Read Online The Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. by Kate Messner - Free Book Online

One batch of cookies isn’t the end of the world. We’ll make more. Okay?” she asks. She waits for me to answer.
    I take a deep breath and try to make my voice calm for her. “I turned the oven off, Nonna. Why don’t you rest a little more, and I’ll help with dinner when the smoke clears out.”
    “And then tomorrow we’ll make more.” She pushes my hair away from my face and looks at me. “You’ll help?”
    I nod. “Sure. I’ll help,” I hear my voice say. “It’s not a big deal.”
    But it is. Client or no client, I need Dad. As I head downstairs to the mortuary, another burned cookie crunches under my sneaker.

CHAPTER 8
    T he front door slams shut as I’m walking downstairs, and the door to Dad’s prep room is open again so I step inside.
    “Gianna?” He raises his eyebrows and looks up at me, still in my track clothes. I usually go right up to change and do homework, so I don’t see him until dinner.
    “I really need to talk to you.” I follow him into the room where he does the embalming. He stops and turns to face me, arms crossed over his chest. There’s a body under a sheet on the table behind him. Dad doesn’t like anyone in the room when he’s working, except Roger, who works for us and helps him sometimes.
    “It’s important.” I cross my arms too. “It’s Nonna.”
    Dad’s hands drop to his side like he’s deflating. He nods, and right away I can tell that he knows. “I do need to keep working,” he says, lifting a makeup case from the shelf, “but you can stay. Talk to me while I work.” He folds back the top of the sheet, and I see a chubby-faced woman with white hair, each of her eyes held closed with an eye cap so they don’t pop open when her relatives come to see her tomorrow. I can tell she was pretty, even though Dad hasn’t put any makeup on her yet.
    “I’m not embalming her because the calling hours are happening so soon—tomorrow,” he says, opening a jar of moisturizer and dabbing some on her cheeks. It makes it easier for him to put on makeup. “So you don’t need to worry about the chemicals.”
    The embalming chemicals make my eyes sting. The makeup, though, is just like regular makeup, except it’s a special kind, made for dead people.
    “Find me a darker one of these.” Dad holds up a small bottle of foundation.
    “I guess you didn’t hear the smoke detector go off today.” I hand him a jar that’s a little darker, but he shakes his head. I look for more. “Nonna was making cookies.”
    “For Mrs. Kinsella’s family?” He nods at the woman on the table.
    Mrs. Kinsella. Ruby Kinsella’s grandmother. She looks like the kind of woman who was probably baking cookies this morning, too. Things sure can change fast.
    “So she burned them?” Dad takes the case from me, since I’m not offering much help. He chooses a darker jar of foundation and rubs some on Mrs. Kinsella’s chin.
    “She didn’t just burn them. She burned them. Then she left them in the oven, and when the smoke detector went off, she got mad that it wouldn’t stop and took out the batteries.”
    Dad twists the cap onto the foundation and turns to me. “She took out the batteries?”
    “Yes.”
    “And then got the cookies out of the oven?”
    “No.”
    He sighs. “You found them after school?”
    “I walked into this huge smoke cloud, Dad. Worse than the day you started that fire in the fireplace without opening the thing that lets the smoke out the chimney.”
    “The flue,” says Mom. She’s been standing in the doorway for a while. I can tell because she has the same serious expression as Dad.
    Mom’s heels click across the floor as she walks over to the prep table. She picks a dark pink shade of blush from the makeup case. “Try this one.”
    “It’s kind of dark,” Dad says.
    “Look at the picture.” Mom hands Dad a photograph of Ruby standing next to her grandmother at our fifth-grade graduation two years ago. Her grandmother has on as much makeup as a