I was for the outside world. And I was pissed. Every act of rebellion, whether it was wearing leather shoes or voting conservative in a mock election, made me feel more normal. I flourished in high school. I became just like everybody else. I made good grades. I had a best friend, Kara Reynolds, who was happy to school me in the customs and rituals of “regular people.”

  I even got a job as a car hop at the Tast-E-Grill Drive-In after school. That afternoon, I ate (and promptly threw up) my first bacon cheeseburger. But Bernie Harned, the owner, helped me slowly build my processed-foods and fats tolerance up to Frito Pie as I worked my way from car hop to manning the grill. I used my hard-earned wages to buy new clothes, CDs, makeup, junk food—forbidden little treasures that I kept in an old steamer trunk at the foot of my bed.

  My enrolling at the University of Mississippi seemed to fry something in my mother’s brain. Well, more so than her concert experiences from 1966 to 1972. Her charming kookiness helped her get a security pass into my dorm and, later, my off-campus apartment building, so that she could, in her words, visit anytime. Mom used this access to “help” me sort through the things I didn’t need anymore, such as lunch meat (the fact that I was eating animal flesh was bad enough, but think of the nitrates!), nonorganic produce (poisons posing as nourishment), chemical cleaning products (baking soda and diluted vinegar work so much better). When she tossed out a full bulk-sized box of Hostess Sno Balls, I took to keeping my junk food in a locking plastic tub. And then I came home to find that she’d taken the tub to a recycling center.

  Mom really thought she was doing what was best for me . . . in her own twisted, self-centered way. After all, how could I tell my own mother she wasn’t welcome in my home? How could I be mad at her for throwing away a bunch of junk that was bad for me anyway? She was only thinking of my health. And hadn’t she replaced it with nine-grain bread, tofu dogs, carob cookies—all the things I’d loved when I was a kid? Arguing with her was like trying to grab a greased eel; once I thought I had a grip, she’d squirm away and switch tactics.

  So I studied hard and dreamed of using my marketing degree to get a job in Illinois, New York, California—as far away from Mississippi as I could get. I dreamed of solitude, of privacy, of owning a home that my parents couldn’t just barge into by virtue of the spare key they’d wheedled out of my maintenance man.

  My dad embraced pacifism. As in, he didn’t want to get between my mother and me when we were fighting. And then, about a month before graduation, Mom and I were arguing over whether she and my dad would be coming to the ceremony. Mom wanted to attend a conference that weekend on pharmacological waste’s impact on the water supply. When I objected, she said I shouldn’t be participating in such an overblown, elitist, meaningless ceremony in the first place. I said it was my overblown, elitist, meaningless ceremony, and it wouldn’t kill her to put her multitude of principles aside for a morning and make me happy for a change.

  “This is just so damned typical!” I yelled. “You try to take over every part of my life. You practically follow me around collecting my toenail clippings for posterity, but when something is really important, important to me, you couldn’t care less. Because I didn’t go to an environmentally responsible school. I didn’t study the right subjects. You think my teachers brainwashed me. You know, most people would be thrilled that their daughter was graduating from college with good grades. When are the two of you going to act like normal parents?”

  And that’s when Dad sort of keeled over and had a massive heart attack.

  Apparently, there’s only so much that oat bran can do for your cardiac system.

  With my mother in full-on histrioni
c mode, I had to step in to take care of the decisions at the hospital and talk to the doctors. I moved back to the commune to help out while my dad recovered. And when he was back on his feet, I found a job at a little company outside Jackson that sold advertising inserts for newspapers. The hour-long drive back and forth to check in on them was exhausting, but it was worth it to be able to go to my own little house at the end of the day.

  Mom soon returned to her old ways. Morning, noon, and night, my parents showed up at my doorstep with huge dishes of marinated tofu, herbal teas, some THC-soaked mementos from my childhood. This only grew worse after my engagement to Tim, an insurance adjuster whose offices were next door to mine. My mother often commented that our meeting at a Starbucks every morning for lattes was proof that the relationship was doomed to fail. Nothing associated with the Evil Caffeinated Empire could be good in her eyes.

