“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—”