The Snowball Effect (5 page)

“But that's not enough!” Lisa exclaims. “You can get robbed in broad daylight. You can get robbed in your
home
. Anything can happen to you at any time, anywhere. You
can't
control the things that happen to you. Not completely.”

Lisa stops pacing and shakes her head sadly, like she's pondering the unpredictability of life.

The women write this down in their journals. On the first day of group they are all supposed to bring whatever
kind of journal they want to express themselves in. Some bring cheap composition books from the drugstore. Most bring expensive hardbound journals.

Pretty Lisa stands in front of them, shaking her fist. “You can't expect life to play fair with your heart”—she pounds her chest with her fist—“or your brain”—she knocks on the side of her head—“or your health”—she places her open palm over her heart. “That's not the nature of the game we call life. You have to recognize the nature of the game and know that you can do your best to make the right choices, but life is going to do whatever the hell it pleases to you anyway. All you can control is how you react to whatever life throws at you. You can shut down or you can soar. And ladies, what are you going to do at the pivotal moment—that moment when you have the choice of a lifetime in front of you? Are you going to fight or are you going to give in? Are you going to shut down or are you going to soar? Well, what's it going to be, ladies?”

“Soar,” one of the women mutters, unsure if she was supposed to answer.

“What?” Lisa says, cupping her hand around her ear. “I didn't hear that. I think that might have been the voice of someone who chooses to shut down. I said, what are you going to do, ladies?”

A few of the women start to catch on. “Soar!” they answer.

“WHAT?” Mom shouts back.

“SOAR!” they all scream. And the walls practically shake.

And these women? They paid her a lot of money to do this. After a while Mom quit her waitressing job, and we moved to Ridgely Avenue, where I had a room farther away from the living room and it became a lot easier for me to barricade myself in and ignore her pretend-therapy sessions.

Vallery had said something about Carl and I couldn't get it out of my head.
Whoever Carl was, I guess he set you and Mom up pretty nice.
That was wrong on so many levels, and I felt a little bad that I hadn't stuck up for Mom. Not that she would have wanted me to, anyway. If she had still been alive, she probably would have said,
Oh yes, Vallery, Carl was a wonderful provider. We were all lucky to have him
. When in reality Carl hadn't done a single useful thing.

So no, Carl did not set me and Mom up in anything nice. Mom, shocker of shockers, did that all on her own, thank you very much.

 

The graduates of Mom's therapy sessions all took her death personally. Mom had taught them to talk about their feelings, so they all felt entitled to come up to me at the viewing and tell me how Mom's death made them feel. They usually started crying. Then they would suddenly realize they were being rude and they'd ask me how
I'm
doing, oh my God, I must be heartbroken. And
then I'd say, excuse me, I have to go find my sister. That same exchange was repeated approximately every three minutes with a new woman. The funeral home reminded me of our living room, with all those chairs and couches in random places, and all those distraught women.

Mabel had insisted on sending an obituary to the
Corben Courier
, so I had insisted on something quick and vague:

I didn't want her to mention the viewing at all, but she insisted we had to.

I hardly recognized any of the faces at the funeral home. That was probably my own fault, since I'd asked Kara to discourage all our friends from coming.

Riley came to both afternoon sessions before he left for work. I wished he'd taken off and stayed with me the whole time, but I didn't want to ask him to. Kara and her parents came the first night. A few of our neighbors were there. Carl's mother didn't come, so Collin wasn't there either. And then, on the second night, with only an hour left to go, my father showed up.

I was on the opposite side of the room, a good distance from the casket. A woman whose name I'd already forgotten rambled on about how Mom had changed her life. I tried to stand so that the woman would block his view of me, but he kept moving around too quickly.

And then he spotted me.

“I'm sorry—” I started saying to the crazy woman. “My sister—”

But by then Dad had reached me.

“Lainey!” he said. He held out his arms like he wanted to hug me. I just glared. He stood like that for a second, and then he went in for the hug anyway.

When I pulled away, he smiled at the woman I'd been talking to, waiting for an introduction. Instead, I held out my hand to her and said, “It was
really
nice talking to you. Thanks for coming.” And she took the hint and walked away.

Dad had on a suit. A nice one. I wondered if he'd rented it. I'd never seen him in a suit before.

I wondered why he hadn't bothered to show up until the last hour of the last day.

He looked off toward the casket. “God, how could this happen?” Dad mumbled.

“Um,” I said.

“How does she look?”

