“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 hid 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.