He fished out some napkins and handed them over. She blew her nose and tidied up as best she could. Flipped down the visor, observed her reddened, weepy eyes. Groaned.
In the low tone of a man confessing his greatest, most humiliating sin, Jason leaned over and murmured: “I streamed Poltergeist. It was horrifying. They just left the bodies! They only moved the headstones!”
That nearly set her off again. “That movie ruined chicken legs and closet ghosts for me. I already hated clown dolls, so that was all fine. You watched it?”
“I said, didn’t I?”
“Ah. So I should always trust you will be a man of your word. Is that the message?”
“The message is, when a small round woman with a childlike voice declares the house is clean, it isn’t.”
“Point,” she conceded.
He had been smiling, but sobered and caught her gaze again. “Angela, I’ll take you wherever you wish, whenever you wish, but in terms of you and me, these new revelations are meaningless. They were not added to an imaginary column of negatives.”
He really was a witch! “How did you know I kept imaginary columns of— Never mind. Go on.”
“I still want to be with you, I want to give us a chance. You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to know that your father being alive and your mother being an almost cartoonishly evil mastermind changes nothing. I’ll always want you.”
She could think of no reason why he would say such a thing unless it was the truth. But now wasn’t the time. “Thank you,” was all she said, because cripes, what a week. “I heard everything you said. Can we please drive on?”
“Of course.”
Twenty minutes later, they were pulling into the cemetery parking lot. “There’s the truck,” Angela said with what she thought was a credible lack of surprise. It was Paul’s used Ford, the dark blue one Jack had learned the stick shift on. It was usually parked off to the side, and it blended so well into their suburban street that it was small wonder they didn’t notice it was missing at first.
“Could you stay here?”
He was already nodding. “For thirty minutes. Then I’ll come for you.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t trust her,” he said simply. She couldn’t fault him for that.
• • •
ANGELA MARCHED PAST the newer graves, past the tombs, past the statue of Inez Clarke, past Eternal Silence, and stopped. She took a few seconds to glare at the thing in its cold stone face. “You want a piece? Let’s go!” she snapped and, when she wasn’t struck by lightning, marched on.
She found her mother at her uncle’s grave, as she’d known she would the moment Jason told them about the letter(s) and visit(s).
“Ah-ha! Look who’s returned to the scene of the crime.” Okay, I already need a do-over. “Ah-ha” sounded great until I said it out loud.
Her mother sat cross-legged in front of the stone and now looked up, squinting, so walking with the sun at her back was definitely the way to go. “I ruined my blouse that day.”
“Because of course you did. But don’t blame yourself. These things happen when you talk your dead husband into serving a life sentence for his own murder and later decide to desecrate his grave.”
“It wasn’t a decision. It’s not like the second thing was part of any big plan,” she said with . . . was that . . . reproach? “It was a reaction to stress.”
Angela came a few steps closer. “Are you seriously tossing me attitude right now?”
“Ask.”
Did she just call me an—oh. “Ask,” with a “k.” Not the other thing. “What?”
Her mother sighed. She was still in the outfit Angela had last seen her in half an hour earlier (red slacks, short-sleeved black blouse, black flats . . . business casual wear as opposed to grave-desecrating wear), her graying brown hair needed a good brushing, and she had her keys in one hand and nothing else.
“Left in such a hurry you forgot your purse,” she observed. “I ought to have Jason arrest your ass. He might anyway. Obstruction of justice, for starters. Fraud.” Breaking your children’s hearts. Consuming selfishness. That last one should be a felony.
“‘Fraud’?” Her mother’s head jerked up. “I never stole from anyone.”
“You’ve been collecting a dead man’s pension! And screwing up your family like you were getting paid.”
“That. Was. Him.” Emma Drake was uncoiling as she rose to her feet. Kind of like a cobra, Angela thought, fascinated. And me without my lidded basket. Or a snake-charming flute. “You can lay this entire debacle at your father’s feet.”
“‘The entire debacle,’ huh? Not just part of the debacle? Most of the debacle?”
“Yes.”
“How did I never notice you were a sociopath?”
“Oh, please. People toss that word around too much. You know better.”
“So let’s talk about what I know.” Angela started to pace around the stone. “Donald Drake is alive and well, or as well as anyone serving a life sentence can be. And he went out of his way to arrange his own life imprisonment for his own murder. Which you condoned and possibly planned.” When her mom started to say something, Angela added, “And don’t say ‘Anything sounds bad when you put it like that.’ There is literally no way to put that where it sounds anything but deeply, deeply fucked up.”
“I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Make me understand. Break it down.”
Emma studied her for a few seconds and said the last thing Angela expected: “I really did love him. And never more than when he went to prison. It’s how I finally knew.”
“Knew what?
“That he valued our lives more than Dennis’s lifestyle.”
“Uh. ‘Lifestyle’?”
“It was like your father was caught in a spell. It was always like that. The family myth was that Dennis was a no-good pothead who couldn’t keep out of trouble, while Donald was a good and responsible man who deplored his brother’s lifestyle. But it was always bullshit.”