I shrugged. She was dead; how was she supposed to look? I actually hadn't been anywhere near the coffin. I'd rather picture her alive in the red dress, at Christmas, instead of lying dead in it.

Dad reached into his pocket and handed me an envelope. “It's just a little something for you,” he said. I didn't open the envelope but I knew it had to be money. Was a funeral really a gift-giving occasion? Lisa kills herself, and her daughter gets money? Or was this overdue child support? I didn't think he bothered to pay that anymore. “I really wish you'd told me when your graduation was,” Dad went on. “I wanted to be there.”

Oh yeah. Graduation present.

“Sorry,” I said. “Things have just been kind of crazy.”

What I really wanted to say was
I invited you to fifth-grade graduation but you didn't bother showing up for that.
Some people expected an infinite number of chances to disappoint you, and it just wasn't fair.

“Liz is sorry she couldn't be here,” he said. He didn't explain why my aunt couldn't come, but I got it. Corben was a long way to come from Florida for the funeral of your brother's ex-wife. Dad lived only an hour away, but I was surprised that he had made it.

Dad took my hand and walked toward the casket. I looked around for Vallery or Mabel, anyone who'd give me an excuse to cross the room and get away from Dad.

He stopped in front of the casket and kneeled down on the little bench. I watched Dad and I tried not to look at Mom. And then he started to cry. He folded his hands and bowed his head. It didn't feel right to walk away. After a minute I put my hand on his shoulder. I didn't know what else to do.

R
iley nudged me on the morning after the funeral. “Back to work today,” he muttered. “Better get out of bed.”

“Ugh,” I mumbled into the pillow.

“What do you want for breakfast?”

“No,” I said. “Stay with me.”

“You need food.”

“I need you.” I wrapped my arm around his waist.

“You'll be sorry,” he said, and snuggled up next to me. I fell back asleep.

I woke up again to Riley shaking me. “You have ten minutes before you have to be at work,” he said, all urgent like. Riley thought being late to work was the end of the world. At his job maybe it was. But at my job I didn't have a boss or any coworkers waiting for me. It wasn't like anyone cared if I showed up a few minutes late.

Riley pulled on his jeans. I looked around on the floor for my nice black pants.

I kept most of my clothes piled up on the floor. Mom thought I was messy and unorganized, but she'd bought me so much stuff that I didn't have any room left in my closet or my dresser. I'd sorted everything into piles. A pile of work clothes in front of the closet. A pile of casual clothes between the bed and the window. The pile on the other side of the bed was Riley's clothes—his shorts and T-shirts and sweaters that he'd left at my house, which I wore until I couldn't smell him anymore; then I washed them and gave them back.

“What?” he asked. “What do you need?”

“Pants,” I said. “Black work pants.”

He found them and threw them at me. I went to the closet and picked out a clean shirt. Riley watched me get dressed, then I grabbed my purse and we went to the kitchen.

Vallery sat at the table peeling an orange. “Good morning,” she said. “Nice shirt, Riley.”

Riley went to the counter and opened the loaf of bread. He looked down at his Nirvana shirt. “Thanks.” He dropped two slices of bread into the toaster.

“Were you, like, even born when Kurt Cobain killed himself?” Vallery asked.

“Yes,” Riley said. He got the butter out of the refrigerator. “But were you even born when Skynyrd's plane crashed?”

I grinned.
Nice one, Riley.

“I saw them in concert last summer,” Vallery said. “That's when I bought the shirt.”

“They have, what, one original member left?” Riley asked.

Vallery rolled her eyes and ate her orange. The toast popped up and Riley buttered it, then wrapped it in a napkin and handed it to me.

“I'm going to work,” I said. I waved my toast at her.

“Collin's coming home today,” she said.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob. “Oh yeah? That's today?”

“We're having a handoff at the lawyer's office in about an hour.”

I smiled. “Good luck with that.”

“What?” Vallery asked. “I don't think the old lady will give me any trouble.”

Riley and I walked around to the front of the house. Before we got to the gate, we hugged and kissed good-bye. Then I watched him walk to his pickup before I headed over to the Grand Am in the driveway.

I hoped Vallery understood that I was keeping my driveway spot and she could park her Mustang on the street. Our tiny parking pad had never been a problem before. Mom and I shared the Grand Am, and Carl's bike could fit beside it. I had seniority. Vallery might have thought she did because she was older, but that wasn't how seniority worked. It meant who'd been there longest,
and that was me and the Grand Am.

