Page 106 of Deja New
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 itwasmy 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 killedthatguy, 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,ourlife 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.”
