The Snowball Effect by Holly Nicole Hoxter Read Free Book Online

I miss you, right?”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œOkay. I’ll—”
    But he’d already hung up.
    Â 
    I had no interest in entering Mom’s bedroom, but Vallery knocked on my door that night and insisted that I had to help her pick out something for Mom to wear for the funeral.
    I looked at Vallery’s things piled up in the corner.She’d brought a red suitcase and three trash bags. It didn’t look like a lot of stuff. I wondered what she’d brought and how long she planned to stay. I tried not to look around at anything else. I tried not to think about the fact that we were dealing with my dead mother’s clothes. I tried to be cool like Vallery. But it was probably a lot easier to be cool when you hadn’t seen the dead woman in ten years.
    She hadn’t seen Mom wear those clothes. She couldn’t picture her in them, walking around the house, playing with Collin, leading one of her groups, making dinner, crying in the recliner after Carl died. Those clothes, to Vallery, were just clothes to be sorted through. It seemed perfectly normal to her that she was rummaging through Mom’s things, shoving the rejected outfits into trash bags, picking out the last outfit she’d ever wear. Maybe Vallery would have been the sort of daughter who shared clothes with Mom. But I never went through Mom’s closet, never borrowed anything. This felt like an invasion, and I didn’t want any part of it.
    I let Vallery dig through the closet while I sat on the floor with my back against the bed. I picked up a notebook sitting on the nightstand. I opened it and pretended to look occupied. As I stared at the notebook, I realized what it was. Mom’s journal. This certainly constituted a bigger invasion than sorting through her clothes, but I couldn’t put it down. Mom hadn’t left a suicide note, but maybe she’d written something in here. I flipped to the last page. These could have been the last words Mom had ever written.
    Possible new metaphors for life:
    flower—blooms, beautiful
    river—flows, twists and turns, harsh or calm
    storm—harsh and turbulent but then there’s a rainbow
    tree—frail sapling but then grows strong
    Notes for Mom’s workshops. New metaphors for life. Jesus. She spouted off cheesy nonsense, but those women loved her. I flipped back a few pages, but it was all the same sort of stuff. Nothing about Carl or her depression. She must have stopped writing in there months ago.
    â€œWhat about this?” Vallery said. I put the notebook back and looked at the green dress she held up.
    â€œI guess that’s fine.”
    Vallery turned and looked at it again. “I think I might actually keep this one.”
    â€œYou’re going to keep Mom’s dress? You’re actually going to wear that?”
    â€œYeah. So what? It’ll fit me.”
    â€œBut she’s dead.”
    â€œLainey, have you ever shopped at a Goodwill? Or bought anything secondhand?”
    I ignored her and stared at the row of stuff hanging up in Mom’s closet. She set the green dress to the side and pulled a black sweater off a hanger.
    â€œLainey, answer me.”
    â€œYes, I have.”
    â€œThen I hate to break it to you, but you’ve probably worn some dead person’s clothes. Death is the number-one reason why people make donations to Goodwill.”
    â€œI’m sure that’s a real statistic.”
    â€œWell, I’m keeping the dress.”
    â€œOkay. Whatever.”
    Vallery flipped through the clothes. I picked at my fingernails.
    â€œSo what were you doing in Texas?” I asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean, what was I doing? I was living there.”
    â€œI know. I mean, did you have a job?”
    â€œOf course I had a job. How do you think I paid my bills?”
    I knew I sounded like an idiot, but I just wanted to know something about Vallery, anything about what her life had been like before