  Tim Galloway was everything my parents loathed. Conservative, Christian, the product of a two-parent, two-income household. He paid his taxes cheerfully. He had a membership with the Steak of the Month Club. Even if he was the opposite of my usual type, I felt safe with him. He was level-headed, funny, and kind. He had a five-year plan, which, after an appropriate number of very conventional dinner-and-a-movie dates, included me. If there was no fiery passion or leg-bowing sexual escapades, that was fine. I knew what to expect.

  At least, I thought I did, right until the moment Tim met me for lunch one Wednesday and asked for his ring back. He couldn’t even give me a good story to take back to Kara. He wasn’t seeing another woman. He brought me flowers to break up with me, for God’s sake. He just felt that he’d made a mistake in proposing so soon. He did mention my parents a few dozen times and the fact that I seemed so hell-bent on being “normal” that I didn’t care what it cost me.

  When I went home to help Tim pack his things and move out of my house, I realized that I felt more guilty than hurt. And it should hurt to lose someone you’d planned to spend the rest of your life with. Tim was right. I’d chosen him because I knew my parents wouldn’t like him. For that matter, I’d chosen marketing because it was something they would never do. Dad said my advertising job made me a cog in the corporate machine and went against everything they’d taught me. They told people that I worked with recycled paper.

  I’d almost doomed myself to a lifeless marriage and an unfulfilling career because I was rebelling in my own silly way. Even though I’d worked for years for independence, I was still letting them influence every decision I made. I was twenty-nine years old. It was time to stop living my life like a spoiled, scared teenager. I wanted to start fresh, to go somewhere where I was an unknown quantity, where people didn’t know me or my parents, where my parents couldn’t reach. At the same time, I was scared of starting over. What if I’d been using my parents as an excuse for all these years? What if the reason I was unhappy was that I was just a generally miserable person?

  I’d moved to Grundy knowing that I probably wouldn’t be able to find a job I was qualified for anywhere near the town. But I had a tidy little nest egg, inherited from Grampy and Nana Duvall. Long before they passed, my mother told them she didn’t want the “blood money” from their family-owned butcher shop and barbecue stand. This made me my grandparents’ sole heir. I saved and invested the inheritance carefully, and it had helped ease the burden of living on college stipends and my pitiful early sales commissions. And now it would help me establish a life in Grundy.

  My plan—because, of course, I had a plan—was to live in Grundy without a purpose, to drift along, for one year. While I enjoyed my job at Gulfside, selling advertising space didn’t exactly turn my crank. I didn’t go home at the end of the day thinking, Wow, I really made a difference to someone today.

  I wanted to discover what I wanted to do with my life when I wasn’t making choices out of spite. I had enough savings to live comfortably for a year or two while I figured it out. And if I made it past one year, I would put a down payment on the Meyers place, find some gainful employment I was qualified for, and set down roots. If not, there was always Washington or New York. Heck, I’d live in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky, if I could find my place there.

  It’s a real place. I looked it up.

  The only person I regretted leaving behind was Kara, who also happened to be the only person, besides the postal clerk, with whom I’d entrusted my new address. Baffled but not exactly surprised by my move, Kara had made me promise to e-mail her every day—which reminded me that I needed to find out what my Internet options would be in Grundy.

  It had probably been cowardly to pack up my house while my parents were out of town at a civil-rights conference. Drastic action had been required and taken, even if it made my stomach pitch with that instinctual squeeze of guilt and irritation that always came with dealing with my parents. But I’d avoided the tearful scene I’d been dreading. And Mom was always telling me I needed to be more unpredictable.

  In the dark, with Yaya Wenstein’s quilt pulled up to my chin, I made more lists in my head. Things to do, things to buy, things to unpack. I rearranged the cabin’s furniture in my head. I thought of the meals I would make as soon as I cleaned the rest of the dead fish out of the kitchen, the long nights of uninterrupted sleep I would get without my parents’ constant calls. I hoped I would be happy, or at least content, in Grundy.

