I'm Done Being the Family Joke novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Decided

I crouched and picked up the pill bottle.

The label said Russell Cheadle, and under his name the word nitroglycerin.

My mother stood very still while I turned it over.

"He's not allowed to be upset," she said. "The cardiologist said so."

"Mom, I'm not going to throw the folder at him."

"Carol," Peg said again. "She's asked you twice."

My mother looked at her mother-in-law, and her mouth shook.

"Not here," she said. "Come to the house. He's asleep. He took his evening dose at six."

I looked at Cal.

"I'll be outside," he said.

I drove behind her taillights through the dark town with the folder on the passenger seat.

The house on Aspen Street had every lamp lit.

Daisy's face smiled out of nine frames on the hallway wall, one for each year she had been Miss Elk Fork Junior Rodeo and then everything else.

Mine was a school picture by the coat hooks, and it was crooked.

My mother put the kettle on, because her hands needed something to do.

Above us, my father's snore rose and fell through the ceiling.

A candle burned on the kitchen table in a jar.

Daisy had lit it that morning, and no one had put it out.

"When did you know?" I said.

My mother kept her back to me.

"Christmas morning," she said. "Your father came in from the burn barrel smelling of smoke. He told me at the sink, before the coffee finished."

"And you said nothing."

"We talked about it all day. We decided."

"We," I said.

"Daisy was fifteen." She turned around, and her face was wet. "She would have been the girl who burned down the town. A police record. Nobody would have let her forget it. She'd have been finished before she started."

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