The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman Read Free Book Online Page A

We did the standard childhood scenarios: school, house, hospital. After Turtle disappeared, we played detective and, eventually, courtroom, swapping the roles of lawyer, judge, and defendant without any understanding of how the scenes would have made our parents feel, not to mention any child psychologist who might happen to pass by.
    Once Susan leaves me alone in the basement, it becomes clear Remy’s grandma has left a mess that is more staggering for its utter uselessness than anything else. Aside from a bed and a dresser, the room is packed with back issues of
Muscle & Fitness
magazine that are stacked in floor-to-ceiling columns against the far wall. There are hundreds of them, the most recent of which is from August 1974. Piles of cardboard boxes hold disorganized collections of items that fall just a hair outside the category of garbage: tangled masses of plastic bead necklaces, most of which appear to be hand-strung by either monkeys or children; maybe a thousand keys that could open an endless number of theoretical locks; dozens of fist-sized wooden armadillos whose gaping mouths function as bottle openers; six convection ovens, their boxes postmarked from the Home Shopping Network; piles and piles of old photographs that were exposed to so much moisture they have fused into bricks of lost memories; an unused candle shaped like the Virgin Mary, its wick protruding from her folded hands; nine packages of Polaroid film, but no camera. Everything stinks of mildew and rot. The only source of natural light comes from a small window near the ceiling above the bed.
    It’s clear that my job here is just an excuse to keep me occupied, the same as when my mom used to pay me a dollar to organize our silverware drawer. The fact that I’m getting ten dollars an hour to sort through garbage annoys me more than it should. I could have gotten a real job somewhere in town, someplace where I’d have the chance to meet people and maybe even make some friends. At the very least, I could be working aboveground.
    And it feels wrong to chuck all of Betsy’s possessions into thetrash, even if that’s where they belong. How would she feel if she knew that her family wanted to get rid of every worthless item she treasured? It seems cruel of the Mitchells, even though I know they don’t mean it that way. I’m more selective than I need to be as I decide what to keep or toss, and I can tell Susan is disappointed by my lack of progress at the end of the day, even though she’s too polite to say anything. As she counts five ten-dollar bills into my hand, I see Remy watching us from the playhouse, gazing at me with steady eyes even when I stare right back.

Chapter Six
    Summer 1985
    Before she became a beauty, Gretchen was a fat girl. Our mother was horrified by my sister’s weight but tried not to show it. She did her best to reassure my sister that lots of kids are chubby, but her daily reminders that everything was going to be fine someday only reinforced the idea that Gretchen wasn’t fine to begin with. It didn’t help that Abby was so petite (“Lilliputian,” our mother called her), making Gretchen seem even bigger in comparison.
    Even after Gretchen’s awkward days were long behind her, our mom still talked about how much it had pained her to watch the two girls play together. “I’d see Abby flitting around like a little whisper of a child, so sweet and dainty; and then, hulking along behind her, would be Biiiiig Gretchen.” She even did an impression of my sister, stomping across the floor with her arms held straight out like Frankenstein’s monster and her faced fixed in adumb stare. Our mother seemed to assume that, just because Gretchen was no longer oafish, the comparisons weren’t hurtful, which was stupid of her. But she had no way of understanding how it felt to undergo the kind of drastic metamorphosis that her oldest daughter had experienced during