  I WAS STARTLED awake by a frantic bleating outside my window, followed by the crash of bodies through the brush. I bolted up, dizzy and disoriented in the darkness. I beat the nightstand with flat, numb fingers for my glasses, slipped them on, and stumbled toward the door. Or, at least, where my bedroom door was located in my old place. I smacked headlong into a wall. Cursing vehemently, I felt my way through the living room and found the front door. I opened it, expecting to find an injured sheep caught in the brambles. Where a sheep would come from I had no idea, but I was half-asleep.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness. The moon was full and alive, casting enough silver light to make shadows. Just beyond the tree line, less than twenty feet from my door, lay an injured elk, panting and panicked. A thick stream of blood flowed from a wound on its neck, making an oily black patch on the grass. Hunched over its body stood the largest black wolf I’d ever seen.

  I don’t think it realized I was there. It was concentrating completely on its dying prey. I gasped, stepping back into the shadows of the house, but somehow unable to close the door. The wolf snarled, its huge jaws poised over the elk’s throat.

  Without thinking, I screamed, “No!”

  The wolf’s head snapped up. Its wide eyes, an unearthly shade of blue-green, glowed with angry intelligence.

  Whoops.

  The elk, sensing the wolf’s distraction, stumbled to its feet and crashed back through the brush. The wolf’s eyes seemed to narrow at me, silently berating me for disturbing it. I stared back, my fingers finally loose enough to fumble for the doorknob and close it behind me. In my panic, I wondered if closing the door would do any good. Could the huge predator just tear through it?

  Through the window, I watched the wolf stare at the door. I held my breath, trying to think of anything in the house that could be used as a weapon. The fireplace poker. The elk antlers hanging over the fireplace, which would seem a sort of karmic justice when used against this thing. Suddenly, the wolf perked its ears toward the sound of the elk lurching through the bushes. It let out what sounded like a frustrated huff and sprang away from the house, loping through the woods after its bleeding meal.

  I sank to my knees and crawled toward my bed, knowing I wouldn’t sleep another wink that night.

  CHAPTER 3

  Thumb Removal for Dummies

  THE BLUE GLACIER SALOON was part general store, part restaurant, part bar. It was my fantasy come true, a Stuckey’s that served shots.

  After ridding the cabin of the last of the fish and returning the emptied U-Haul trailer to a dealership 220 miles away, I’d finally called my parents. No one picked up. They didn’t
believe in answering machines. And by that I mean they believe the point of not being home is not answering the phone. They do believe that answering machines exist. So, having dodged that bullet for a few more hours, I was in a fine mood. And I was starving.

  As I drove through town, I was struck again by the obvious effort people made to maintain the buildings. Every structure was occupied. Every square foot of indoor space was made useful. Mr. Gogan had told me that even if businesses closed down, the storefronts were used as storage space, an improvised church, extra classrooms for the high school. The weather and the expense of shipping construction materials made it difficult to build there, so wasting precious interior space was not tolerated.

  In the South, between the wet, baking heat and passage of time, the decay of buildings was expected. People walked away from their businesses, leaving them frozen like some museum exhibit on bad management. It was common and depressing to drive through a town square and see an abandoned gas station with the self-service signs intact, the rack of Black Jack chewing gum moldering near the register, houses rotted, their splintered gray walls overgrown with kudzu, usually with a newish trailer installed just a few yards away. I found the continuity of my new home, the commitment to preservation, to be comforting, and I marveled at the exquisite old woodwork on the door to the Glacier.

  While Hannigan’s Grocery provided milk, eggs, and produce, the men of Grundy generally made an afternoon of buying their dry goods at the Blue Glacier, playing pool or watching a game. The dining room was lit by afternoon sun streaming through huge picture windows. On the opposite side of the dining room was a huge black metal woodstove that seemed to be the centerpiece of the room, giving it a homey, lived-in feeling. The wood-paneled walls were decorated with a mix of neon beer signs and hand-painted wildlife scenes. The scent of potatoes fried in peanut oil had my mouth watering.