Page 28 of Deja New
FOURTEEN
“Ipicked 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 fretpose 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, thensat 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 thehellthey 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... whynotget 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 manymanys? 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?”
