But perhaps the most excited conversations were around what I was going to wear.
It became pretty quickly apparent that I wasn’t going to go to a bridal boutique and pick a dress. The vampire knitting club fully intended to make my wedding gown. I’d never even known you could knit a wedding dress, but they showed me pictures of knitted and crocheted dresses that were absolutely gorgeous.
I tended towards something with a higher neck, but Sylvia kept edging me toward something off the shoulder and low-cut.
We were standing in my back room, where I ran classes and the vampire knitting club met. Sylvia, Gran, Clara, and Mabel had come in through the back way with more dress patterns. I was a little nervous, as only a curtain separated the back from the front of the shop, and I didn’t want to risk Gran being seen. It tended to upset customers when they discovered the supposedly dead former proprietor of the shop wandering around.
However, there were no customers, and I kept an ear tuned for the bell so I could scurry out front if anyone came in. Violet was supposed to be serving in the shop, but she was on her tea break, and who knew when that would end?
Sylvia showed me yet another hand-knitted gown with a plunging neckline. I finally said, “I don’t want anything low-cut.”
Sylvia glanced at Gran and then at me, her gaze going to my cleavage. “It’s so much more practical, dear. For later.” She looked at me significantly.
I’d never seen a look of embarrassment on Sylvia’s face, and I wasn’t positive I saw one now, but she definitely looked a little odd. Gran was looking down at the floor as though searching for dust bunnies.
“For after what?” I had no idea what these two were on about.
“The wedding night,” she said, finally.
I still wasn’t getting it. “What’s my neckline got to do with my wedding night?”
I knew these two were old-fashioned, but they’d been born at the end of the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth.
Finally, Sylvia almost shrieked, “For when he turns you.”
I was so stunned, I stood there in silence for a second. “Turns me?”
“Into one of us,” she said at last.
I took a step backward. I didn’t mean to; it was instinct. “You think Rafe is going to turn me into a vampire on our wedding night?”
“Yes,” she said, as though I were being thick. “It’s the logical thing to do. As part of the ceremony.”
“Not any wedding ceremony I want to be part of.”
I looked at my grandmother, and she finally lifted her gaze to mine. I wasn’t positive, but I thought she appeared relieved. Sylvia not so much. I tried to explain my position. “It’s not like we haven’t talked about it, and I love Rafe. You know I do. But I don’t want to be a vampire.”
I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but I liked food way too much and preferred to look in the mirror to put on my own makeup. Maybe I was looking at things through too human a perspective, but I didn’t want to have to worry about the sun any more than a fair-skinned person with concerns about the ozone layer would.
“But then you’ll leave him all alone,” Clara said. She was sentimental and inclined to state the obvious.
I nodded. It was, I admitted, the great sadness of my approaching nuptials. “I know. But he still wants to marry me, and he’s the one with the most to lose.” It would be great for me. I’d have a man who had the looks and strength of a thirty-five-year-old for my whole life. It would get weird as I got older and he didn’t, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.
Gran took over the conversation then. “Well. Now that we’ve got that settled, there are more wedding gown choices available to you.”
We finally settled on a crocheted gown that would be done with pure silk crochet thread. There were separate lace flowers that could be crocheted individually and then sewn on, as well as a beautiful shawl and a detachable train. This was important, because every single member of the vampire knitting club wanted to know that they had made a piece of my gown, so there had to be a lot of it.
The only difficulty was that Rafe couldn’t see the gown before our big day, so we had to have extra meetings in secret. I suspected he knew what was going on, but he was a good sport, and if I told him he couldn’t come near or by my shop, he didn’t.
“And what about filling the tradition of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue?” Mabel asked. Before I could say a word, she eagerly said, “I’d be delighted to lend you something. Something to wear, perhaps.”
I had to school my expression to remain calm and not gape at her in horror. I sometimes wore sweaters Mabel had crafted, out of kindness. She was a brilliant knitter but had the worst taste of anyone I’d ever known. The thought of wearing something of hers on my wedding day gave me a thrill of horror.
I was pretty sure everyone else felt the same way. Gran said, “I’m so glad you brought that up, Mabel. I’ve been wanting to talk to Lucy about my own wedding dress.”
We all turned to stare. “You still have your wedding dress?” I asked her. I wasn’t fabulous at math, but I thought she’d gotten married around 1960. I lived in her house now. I’d never come across an old wedding dress. I’d have remembered.
She looked a bit superior as she said, “If you’d ever bothered to go up in the attic, you might be surprised what you’d find.”
“There’s an attic?” I supposed I knew there must be one, but I hadn’t really thought about it, and I certainly hadn’t spent any time searching. Unless your ceiling leaked or you had vermin, did
