Little Miss Red Read Free

be.
    Unfortunately, as Grandma Roz also liked to say, “You make your plans and God laughs.”
    Like when the person who owns the vacation house cancels the trip after finding out she has to do a major rewrite of her latest book because her editor has accused her of plagiarizing herself.
    “So Daddy and I have a surprise for you,” cooed Mom at dinner a few nights later, as she plunked a piece of liver down on my plate that night. (A typical conversation withmy mother: Mom: It’s for your anemia. Me: But I’m not anemic. Mom:
Exactly
—because you eat your liver!)
    Mom only cooed like this when she was trying to get Jeremy to turn off the TV or when she was about to tell me something I wasn’t going to like.
    “What is it?” I said warily, shading my eyes from the glare that was coming off the freshly painted yellow walls of our kitchen. Mom had recently redecorated our entire house to make it more “serenity-friendly.” Because it was like every other Spanish-style house in Studio City, wood and darker colors worked best, but that hadn’t stopped her from choosing so-called happy colors like yellow, lavender, and peach. I felt like I was living in a tub of rainbow sherbet. When I grew up, I was going to paint my entire New York City penthouse apartment red, just like Devon did. All the magazines said that red was the most passionate color.
    After plunking down a piece of liver on Jeremy’s plate (which he immediately pushed away before going back to making ruler-straight rows of peas), she sat down and took my hand in her own Cotton Candy–painted one. Even though I had seen the video of Mom holding me in the hospital right after I was born, I still sometimes wondered if it had been a switched-at-birth situation. My parents were great, but as an accountant (Dad) and a shrink (Mom) they were both so…normal. I knew at my very core that I was supposed to have a page-turner kind of life, so wouldn’t itmake more sense for me to come from a family full of CIA agents or something?
    “I talked to Grandma Roz this morning,” Mom started to say, pushing her auburn hair off her face. (Mine was the same shade, so I guess there was no denying we were related.)
    The back of my neck started to itch. Just hearing Grandma Roz’s name made me nervous. Unlike other grandmothers who were sweet and cuddly and who did things like tell you how brilliant you are and sneak you five-dollar bills, Grandma Roz was like the poster person for cranky old people.
    “Did she call with a new burial outfit update?” I asked. At seventy-five, Grandma Roz was still in perfect health, but that hadn’t stopped her from spending every day for the last fifteen years talking about who was going to get what when she died.
    Mom let go of my hand and reached over to Jeremy to try and get him to eat some of his liver, but he was having none of it, which made sense for a kid with an IQ of 165. Unlike me and Mom, Jeremy took after my dad—darker hair and a big nose.
    “No. She called to say she wants the silver candelabras back,” Mom said.
    The candelabras were the only thing of value that my great-great-grandparents had been able to take with them when they left Poland. Legend had it that getting them toAmerica involved a train, a ship, and a mule. They had been passed down from generation to generation as a wedding gift and now lived in our dining room, where Jeremy liked to compulsively polish them (which, Dad said, was one of the few pluses of Asperger’s).
    “Why does she want them back?” I asked.
    “She says that because she has so little in her life that makes her happy, having them around as she gets ready to die might make her feel better.”
    Dad looked up from his liver, which, he too wasn’t eating. “And you wonder why I’m a glass-half-empty type of person,” he grumbled to Mom.
    She turned to him. “Larry, please don’t take out your resentment toward your mother in front of the kids. You know how children mirror what