Books like Tribute

In fact, Nicole’s voice was the next one on Allegra’s answering machine, telling her that she hoped that Allegra was coming to San Francisco with her dad that weekend. She said she missed her, and that she hoped everything was okay, and she hoped they’d have time to go skating. “And oh ... that’s right ... I love the jacket you sent me for Christmas ... I was going to write a note, but I forgot, and Mom said...” There was an embarrassed silence as the eleven-year-old voice tried to regain her composure. “I’ll give you the letter this weekend. Bye ... I love you.... Oh ... this is Nicky. Bye.” She hung up, and Allegra was still smiling, when she heard Brandon’s message that he was working late, and was still at the office when he called her. His message was the last one.

I’d rather drink a can of Axe body spray while feral raccoons feast on my exposed bone marrow than sit across from this twat.

Sometimes, it was just easier for me to live under the piles rather than face what might be in them. It wasn’t logical, but my brain didn’t really work normally.

It must have worked for her, because it never mattered where she was in the world, she was home. She waltzed through life like she belonged at every party she was never invited to, fell in love with every lonely heart she found, and found luck in every adventure. She had that air about her-tourists asked her for directions when she went abroad, servers asked her opinion on wines and fine whiskeys, celebrities asked her about her life.

“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like a low hat. The walls, streaked with moss, had grown soft, and bulged a little with dampness that seeped up from the ground. The wild, overgrown garden was full of the whisper and scurry of small lives. In the undergrowth a rat snake rubbed itself against a glistening stone. Hopeful yellow bullfrogs cruised the scummy pond for mates. A drenched mongoose flashed across the leaf strewn driveway.

There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.