Riley waved. I watched him drive away before I tried to start the car. Fortunately it didn't give me any trouble.
Thank God for small miracles,
Mom would have said.

Mom liked to sit way up close to the steering wheel, so I always had to move the seat back when I drove after her. I knew that I'd been the last one to drive the car, but I reached down to adjust the seat out of habit. And the plastic knob broke off in my hand. I rolled my eyes and reached into the glove compartment for my list.

The Grand Am was quite possibly the biggest piece of crap ever. I wished, on a daily basis, that Carl could have crashed the Grand Am instead of the stupid Kawasaki so we could have gotten a new car. But as long as it still ran, there wasn't really a good reason to waste money on a new one. At least according to Mom and Carl. They told me all my complaints were petty, but I kept a list of everything in the glove compartment for Riley. One day he would get around to fixing everything for me.

• 1. Windshield cracked.
  
• 2. Passenger window won't roll down.
  
• 3. Driver's window completely broken.
  (Somehow the window stopped rolling up and down properly and Carl had shoved some wires in there to keep the whole window from falling out. Even with the wires, the window constantly fell open about an inch. If you wanted to put
  the window back up, you had to grab the wires, one in each hand, and yank them up.)
  
• 4. Seat belt doesn't work.
  (Driver's side, no tension whatever. It just hung there. In the event of an accident it would probably just wrap around my neck and strangle me.)
  
• 5. Air conditioning doesn't work.
  (Wouldn't have been such a big deal if the windows rolled down.)
  
• 6. Gas gauge unreliable.
  (Acted normally for a while, but when it hit a certain point somewhere below a quarter of a tank, it started going in the opposite direction and if I didn't pay attention, I would think I had three quarters of a tank when I was really dead on
  E
  . There were plenty of times when Mom gave the car to me on E and I didn't know it so I ran out of gas and had to get Riley to come rescue me with his gas can.)
  
• 7. Interior lights don't work.
  
• 8. P, R, D, N,
  and
  3
  don't light up.
  (Wouldn't have been a big deal if interior light still worked. At night I was constantly putting it in the wrong gear and backing into poles.)
  
• 9. CD player doesn't work.
  (Tape player still worked, though, so Riley bought a bunch of blank tapes and recorded all of my favorite CDs so I could still listen to my music in
  the car. Was he the best boyfriend ever, or what?)
  
• 10.
  Volume control doesn't adequately control volume.
  (A lot of the time when I tried to turn it down, the volume would go WAY UP for no real reason, and I had to spin the dial around and around and around before the volume would start to go down again. Very annoying.)
  
• 11.
  Car sometimes doesn't start.
  (This had been going on since the fall, and I'd thought it was reason enough for us to get a new car already, but Carl showed us how to jiggle the battery wires and then try again. He thought he was brilliant for figuring this out. I would have thought he was brilliant if he'd fixed the damn thing. Or bought us a new car.)
  

I had just enough room at the bottom of the list to add the newest problem with the Grand Am.

• 12.
  Plastic seat adjustor thingy broke off.
  

That would definitely be a top priority for Riley.

 

Corben Mall was just about the crappiest mall I'd ever been to. It was where you went if you needed something right away and didn't want to drive fifteen miles up the beltway to White Marsh. Or you went there if you
couldn't drive at all and you had to take the bus, or if you were a teenager and you had to walk or ask your parents for a ride. Really, no one shopped there because they wanted to. They either hung out there when they didn't have anywhere else to go, or they got in and got out.

The mall was anchored on one end by a discount department store and on the other end by a shut-down Ames. Every year there was a rumor about something new opening up there—a Sears or a JCPenney or even a Nordstrom, but it'd been empty since I was a kid.

My kiosk was outside the Big & Tall men's clothing store. It was a big improvement over our previous location right outside the toy store. They kept all kinds of squawking toys outside the store, but the worst was the pig. It walked in circles and oinked. All friggin' day long. Sometimes I walked over and switched it off, but it was only a matter of time before some evil child came walking by and switched it back on again.

Working at the perfume kiosk—any kiosk, really—was the most boring job on Earth. Mall shoppers were leery of the kiosk workers. The scary foreign guys who practically chased you down to get you to try their hand lotion had given us all a bad name. Most people wouldn't make eye contact. And when they did, God forbid you said something friendly, like “Good morning.” They'd give you this stupid grin and say, “No thank you,” and scurry off. No thank you? Are you kidding me?

