Dying in Style by Elaine Viets Read Free Book Online

Josie said solemnly. Amelia was so serious one minute, so silly the next, it hurt her heart. Josie treasured these car confessions. She didn’t know how much longer Amelia would tell her things.
    “Can I turn the radio on 101 The River?” Amelia said.
    “Go ahead,” Josie said. She could stand listening to Hilary Duff for the trip to school. She knew it was important to Amelia’s social life to hear The River in the morning.
    There was no way Josie could afford the Barrington School for Boys and Girls. She had a small legacy from her Great-Aunt Tillie, but even so, the tuition was more than Josie made in a year. Fortunately, her daughter had her father’s brains. Amelia was a scholarship student with top grades in everything except the dreaded Spanish.
    Amelia got the scholarship because she fit the school profile. Josie suspected it was because they lived in Maplewood, which was practically the ghetto by Barrington standards. It was an old suburb of St. Louis that looked like a city neighborhood. The homes were brick and limestone, built early in the last century.
    Josie’s Honda was creeping along Manchester Road through Maplewood’s main shopping district. Josie thought Maplewood looked like an old-fashioned small town. They passed the Paramount Jewelers, with its clocks and cuff links in the window. Penzey’s Spices had the best pepper. She would take Amelia in there and say, “Snort!” and they’d breathe in the good smells until they were laughing too hard. The Switch Stand sold model trains, but Josie could never get Amelia interested in them. Josie was a sucker for train villages with water towers.
    The shopping district’s plate-glass windows sparkled in the morning sun. So did the sidewalks. Some kids in Amelia’s school had never walked on a sidewalk. One boy called sidewalks “little patios.”
    There were big patios, new decks and in-ground pools for most of the Barrington students. Mother and daughter drove through the old-money suburb of Ladue along wooded roads just starting to get a bit of fall color. Cicadas made their sad end-of-summer sound, and Josie thought she felt the cold winter under the last summer heat.
    At 7:50, Josie flicked on her blinker to pull into the long driveway of the Barrington School. Her daughter shouted, “Stop, Mom! You can’t!”
    Josie slammed on the brakes, her systems on full maternal alert. “What’s wrong?”
    “You can’t go to school like that,” Amelia said.
    The kid was right. Josie’s yellow tush-brushing wig and rhinestone tube top would shock the Lilly Pulitzer crowd down to their pedicured toes.
    “I’ll stay in the car,” Josie said. “I promise.”
    “They’ll still see you.”
    Amelia’s agonized plea made Josie remember when her own mom had picked her up at school wearing a baggy brown knit hat. Jane’s hat looked like a cow patty, as that nasty Heather told Josie—and everyone else at school. Snotty girls chanted, “Patty, patty, hi, patty” whenever Josie’s mom drove up. Her mother innocently wondered who the popular Patty was, while Josie prayed for death in the seat beside Jane.
    She wasn’t going to do that to her daughter. Josie pulled over and whipped off the wig. Her respectable brown bob was hopelessly flattened. “Now I look like I have terminal bed head.”
    Amelia looked relieved and Josie knew she’d made the right move.
    “Sorry, kid, I can’t do anything about the tube top and the tattoo,” Josie said.
    “You can hunch down a little,” Amelia said.
    “Good idea. They’ll think your mother is the Hunch-back of Notre Dame. Assume the Quasimodo position.”
    Josie hunched. Amelia laughed. She sat with her monogrammed backpack on her lap, ready to launch herself out of the seat before anyone noticed her embarrassing mother.
    Josie was pretty sure none of the other car-pool moms saw her tube top. They wouldn’t believe it if they did. White trash didn’t go to the Barrington School.
    Who am I kidding? she