Member-only story
The Snow Globe Gala
Does love define us? Or do we define love?
My mother named the charity event the Snow Globe Gala as a way to harken back to her childhood love of snow globes. I could still recall her collection — spanned across four cabinets in the living room — but I was never allowed to touch a single one. I could only stare at them and wonder if my mother loved those snow globes more than she loved me.
After her death, my father donated the snow globes before I had the chance to see them outside their glass cages. When I confronted him about the sudden decision, he frowned at me as if I were a pest instead of his only child.
“And what should I have done with them, Katerina?” My father’s upper lip curled. “Are you so sentimental like your mother? Trinkets just collect dust.”
Despite my father’s divorce from emotional attachments, he still put on a show every year for the Snow Globe Gala. As the director of the largest hospial in the area, he had always been a distant man. It was a wonder my mother, with the way she had clung like a child to ideas of romance and whimsy, had ever married someone like my father. In the end, I decided the marriage had been one of convenience far more than one bound up in true feeling.
But then, right before this year’s gala, I happened to cross my father’s bedroom…
