FOURTEEN

“I picked up the mail.”

“Okay,” Angela replied absently, engrossed in the minutia of legal jargon.

“You didn’t have anything. Just some catalogs.”

“Thanks for the update.”

“So. How was . . . everything? Um . . .”

Angela looked up. It had finally happened, the thing she had long foreseen: Her mom had forgotten her only daughter’s name. Dammit! Jordan wins the pool.

“Angela,” she prompted.

“I know that,” the older woman snapped. “For heaven’s sake.” She was standing in the doorway to Angela’s office in her long yellow robe, the one Jordan and Paul insisted made her look like a sleepy banana. Her short brown hair, streaked with silver, was damp from her pre-bed shower and she was in fret pose number two: one hand on her hip, the other reaching up to fiddle with the neckline of her nightgown (also pale yellow, so sleepy banana—times two).

Huh. Six p.m. already? And did she just snap at me? Careful, Mom. You’ll sound engaged. What’s next, raising your voice?

Mom coming in (well . . . not exactly in, since she almost never crossed the threshold) was a rarity. To be fair, all the Drakes respected Angela’s office, formerly her father’s office.

At first she’d kept it as a shrine: leaving his diplomas up, never switching out the old pictures of his kids and nephews, working around his paperwork rather than filing his away to make room for hers. She saved the chewed pens. She didn’t empty the recycling. She left his coffee cup on the desk blotter for more than a year, and finally threw it away (coffee, she had learned, gets cold, scums over, shrinks, gets sludgy, gets moldy, and eventually disintegrates, ruining the cup in the process).

Now, years later, the room was well established as her office, everything in recycling was something she’d put there in the last two weeks, she drank hot chocolate and rinsed her mug every night, the bite marks on her pens all corresponded to her teeth. She’d kept her dad’s diplomas up, but placed hers just beneath his, and as each brother/cousin graduated, she put theirs on the ego wall, too.

Everything else was hers: the laptop, the files, the printer that was broken and the printer that wasn’t, the accordion Post-it notes Paul liked to steal, and, to her amusement (some of her clients were old school), the fax machine.

She’d gotten her bachelor’s degree in paralegal studies, then sat for the NALA and was certified by the Fourth of July. The certification was Mitchell’s idea: He’d pointed out that since she spent most of her free time researching their dad’s case, which led to other cases, why not get paid for it? “You aced everything,” he pointed out, “because by the time you got to college you’d been doing it for ten years. There’s gotta be jobs out there that fit those parameters. Also we’re out of milk.”

She’d thought about it for all of five minutes and realized he had a point. (She also wondered how the hell they could be out of milk when she’d bought two gallons the day before.) She knew she lacked the desire and discipline for law school (it took too long, and she’d have no say over the cases she got for years, if ever), and the selflessness to go through the police academy ($44,000 a year to get shot at? Pass). Research, she could do. Writing legal briefs, she could do. And she could do it from home, something that couldn’t be said for patrol officers. So, yes . . . why not get paid for it?

Now she telecommuted for a number of attorneys and sometimes it was interesting and sometimes it was dull, but she made a respectable living and between her salary and the insurance/pension from her father’s death and the fact that she lived at home and the mortgage was paid off, they were okay. Financially, anyway.

“I was wondering about your . . . ah . . . trip.”

Right. Back to the present: Her mother had decided to spend a few minutes feigning interest in her life. In a way, this was worse than the indifference.

“My trip?” She never says the words, Angela realized. It’s always “your trip” or “the errand.” “To the state prison my uncle’s been languishing in lo these long years?”

“Well.” The hand drifted up. Clutched the gown’s neckline. Fiddled. “Yes.”

“It was . . .” A rerun? A bust? A waste? Fun seeing Jason’s socks? “. . . like it always is.”

“So you won’t need to go back anytime soon.” When Angela said nothing, her mother continued. “There’s—there’d be no point. Right?”

She closed her laptop to give her mother her full attention. Oh holy hell. Let’s just get to it, okay? “Something on your mind, Mom?”

“I just think it’s a waste of time, is all.”

