Page 105 of Deja New
“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’thave 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 itstillwasn’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, therealDennis 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.”
