Despite the snubbing of her firstborn, Lurlene, from the best-maid spot, Jolene’s aunt Vonnie was finally persuaded to keep her shop open after dusk so I could come in for a fitting. I’m pretty sure the indignity of having to rework her schedule for a vampire is what put the burr up her butt.

Buying your first prom gown at the Bridal Barn is a rite of passage for every Half-Moon Hollow girl. Because it was the only place in town where you could buy a prom gown. Or a wedding gown. Or a bridesmaid gown. We had a formal-wear chain store called Mr. Monkeysuit in the early 1990s, but they mysteriously shut their doors after six months. Before I knew the Barn was owned by a werewolf, I figured that the lack of competition stemmed from the claustrophobic confines of Hollow commerce. Now I thought it may have been because Aunt Vonnie ate her competition.

Now that I knew how much time Aunt Vonnie spent in the nude, I found it deliciously ironic that she owned a dress shop. Werewolves don’t like wearing clothes when they’re in the home field. Clothing makes life awkward for werewolves, for whom the most comfortable state is to be in wolf form. In an environment where they’re relaxed, sometimes they don’t even realize they’ve changed. There’s a subtle blending of light, and suddenly there’s a full-grown wolf standing next to you. It’s difficult to change form while dressed. At the same time, adult werewolves become conditioned to associate clothing with being out in public among humans. It’s handy as a reminder to help keep the change in check.

Jolene says that modern weres have adopted the human habit of dressing for weddings since so many of them involve human guests, and a nude officiate can be terribly offputting. The weres figure if you have to be dressed, it might as well be the most elaborate, uncomfortable clothes possible, which led Vonnie to open her shop. The problem was that Vonnie’s tastes hadn’t quite evolved since the days of big shoulder pads and bigger hair. The dresses in the Bridal Barn only came in colors that cannot be found in nature. Also, I don’t think any of the fabrics were manufactured after 1984. We’re talking a lot of large-gauge sequins.

“Jane, are you comin’ out?” Jolene called from outside the dressing room.

“No,” I whispered, transfixed by the horrific reflection before me.

Wasn’t there a Greek myth that ended like this?

From just outside the privacy curtain, Jolene said quietly, “Zeb says you’re not thrilled with the dress.”

“And that means I have to kill Zeb for telling you that,” I said, poking my head out of the dressing room but keeping the curtain closed tight around my neck. “I hate it when couples make up. It means they repeat everything other people have told them in some sort of confessional fit.”

“It can’t be that bad—” Jolene ripped back the curtain. “Whoa.”

“Yeah,” I deadpanned.

“It will look different,” Jolene promised. “After the rose and the ruffles and everything are put on. It’ll look different.”

“I don’t think ruffles are going to improve the situation.”

“I know,” Jolene whispered. “I know it’s horrible. I’ve worn that dress in six of my cousins’ weddings, including my cousin Raylene, who chose black taffeta for a July ceremony. Nobody looks good in it. That’s the whole point. Parade the bridesmaids out in this dress, make them look like cows—”

“Hey.” I glared at her. “There’s no need to agree with me quite so much.”

She ignored me. “So that when you walk down the aisle, you seem gorgeous by comparison. That’s the real tradition behind the dress.”

“You’re already gorgeous by comparison,” I hissed.

“Thanks,” she said, glowing briefly. “But it’s the one concession I’ve made to the pack about the wedding. I’m not marryin’ a were. I’m havin’ a nighttime ceremony to accommodate the vampire guests. I’m not marryin’ in the boneyard.”

“Boneyard?”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask. I went against almost every McClaine family tradition to marry Zeb. This is the one thing I agreed to.” She paused when I arched an eyebrow. “That you have to wear. You can get me really, really drunk at my bachelorette party and take embarrassin’ pictures,” she promised.

“I was going to do that anyway,” I snarked.

Aunt Vonnie bustled into the room with a bolt of lime-green chiffon. My lack of enthusiasm was clearly an affront to her craft.

“I haven’t stayed open past six in thirty years of business,” she reminded me.

“I really appreciate it, Miss Vonnie,” I said with all the cheer I could rally dressed like an extra from Footloose. “And thank you for making the dresses. They’re just … stunning.”

Aunt Vonnie easily picked up on my shifting eyes and twitchy lips. Or maybe I was pushing it with the empty double thumbs-up.

I have got to learn how to lie.

“Every McClaine bride since 1984 has chosen the ‘Ruffles and Dreams’ for her bridesmaids.” She sniffed, turning back to the sewing room. “It’s very popular here in town. I’ve made this dress in thirty-two colors for more than one hundred weddings.”

“Well, that certainly explains the Hollow’s unusually high divorce rate,” I muttered.

“I heard that!” Aunt Vonnie yelled from the back. I was going to have to watch myself around werewolves and their superhearing.

I turned to Jolene. “There will be pictures. Oh, yes, pictures and male strippers.”

“I accept your terms,” Jolene said solemnly.

“Get me out of this thing.” I sighed, angling the ridiculously placed zipper toward her. “Can I at least see the wedding dress?”

“I ordered it special on the Internet!” she squealed as she ran into the back room.

“Still need help with the zipper!” I called after her. I turned and caught a look at myself in a mirror. “Gah!”

Seriously, how does a veteran seamstress sew a zipper so that you need Go-Go Gadget arms to reach it? I spun in circles like a dog chasing its tail. I heard shuffling and giggling as Jolene tried on her wedding dress.