“So you’ve said. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.” And even that many manys? Not enough.

“And now”—here came the vaguely hectoring tone she knew well—“you’ve dragged your cousin back into it.”

Angela felt her eyebrows arch involuntarily. “‘Dragged’?” Not the verb she would have gone with. And that her mother thought Archer could be dragged anywhere was laughable.

“He has a new family now,” the sleepy banana masquerading as her mother went on. “He has . . . responsibilities. New things he should be focusing on, not . . . er . . .”

“Old business?”

“You make it sound like I don’t care.”

Because you don’t.

“Of course I care.”

Nope.

“But how long until you let this go?” Mom paused, like Angela actually had a time period in mind. Like she’d jump in with, I thought I’d give it another three years and seventy-eight days, and if I don’t have it solved by then, I’ll hang it up forever. “It’s been a decade.”

“Mom, I could understand your mind-set if it was one you had gradually come around to. But you’ve never liked me looking into Dad’s murder.” It was almost as if her mother knew more than she had told back in the day. Not guilty knowledge, exactly, but . . .

Wait. Why assume she doesn’t have guilty knowledge? I’ve never understood her paralyzing grief. What if she had something to do with Dad’s murder? What if it’s not grief, but guilt?

Ridiculous. The woman had problems, but ascribing guilt was a big step too far.

Meanwhile, Mom’s brows had rushed together and she nearly shouted, “Because you were a child!”

“Yes. But I wasn’t for long. We all grew up pretty fast.” Unspoken: We had to, because you fell apart. You know who paid for that robe, right? “After a while—and not a long while—I wasn’t a child. I was a pissed-off young adult looking for answers and you still did everything you could to discourage me.”

In response, a mutter: “Obviously not everything.”

“And it’s not just me.” Here was a conversation they should have had years ago. Oh, well, no time like the present. This’ll teach her to hover in my office doorway. “You’ve always been opposed to anyone researching the case, discussing the case, thinking about the case.”

“That’s not—”

“No. No denial this time. Let’s try something different, okay? Just for fun. No denial!” Angela realized she was rocking back and forth in her agitation. God, this ergonomic chair was the best gift to myself. “Hell, when I was in college, my prof offered extra credit to anyone who wanted to help me. He was goddamned enchanted by Dad’s murder and loved that I was working a ‘real-world scenario.’ And, yes, he was an insensitive boob, but half my floor took him up on it—free labor and a bunch of fresh eyes and you were still against it.”

“That’s not what college is for! It’s for drinking too much and learning new things and making terrible decisions about your sexuality but coming to your senses in time for graduation!”

“I . . . Wow.” Where? Where to even start? “If it’s any consolation, I did all that other stuff, too.” Oh, my God. I did not just tell her that.

Mom’s hand froze mid-fiddle. “Oh. Well. Good for you, then.”

I visited my imprisoned uncle in the company of the Andretti of Insighters and a detective wearing Van Gogh’s Sunflower socks and this is still the most surreal conversation I’ve had today.

“Mom, something I’ve always wondered.” Bad idea. No, good idea. No, terrible idea. Fuck it. “Why do you care? This . . .” She gestured to the files, the boxed files in the corner, the entirety of the office, which wasn’t a shrine to her father but was HQ for catching his killer. “All of this, it doesn’t affect or alter your life at all. Whether I’m working on Dad’s case or writing a brief for Judge Shepherd, your day-to-day routine is exactly the same. So what’s the problem?”

Her mother stared. “You really don’t know?”

“I really don’t know.”

A long sigh, followed by, “The problem is, I don’t want to see my daughter throw her life away like—” She cut herself off, so quickly Angela heard her teeth click together.

“Like my uncle?” she asked quietly.

“It should have been him.”

As a revelation, this wasn’t exactly shocking. Emma Drake had not kept that concept to herself. “But it wasn’t. So we had to deal. Have to deal. I understand why you’ve never visited Uncle Dennis—”

A bark of laughter, quickly choked off. “Figured that out, did you?”

“Yes.” This is the longest conversation we’ve had since Paul accidentally sent us all to the emergency room. Soooo many forms. The paperwork was worse than the stitches.

