Read Online The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal - Free Book Online

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    If Vince hadn’t held fast to her arm, Natalie would have beenon her sister again and likely would have drawn blood. “Go. To. Your. Room,” he said to Natalie. “Jade, you’re going to clean the bathrooms.”
    “But she—”
    “Not another word. Go.”
    Crying, both sisters stomped into the house. Hannah patted his arm, silently sucking her thumb. Pedro had slid beneath the porch and now crawled out, covered with red dirt himself. He wagged his tail slowly as he looked to Vince for reassurance.
    “You’re a dog,” Vince said. “A
big dog
. You’re not supposed to be scared when little girls are having a fight.”
    Pedro, who stood as tall as the middle of Vince’s thigh, came over and leaned on him. Absently, Vince rubbed his head, looking back toward the house. Did all sisters fight like this? It seemed unnatural, evil—though his mother said not to worry about it, they would outgrow it. They’d better, or he would end up wringing their necks.
    “Peanut butter,” Hannah said.
    “You’re right. Come on.”
    Beneath her pajamas in her bottom drawer, Natalie kept a cigar box. It was made of smooth reddish wood, varnished, with a metal clasp and carved words that were painted red and said,
Royal Butera vintage Premium Blended Cigars
. It wasn’t very deep. She only had room for a few things. A plain black comb with a few long blond hairs clinging to it. A pair of turquoise earrings she would wear someday when she was allowed to get her ears pierced. A tarot card showing a castle tower on fire. A photo of her mother at age twelve, dressed up in a very short dress and poofy bangs. An embroidered bag that had herbs anda crystal inside. There was also a tiny crystal dish with fluted sides. It sat on a tiny metal plate and had a tiny silver spoon, carved with teensy swirls, to go with it. A salt cellar. Natalie loved it.
    They all had belonged to her mother. Natalie took them out now, lining everything up in a row on her desk, which looked out over the meadow to the mountains. Once she’d seen a bear walking through the grass, looking so ordinary she didn’t even think to be afraid until after he was gone, and then she’d been so scared she almost peed her pants.
    Everyone thought she was forgetting about her mother, just like Jade, who didn’t remember her because she was only three when Mommy died, or Hannah, who wasn’t even three months old. Natalie had been five, and it was her job to make sure Mommy never got forgotten, so every week—she used to try to do it every day, but it was hard and she sometimes had to do homework—she brought out all these things and went through her list.
    The comb made her think of Mommy’s long blond hair, which she let Natalie brush sometimes when she wasn’t too tired, and how it smelled of bacon sometimes after she finished making breakfast for everybody, or like soap after a shower, or sometimes perfume when she had gone out to dinner with Daddy. When she looked at the picture, Natalie could remember how Mommy’s mouth looked when she smiled. Natalie had stolen the tarot card off the table when her grandma Leanne—who lived in Denver, where they used to live—came in and swept all of them on the floor the day Mommy died.
    The salt cellar was the most precious of all. Her mother had it for years and years before she even met Natalie’s dad. She bought it at an antiques store in England, which was far acrossthe ocean. Mommy thought the salt cellar was so adorable, she just had to have it, even though it meant carrying it around all over Europe in her backpack. She carried it home and kept it forever.
    Natalie would keep it forever, too. Today, with her heart stinging over getting in trouble and the hatefulness of school starting, Natalie felt empty and cold, looking at the things on her desk. It was getting hard to remember things sometimes, like exactly how Mommy sounded when she talked. She could remember the singing, because she had a tape with