The Snowball Effect by Holly Nicole Hoxter Read Free Book Online Page B

friend died. That’s when she lost half her mind. So she said.
    She lost the other half when I was seven. She said we were walking to the store (because after the car accident she hated driving if she didn’t have to) and I found a garbage bag at the side of the road. I walked up and kicked it. Mom, for whatever reason, decided to bend down and tear the bag open and investigate. She found a dead body inside. According to Mom. I didn’t remember this particular incident at all. She said it was so traumatic that I blocked it from my memory. She said we both cried and cried and we flagged a car down and had them call the cops.
    A few months after that, the fear-of-ovens thing kicked in. She’d just dumped her boyfriend and he’d moved out. I don’t even remember his name—Daddy Whoever, right? Mom was in the kitchen at the restaurant where she worked and flames shot up out of the oven, and she freaked out. She didn’t get burned. Not even close. The chef’s eyebrows were singed, but thatwas the extent of the damage.
    A while after that, Mom and Carl met in this support group for crazy people. Not real crazy people like schizophrenics or anything, but dumb people like Mom who were afraid of things like ovens. Carl was afraid of public transportation.
    The key to the support group was taking baby steps, and that the whole group be there when everyone conquered their fears. Mom went first. They had Mom turn the gas in the house back on, and that was the first step—Mom just living in the same house with a gas oven. I wasn’t allowed to use it, and Mom wouldn’t go in the kitchen, so I still lived on Hot Pockets. Then after a week or so of that, Mom and Carl and this other woman and the group leader worked up to just standing in the kitchen and talking. Carl actually acted like he was a little afraid, too, I guess to make Mom feel better about having such a stupid fear. After that, the group leader made dinner in our kitchen for everyone. Then the next week, Mom made dinner. She didn’t fall into the oven, and everything was fine. She never relapsed. It was like she’d never had the stupid phobia.
    Then they worked on Carl’s public transportation nonsense. See, the reason Carl needed to get over his fear of public transportation was that he didn’t have a car back then. And without public transportation he really didn’t have much of a shot at getting a decent job. I swear to God those stupid fears they came up with were just to getout of going to work every day.
    The story of Carl’s attempted rehabilitation is long and boring, but in the end, Carl did not conquer his fears the way Mom did. He dropped out of therapy. A few years later, Mom ran into him at work. Since she’d gotten over the oven thing, she’d found a job as a waitress at a buffet. Carl sat in her section one night and they talked a little bit; then he left her a huge tip and his phone number. She didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, so things moved pretty quickly after that. I’m pretty sure he was over the public transportation thing by then anyway, but Mom wanted to help him with his anxiety, so he pretended that he’d had some miraculous recovery as a result of her guidance. Mom was so inspired by the experience that she decided to become a life coach and hold her own inspirational group sessions. She started inviting women over at all hours of the day when she wasn’t working at the buffet, and she gave them these goofy inspirational talks and had them talk about their stupid problems and write down stuff in journals, and sometimes they did little interventions like Mom had done with the oven.
    I could still hear her in my head, standing in the living room, pouring her heart out to those lonely, crazy women.
    Picture Mom, a pretty forty-something-year-old woman named Lisa, standing in her living room in blue jeans, a nice shirt, and bare feet. Her hair and makeup are