To Angela’s alarm, her mother took another step into the office. “Okay. I’ll reiterate, so there’s no misunderstanding going forward. It should have been your uncle—”

“There’s—”

“—bleeding out on that filthy floor—”

“—no misunderstanding—”

“—in that shitty little drug warren.”

“—on my end. Any of our ends.”

“Not your father.”

“Yes. Got it. But, again: We have to deal with what is.”

But her mom wasn’t listening. “So that doesn’t come as a surprise to you? That I wanted your uncle dead?”

“No, but it’s good to receive confirmation. I guess.”

“And now I’ve reiterated.”

“But d’you know what else was a surprise, Mom? You taking Dad’s death so hard. The others are too young to remember, but you guys used to fight. A lot.”

“About your uncle! About how he was an irresponsible junkie shithead we all should have stayed away from.”

“Not just about— Well, yes, you fought about Dennis. But I remember Dad wanting some space, and you weren’t having it.”

She snorted. “He wanted a lot more than that, but this isn’t about him.”

Um. It’s not? Isn’t EVERYTHING about my dead dad?

“It’s about you wasting your life. It’s about how even though you know how I felt back then and how I still feel, you’re still trying to save Dennis! You’ve pissed away years trying to save someone who was always worthless. How can you do that?”

For several seconds, Angela could only gape at the enraged banana before her. “That’s why you withdrew from me? From all of us? Even Jack, and he was little more than a baby at the time! You’ve been . . . what? Sulking? ‘She’s ignoring my wishes, I’ll ignore hers’? For ten years? Seriously?”

The banana deflated. “I can never make you understand.”

Back atcha, Mom. “Did you ever like Uncle Dennis?” Angela remembered very little of pre-murder Dennis. Whenever she thought of him, post-murder Dennis was always at the forefront. As best she could recall, he’d been the fun uncle, the guy who was always up for anything. But to a kid, that could mean going to Dairy Queen after 9:00 p.m. How wild and crazy had he really been when she looked at him through the lens of time?

As if her mother could read her mind, she said, “He was always a pain in your father’s ass. And mine.”

Yes. That message is loud and that message is clear. “I know . . . I remember you used to tell us how jealous he was of Dad.”

Her mother shook her head. “It was more than envy. He wanted to be your father. And sometimes, your father wanted to be him, if you can believe it.”

Hmm. That was a new take on the old story. “I remember he was always happy to drop everything and have fun with us. Even when Jack was just a baby, he’d bundle us all in his car—”

“Your father’s old car. Which he took. Often without asking.”

“—and off we’d go.”

“Yes. So he could pretend he had what your father did.”

“Or maybe they were just brothers who shared their stuff?”

Mom shook her head.

“So all the fun things he did for us, they were only ever about him? Dennis never loved us because we were just symbols? Because that’s harsh, even for you.”

“No. Harsh is stealing what other people have and pretending it was yours all along. It’s almost as bad as just coveting what others have.”

Here was a well of bitterness Angela had never suspected. It was one thing to loathe your husband’s killer. It was another to realize the loathing had always been there, long before the murder. “For example?”

“Well.” Up came the hand again, fiddling, fiddling. The neck of her gown was starting to fray. “He—he ruined your father’s credit rating!”

“Thank God they locked him away, then. I feel safer already. Why didn’t you leave?”

“What?”

“You guys were fighting all the time about Dennis, why not pack us up and leave?”

“How can you ask that? I never would have left him. And he never would have left me.”

Angela started to reply when she suddenly had—not a recollection, exactly, but a piece of memory: her father standing in his bedroom doorway, holding a bulging suitcase.

Where did that come from? But the more she tried to pin it down, the faster it faded.

“You know what?” her mother was saying. “Never mind.” Her mother let go of the gown and held up her hands, palms out. “Forget I came in here. Forget we talked.” And just like that—poof. Meaningful, painful, long-overdue family discussion over. Exit Emma Drake.

Angela stared at the empty doorway for several seconds.

No, Mom, I won’t forget. That’s what you’ve been trying to do.

She got back to work.