Angela rolled her eyes so hard her temples throbbed. “You pretended to be a widow for ten years and you’re gonna bitch about family myths?”
“Do you want the story or not?” her mother snapped. “Less editorializing, more listening.”
“We never made that deal. But fine. Talk about myths.”
“It was all the time. It was constant. Dennis would call or drop by or steal your father’s car and without exception, your dad would be out the door. Even if we had plans. Even if I was pregnant. Once, when I was in labor. In labor, Angela!”
“I can see how that would be aggravating,” she said carefully.
“He was always leaving to bail his little brother out—literally, on more than one occasion. But worse, just to be with him. Donald couldn’t stay away. I always thought that Dennis had to hit rock bottom so Donald would. I assumed Dennis would demand our attention one time too many and that would be it. Donald would realize that his brother would never change and would focus on the rest of his family.
“But it never happened. It was so pathetic, Angela. He didn’t have the balls to out-and-out rebel, so he put himself on Dennis’s fringe where he could see all the fun and face none of the consequences. Which made sense, because Dennis never had to face them, either.”
“The dead guy,” Angela said bluntly. “That’s who you mean, right? The guy who’s in the grave? No consequences for the corpse?”
Her mother waved that away: Shoo, fly! Enough with your nit-picking. “I couldn’t break Dennis’s hold, so I figured I’d start a family with Donald, make something new and beautiful and ours for him to hold. And we had you.”
“You trapped him,” she corrected. “You told me yourself and even then, I thought you told me more out of spite than a desire for me to know the truth.”
Emma sighed the sigh of the greatly put-upon. “I can’t win with you, Angela. If I tell the truth I’m a cold bitch, but if I try to pretty it up a little, I’m perpetuating a family myth.”
“You know you’re not the victim here, yes?”
Her mother ignored the interruption. “I made him a father, gave him a home—Dennis lived in a trailer, for God’s sake—”
“Oh, and you’re a snob on top of everything else. Nice.”
“—and it still wasn’t enough for him.”
“Which should have told you something, Mom! Don’t you think? Didn’t you ever hear that saying? About when you love something let it go, and if it doesn’t come back—”
“Bullshit trite nonsense. If you love something, you hold on with everything and you don’t let anyone stop you.”
“Uh. No. That’s the sociopath’s version.”
“I warned him and warned him.”
“At the top of your voice,” Angela remembered. “A lot.”
“I told him Dennis would get him killed. That it was inevitable. And then where would we be? Because by then I was pregnant again. And again. But—”
“But the more you tied him down, the more he wanted to get free. And wasn’t that around the time that Grandpa died?” Angela had no memory of her paternal grandmother, who died of a brain aneurysm the summer Angela turned three. Her paternal grandfather died of lung cancer a few years later. “Okay, I see it now. He wouldn’t risk disappointing his parents. But then his father died and Dad could be the guy he wanted to be. And you must have lost your shit.”
“Everything I worked for, everything I gave him—”
“It’s not a gift if it’s got strings all over it, Mom.”
“—was in jeopardy. Because by then, they were actually impersonating each other! You know how alike they looked. Your father still didn’t have the guts to rebel, and he wasn’t cheating on me—yet—but he’d go out with women and introduce himself as Dennis.”
The memory bubble. Finally, Angela had context. “Is it that you don’t remember, or that you think I was too young to remember? He might not have been cheating on you, but he was leaving you. I remember the suitcase, Mom. He’d crammed it so full, the thing barely closed. He was gonna be out the door and you were going to be stuck with the kids who were designed to trap him.”
Nope. Emma wasn’t listening. Clearly, some myths were cherished. “He’d introduce himself to strangers as Dennis, can you believe it? Meanwhile, the real Dennis was tooling around town—”
“In Dad’s car. Without permission.” For some reason, that seemed to irritate her mother the most.
“—ignoring his little bastards—”
“Nice, Mom.”
“—living a life of zero responsibility and taking my husband along for the ride.”
“Literally.”
Her mother, who had been standing in one spot while Angela paced, abruptly sat again. “Then he started buying drugs as Dennis.”
“Ah.”
“A lot of them.”
“Yep. Makes sense.” Dad, you sneaky shithead, you were doing everything to run away except actually running away.
“He wasn’t a pothead—yet. And by then I had an iron grip on our checkbook—”
“Oh, please. Mom, I know you. Well, sometimes. You had an iron grip from day one.”
She nodded, acknowledging the point. “He didn’t have ready access to money, is my point.”
“Argh.” She rubbed the bridge of her nose, having seen enough crime reports to guess the next step. “So he started selling them. He wouldn’t smoke them all or pop them all, and he’d sell the leftovers.”
“Yes.”
“Without telling Dennis, who would have warned him what an unfathomably stupid idea that was.”
“Correct.”
“And the wrong people came looking for the wrong brother.”
“Yes.”
“So the dealers killed Dennis for poaching. And Dad must have come in—”
“As he told me, he got there in the nick of too late and realized what happened. He’d missed the killers by maybe two minutes.”
