Free House Under Snow by Jill Bialosky

to feed in the grass, and Austin’s smell stuck to my clothes.
     
     
    Maria blamed me
for Billy Fitzpatrick’s lack of attention. It was irrational. We both knew it, but nevertheless, I woke up the morning after Skippy’s party friendless. Maria refused my phone calls. I would have to choose between her and Austin. I would probably have felt the same way, if the situation had been reversed. But I couldn’t change anything now. I had
driven into a fog so thick everything slid out of focus and disappeared.
    When I was a child, the two most important people in my life had vanished, first my father, and then my mother, when she lost herself in her dates. Love to me was always sheer, something you could see right through. I longed for a kind of love that was impenetrable, that was tough and enduring.
     
    By the snowy December the year my mother started her dating career, she was going out almost every night and sleeping all day. She forgot to wake us up for school in the morning, to leave money in an envelope in the milk chute for the milkman, to call the snowplow to dig us out. Sometimes the snow drifted so high that our house looked like an animal burrowing in the ground. My mother lost all sense of time and place; all sense of herself, except for an obsession with her figure. She went on liquid diets; for a week, she ate only three grapefruits a day.
    While Lilly busied herself with her makeup and creams, Ruthie heated cans of Campbell’s soup for supper. Meanwhile, Lilly looked as elegant as royalty, the way she carried herself down the stairs in the late afternoon. Yet there was often little in the refrigerator except a stack of frozen dinners or a doggy bag from one of Cleveland’s elite restaurants filled with gristled filet mignon or leftover slices of prime rib.
    By the time Kent Montgomery came to call, my mother’s flirtations had gone beyond playfulness and she had grown anxious.
    That afternoon, I watched Lilly try on cocktail dress after cocktail dress, complaining that not one looked right. After
she finally decided on one, she worried over the color or wave of her hair. She became irritable at these times, snapped at us over small things—if she ran her last pair of panty hose—then begged our forgiveness.
    I pleaded with my mother to stay home. She looked worn down and haggard, like a slab of meat hanging in the butcher shop. With panic in her eyes, she answered, “Don’t you see? I have no choice.” She continued to cream her tired face. Later, when Lilly glided down the stairs to meet Kent Montgomery, I saw her forced smile as she gazed into his eyes, and my heart plummeted.
    When she got home from her date, the front door creaked open. Lilly fumbled with the lock; Kent’s voice echoed up the stairs. He stomped his feet on the front doormat to clean the snow from the perfectly polished leather shoes I had noticed when he had come for Lilly.
    “
Shhhhhhh
,” Lilly whispered. I heard both of them laugh. The front door creaked shut again. Loose paint from the hall ceiling outside my bedroom fell in chips to the floor. My heart gradually slowed from quick, anxious beats to a more normal pace.
    My mother’s high heels clicked up the steps and stopped outside our door. “I thought I heard you two talking,” she said to Louise and me, opening the bedroom door a crack. “How come you’re still up?” Her voice was slow and thick like syrup. She slipped inside the room and sat down at the bottom of my bed. She stretched out one leg and slipped off its shoe with the other foot; her red polished toenails shone through her nude stockings. Her body was warm and floppy. That’s how she got when she drank. Sleepily, she laid her head down and curled up her body. She let out a long sigh. She was absorbed in something dark and secret.
    “Isn’t Kent adorable?” she asked at last, pushing herself up. She tossed back her head and laughed. “You liked him, didn’t you?”
    “He’s got a beard,”