I nodded reluctantly. You could put it that way.
“That’s so romantic,” Charlsie sighed.
You could look at it that way.
“But you should see him,” Arlene told Charlsie, having held her tongue as long as she could. “He’s exactly like—！”
“Oh, no, not when you talk to him,” I interrupted. “He’s not at all the same.” That was true. “And he really doesn’t like it when he hears that name.”
“Oh,” said Arlene in a hushed voice, as if Bubba could be listening in the broad daylight.
“I do feel safer with Bubba in the woods,” I said, which was more or less true.
“Oh, he doesn’t stay in the house?” Charlsie asked, clearly a little disappointed.
“God, no!” I said, then mentally apologized to God for taking his name in vain. I was having to do that a lot lately. “No, Bubba stays in the woods at night, watching the house.”
“Was that true about the cats?” Arlene looked squeamish.
“He was just joking. Not a great sense of humor, huh?” I was lying through my teeth. I certainly believed Bubba enjoyed a snack of cat blood.
Arlene shook her head, unconvinced. It was time to change the subject. “Did you and Rene have fun on your evening out?” I asked.
“Rene was so good last night, wasn’t he?” she said, her cheeks pink.
A much-married woman, blushing. “You tell me.” Arlene enjoyed a little ribald teasing.
“Oh, you! What I mean, he was real polite to Bill and even that Bubba.”
“Any reason why he wouldn’t be?”
“He has kind of a problem with vampires, Sookie.” Arlene shook her head. “I know, I do, too,” she confessed when I looked at her with raised eyebrows. “But Rene really has some prejudice. Cindy dated a vampire for a while, and that just made Rene awful upset.”
“Cindy okay?” I had a great interest in the health of someone who’d dated a vamp.
“I haven’t seen her,” Arlene admitted, “but Rene goes to visit every other week or so. She’s doing well, she’s back on the right track. She has a job in a hospital cafeteria.”
Sam, who’d been standing behind the bar loading the refrigerator with bottled blood, said, “Maybe Cindy would like to move back home. Lindsey Krause quit the other shift because she’s moving to Little Rock.”
That certainly focussed our attention. Merlotte’s was becoming seriously understaffed. For some reason, low-level service jobs had dropped in popularity in the last couple of months.
“You interviewed anyone else?” Arlene asked.
“I’ll have to go through the files,” Sam said wearily. I knew that Arlene and I were the only barmaids, waitresses, servers, whatever you wanted to call us, that Sam had hung on to for more then two years. No, that wasn’t true; there was Susanne Mitchell, on the other shift. Sam spent lots of time hiring and occasionally firing. “Sookie, would you have a look through the file, see if there’s anyone there you know has moved, anyone already got a job, anyone you really recommend? That would save me some time.”
“Sure,” I said. I remembered Arlene doing the same thing a couple of years ago when Dawn had been hired. We had more ties to the community than Sam, who never seemed to join anything. Sam had been in Bon Temps for six years now, and I had never met anyone who seemed to know about Sam’s life prior to his buying the bar here.
I settled down at Sam’s desk with the thick file of applications. After a few minutes, I could tell I was really making a difference. I had three piles: moved, employed elsewhere, good material. Then I added a fourth and fifth stack: a pile for people I couldn’t work with because I couldn’t stand them, and a pile for the dead. The first form on the fifth pile had been filled out by a girl who’d died in a car accident last Christmas, and I felt sorry for her folks all over again when I saw her name at the top of the form. The other application was headed “Maudette Pickens.”
Maudette had applied for a job with Sam three months before her death. I guess working at Grabbit Kwik was pretty uninspiring. When I glanced over the filled-in blanks and noticed how poor Maudette’s handwriting and spelling had been, it made me feel pitiful all over again. I tried to imagine my brother thinking of having sex with this woman—and filming it—was a worthwhile way to spend his time, and I marvelled at Jason’s strange mentality. I hadn’t seen him since he’d driven off with Desiree. I hoped he’d gotten home in one piece. That gal was a real handful. I wished he’d settle down with Liz Barrett: she had enough backbone to hold him up, too.