Angela remembered her mother’s harsh words from a few days ago. At the time, she’d put it down to resentment of her brother-in-law. She’d been dead wrong: The resentment had been aimed at Donald Drake.
It should have been your uncle bleeding out on that filthy floor in that shitty little drug warren. Not your father.
“So you decided it was my uncle bleeding out. For all intents and purposes.”
“I told him,” Emma replied, and she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) keep the triumph out of her tone. “I said to him, ‘You wanted his life, now you have it.’”
“Oh, God. Mom.” Angela shook her head, but nope: The words kept coming.
“‘You wanted to be him?’ That’s what I asked him. ‘So be him.’ And he just sat there and stared at me. And went along with it.”
“That’s what you meant when you told me my father already got justice.”
Even though it was (finally) laid out for her, Angela still had trouble grasping it. She knew Chicago had its share of crime and plenty of overworked cops, but it was still hard to believe that no one had questioned any of it. The cops? “This guy says he’s Dennis Drake and that he killed that guy, who he says is Donald Drake. The wife/sister-in-law backed it all up.”
His lawyer? “He fired me. He wants to take a plea.”
The DA? “He wants a plea? Story checks out? I can keep a trial off the overcrowded docket? Rubber stamp that bitch. Next!”
It was a set of circumstances the likes of winning the lottery: unlikely to happen twice. No matter how often you tried.
“So not only was Dad trapped in Dennis’s life, he had to take all the grief Dennis never did. ‘You’ve always been the fuckup, of course you ended up in prison, why couldn’t you have been like your wonderful good brother, etc.’ That would have rubbed extra salt in the wounds.”
“He took his own life for granted, our life for granted. That was brought home to him every time he had to answer to the name Dennis.”
All the questions of my childhood are being answered, and I think I want to die now.
“That’s why you never took us to see him. The first time any of us saw him was after we turned eighteen, when you couldn’t prevent it anymore.”
“I had to protect—”
“Your secret. That was your primary motivation. I was stupid enough to think grief was making you selfish. I closed my eyes to everything. Jason was right, one assumption led to a huge mistake, which led to years of reinforcing that mistake.”
“You were too young, it would have damaged you, the—”
“Stop it. You were afraid we’d recognize him. Maybe not Jack and Mitchell, they were pretty young when Dennis was murdered. But some of us were old enough. We would have known Inmate #26166 wasn’t Dennis Drake. That’s why you kept us away. Anything else is one of those family myths you pretend to have no use for.”
Angela had stopped pacing and simply stood and looked at her mother. She’d always understood Emma was selfish and vindictive, but this was pathological. And it sure as shit wasn’t grief. Angela wasn’t sure if it was ever grief. “You know you’ve broken any number of laws, right?”
Shrug.
“And I’ll be having a chat with Dad?”
“You can’t,” Emma replied in that smug, triumphant tone Angela wanted to throttle out of her body. Fooled you, the tone said. Still fooling you. “He won’t see you anymore.”
“Mom. Look at me. Look at my face. Do you think anyone can keep me out, now that I know what I know? Do you think I won’t talk to the DA?”
“It won’t be as easy as—”
“The hardest part is seeing the big lie, since you and Dad h
id it right in front of everyone all this time. But once you understand the lie, the rest of your lame-ass story falls apart. And I promise you this: Once the system gets clued in, everything you worked for will be undone.”
It was gratifying to see the smug replaced with a scowl. “You wasted so much of your life.”
“Back atcha, Mom. Right back at you. Look at yourself. You’re so invested in the myth, even now, that rather than being glad for a chance to set the record straight, you still want to keep your head down and keeping playing the Widow Drake.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“It’s hilarious that you’re saying ‘I should have known you wouldn’t understand my psychotic need for revenge and my inability to take responsibility for this mess’ like it’s a bad thing. Like it’s a character flaw I should feel bad about and try to overcome.”
“It’s not my mess,” she insisted. “It’s his.”
“Wrong. Again. It’s ours, all of ours. You won’t take your share of the weight, so we’ll have to.” She doubted Emma was looking ahead. That wasn’t her mother’s strong suit. But her children and nephews wouldn’t live with her after this. How could they?
So even if Emma didn’t go to jail, the life she had was over. They’d all move, or she would. The support system Emma had built around herself would shatter. Christmas was officially ruined, probably for the next ten years.
And for what?
Emma wasn’t looking at her anymore. It could have been the sun. Or her conscience, pricking her at last.
No, definitely the sun.
For a moment she imagined seizing her mother by the throat and wrestling her down the bank by the footbridge and tripping her and holding her head under the water and kneeling on her face until the thrashing stopped. The vision was clearer than any dream and the scariest part was how doable it was. She could overpower her mother. Jason might not get there in time.
Sure. Another Drake in prison for manslaughter, whose selfish act left the family in even more dire straits. Great plan, dumbass.
So Angela pushed away the sunny daydream and focused on the present. “You told me—told yourself—that you always loved Dad, but never more than when he went to prison for you.”
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