Chapter 20
AC/DC’s Highway to Hell was rocking away on Valerie’s stereo, she didn’t even remember that she’d owned it. Two long lines of blue masking tape ran down her hallway toward the bedroom. They were placed so that they did the railroad track-perspective thing, coming to a point just at her bedroom’s threshold.
Peter and Eric were consulting over the whether some potato chips salvaged from the floor of her kitchen were fried or baked as the recipe called for something fried. It also said, something chestnut, a lock of her hair that she’d have fought against if she hadn’t been so numb, numb like the stillness before a storm. Something shredded, the remains of the original cookbook that Valerie had torn into confetti in a fit of outrage sometime yesterday. And something died, not dea