She emerged from the dressing room a vision in an elaborately beaded white Edwardian gown. And despite the universal laws of wedding dress ordering, the standard size four actually fit her perfectly. The cut emphasized her tiny waist and gave her the ideal hourglass silhouette. Every move sent a burst of sparkles from the beading. Her skin seemed clearer, brighter, creamier, her eyes a truer green.

“I hate you. You’re completely gorgeous, and I hate you,” I grumbled, feeling even more dumpy in my half-basted peach death shroud.

“Thanks.” She sighed dreamily.

“Meanwhile, I’m still dressed like this and …” I sent a glance at my watch.

“The engagement party!” she cried. “I almost forgot!”

“Well, that’s probably just your brain’s protective response to the prospect of seeing Mama Ginger,” I said as she dashed off.

“Hey, I’m still in this … thing!” I yelled after her.

You know that feeling you get when you walk into a room and you’re completely underdressed? That feeling would have been welcome at the Lavelle-McClaine engagement fete.

Claiming that the McClaine family was hogging all of the prewedding revelry, Mama Ginger threw together a last-minute “celebration” of Zeb and Jolene’s engagement. Engagement parties are a rarity in the Hollow, generally thrown by swankier families at the Half-Moon Hollow Country Club and Catfish Farm. Mama Ginger pulled a fast one when she listed the venue address on the invitations. Since few of us spent a lot of time at Eddie Mac’s, where local rednecks went to find their future former spouses, we were not familiar with the exact street number. Floyd and Mama Ginger had special access to the back room there as members of the pool league.

It was a surprise party, as in “Surprise! You’re wearing three-inch heels, but your party’s being held at a place where the table linens come from wall-mounted dispensers.”

I should have suspected something when the invitations encouraged us to “dress up.” This may have been a counterattack following the Great Wedding Date Change. A week after the wedding invitations were sent out, Mama Ginger decided that her allotted 100 were not enough. Apparently, her open distaste for the bride didn’t preclude Mama Ginger’s right to invite every person she’d ever met to her only son’s wedding. She convinced a neighbor who sold stationery out of the back of her dad’s gas station to help Mama Ginger design her own version of the invitation, featuring a Precious Moments bride and groom. Mama Ginger sent it out to another 150 distant relatives and passing acquaintances, so that instead of assuming the risk of inviting 100 carefully selected strangers to their farm, the McClaines now risked exposing their secret to 250 people even Mama Ginger might not recognize face-to-face or sober.

When Mimi and Jolene got wind of this maneuver, their only logical defense seemed to be moving the wedding up a week without planning to tell Mama Ginger until the last minute. And it would have worked, if Misty Kilgore, whose husband was shooting the wedding photos, had kept her mouth shut in line at the Piggly Wiggly.

Mama Ginger responded with a world-class hissy fit, further exacerbated when she was told that anyone who was not on the original mailing list would be turned away at the McClaines’ gate by large male cousins. This steely-spined response by Mimi McClaine forever secured my loyalty and devotion. Mama Ginger’s countermove was to tell Misty Kilgore that the wedding was off, prompting Mr. Kilgore to rip up the contract and schedule another wedding that weekend. Since there were no local photographers available, it was decided that Jolene’s cousin Scooter, who had a lazy eye and astigmatism, would be taking the pictures. It was safe to say at this point that Jolene had lost all control of the wedding-planning process.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to be standing under a guttering neon Budweiser sign wearing a strapless black dress and hair that took an alarming amount of time and pins. Vampires don’t fare well in redneck establishments. There tend to be a lot of easily breakable wooden objects and, well, rednecks. And Eddie Mac’s just happened to be the county’s main supplier of T-shirts showing a cartoon vampire being stomped on by the Statue of Liberty.

“Oh, hello, Jane, honey!” Mama Ginger cried, rushing past Jolene and the recently de-eye-patched Zeb. She wrapped her arms around me in an inescapable viselike grip and swung me around in time to the jukebox’s blaring “Islands in the Stream.” “There’s my girl! How are you?”

“Fine,” I said, smiling politely, even as Jolene’s face fell at this blatant display of favoritism. Behind her back, Mimi sent Mama Ginger a poisonous glare.

“Mr. Lavelle,” I said, smiling politely at Zeb’s father. Floyd Lavelle hadn’t had a civil word for me since I refused to fetch him a beer at a Labor Day barbecue. I was seven, and even then, I didn’t know my place. He grunted in what passed for a greeting and headed for the bar.

“Now, I made my special pimento cheese balls because I remember how much you like them,” Mama Ginger said, pinching my cheek. “You’re so skinny.”

“OK, that hurts,” I said, prying her carmine-tipped pincers from my face. “This is Gabriel. He’s a friend of mine and Zeb’s, oh, and a groomsman.”

Mama Ginger caught sight of our joined hands. Her sharp brown eyes narrowed at Gabriel. She mumbled, “How nice,” and turned on her heels.

Mama Ginger continued to greet her guests, most of whom were bar regulars. Jolene might as well have been furniture for all the attention she was paid. For example, the little banner Mama Ginger had hung simply said, “Congratulations, Zeb,” leaving room for possibilities. To add insult to gastronomical injury, the bar’s “special event package” provided a crock pot of beer weenies, a grocery-store sheet cake, and lots of beer on tap. That was it. For fifty people. Fortunately, Mimi McClaine saw this coming and called in werewolf reinforcements.