Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 27 of 32

Chapter 27: Dead Girl

Joanie threw the remote at the TV.

It hit Dino in the face and bounced off.

"Threatened her," she said. "He threatened her. He's got the nerve to stand on a dock."

"He's got nothing but nerve," I said.

I sat on her couch in her old Lifeguard Staff sweatshirt and watched myself be dead.

It went on all day.

Coast Guard boats went back and forth under the bridge.

Divers went off the back of a police launch.

My college photo, over and over.

A reporter at the end of the Sheepshead Bay dock saying the words "tragic accident" and "questions remain."

At noon my mother came out onto the front steps on Todt Hill.

She wore her black dress and her pearls. Her face was gray.

She stood in front of a crowd of cameras at the bottom of the gravel drive and didn't say a word for a long time.

Then she said, "Bring my daughter home."

Her voice cracked right in the middle.

She went back inside, slowly, holding the rail.

Joanie looked at me. "Is she okay?"

"She's fine," I said. "She's showing off."

That night at eleven, the parish van pulled up behind Joanie's building.

My mother came up the back stairs carrying a lasagna in a towel.

She put it on Joanie's counter. Then she put her arms around me and held on so hard my ribs hurt.

"I stood on those steps," she said into my hair, "and I cried for a daughter who was on a couch in Bay Ridge. I've never been so good at anything in my life."

"You were very good, Mom."

"I was. I was terrific." She let go and wiped her face. "Twenty years of smiling at men who didn't tip. It all paid off at once."

Joanie got plates.

We ate standing up in the kitchen, the three of us, with the blinds shut.

"How is he?" I said.

My mother put down her fork.

"They took him in this afternoon."

It was the detective from the sunroom in Great Kills, with two others, in front of the cameras at the pier gate.

They kept him nine hours in a room at the precinct.

"He didn't say anything but one thing," my mother said. "His lawyer told me. Every question, the same answer."

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