The security guards always came by to talk to me while
they were on their rounds, and that broke up the monotony. Corben Mall needed lots of security guards. They had to break up lots of fights and catch lots of shoplifters, and one time there'd even been a shooting in the parking lot.

I also had Rodney from the body jewelry kiosk to keep me from going over the edge. Occasionally I even had customers to deal with. But mostly I just sat on my stool staring off into space. Not the kind of job you would want to have when you had a lot on your mind and didn't want to think about any of it.

As I started up my register, Rodney walked over to me. He looked like exactly the sort of guy you'd expect to sell body jewelry. He had his lip pierced, his left eyebrow pierced twice, a hoop in his nose, and a long bar going through his upper ear. As he walked up, he frowned at me.

“Bob told me what happened,” Rodney said. I groaned. He held out his arms for a hug.

Bob was my boss, and I was so glad that Bob had taken it upon himself to spread the news of my mother's death. Rodney had been the one person I'd been counting on to treat me like a normal human being for a few hours. Thanks, Bob.

“It's cool,” I said as I hugged Rodney.

He rubbed my shoulder and then walked back to his kiosk. Looking back, he said to me, “Let me know if you need anything.”

I wondered why people kept saying that. Like, what would I need? What could Rodney give me that would fix anything?

I opened the cases and straightened out the boxes of perfume, which were already perfectly straight to begin with. It didn't look like anything had even been sold in the last week. Then I stared at my register for a while. I looked around the mall, but there were hardly any shoppers yet. I watched the girl at the handbag kiosk putting on her makeup. Her kiosk was only a little farther away from mine than Rodney's was, but I never talked to her. She'd gone to my high school and we'd taken a remedial math class together sophomore year. Neither of us had actually belonged in that class. Our grades were incredible compared to everyone else's. The teacher posted our averages every week, and the handbag kiosk girl—her name was Gia or Ginny or something—acted like we were competing for the top grade. Which was ridiculous, because it was remedial math. Yet she always got so smug when she had a ninety-eight-point-five percent and I had only a ninety-seven percent. Seriously.

Since I had nothing better to do, I started playing the alphabet game that Rodney had taught me. He had all kinds of games that we played to pass the time on slow days. Normally I would have asked him to play with me, but since he was wearing the Poor Lainey face, I didn't really want to talk to him. And I guessed he wanted to avoid me too, because he'd picked up a book and started reading.

Okay…foods. My favorite category.

 

A. Applesauce.
Which I liked.

B. Bratwurst.
Which I'd never had.

C. Catfish.
Which I'd tried but didn't like.

D. Danish.
Which Mom had loved.

 

“Rodney?” I called over to his kiosk.

He looked up from his book and grinned at me. “Hey, Lainey.”

“I'm running to the newsstand. Watch my stuff?”

He laid his book down. “What do you need? I'll get it for you.”

“No, I can go. Do you want some Doritos? I'll get you some Doritos.”

I walked away before Rodney could keep arguing with me.

I went across the mall to the newsstand and looked at the magazines. I grabbed something with Renée Zellweger on the cover, got Rodney's Doritos (Cool Ranch—I knew what he liked), and went back to my kiosk.

I gave Rodney his Doritos. He thanked me profusely. I read through the magazine twice, putting it down only to help a few customers. And somehow, miraculously, my shift finally ended.

Before I left the mall, I bought a few slices of pizza and some fries and then met Riley at the shop. We ate together in the break room. Since he'd graduated a year ago, he'd been working full-time. I couldn't imagine working full-time at
the perfume kiosk, so I still only worked ten or fifteen hours a week. I knew I'd have to find something full-time eventually, but I thought it would be okay to wait until summer was over. Or until people in my family stopped dying.

After lunch I went home, because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I could hear Collin's high-pitched screaming as soon as I got out of my car. Welcome home, right?

I found Vallery in the kitchen with her head down on the table. She didn't look up when I walked in. “You set me up,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

She lifted her head. “You didn't tell me he was like this. I mean, is he
always
like this? Or is he just upset about Mom? Seriously, what's going on here?”

“He has behavioral problems.”

“No kidding. And what is he, Mexican? I didn't know Mom dated Mexicans.”

“Mom didn't date a Mexican. They adopted Collin. His birth mother is Puerto Rican or something.”

“You mean the kid's not even my real brother?”

“Oh my God, Vallery,” I snapped. “Just go back to Texas.”