Five Women by Rona Jaffe

Author:Rona Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-17T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

KATHRYN’S MOTHER had been languishing in jail for five months. Bail had been denied because she was suicidal. Although Kathryn had asked her uncles to help her find a good defense lawyer, she had not heard from them again in all this time, not even to tell her if they had hired one, and by now she and her brothers were sure that they had deserted them. She knew their uncles had to be angry about the murder, even though they were well aware of what her father had been like, and she was afraid to call them, hoping they might get over the worst of it with time. It was bewildering and upsetting, but she realized she would have to face the fact that they not only probably wanted her mother to be electrocuted, but they didn’t care what happened to the rest of their family either.

It had been a strange funeral; everyone acting proper and sad and hypocritical. Her father had had very few friends at the end, and this nearly empty church was what he deserved, Kathryn thought.

Her brothers Donal and Kean had come home for the funeral. Afterward Kathryn talked with Donal in the kitchen. She was pouring coffee with a steady hand into a row of cups on a tray for him to take out for their visitors. “You’re glad he’s dead, aren’t you?” she said.

“I don’t know. I mean, he was my father.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “Bullshit.”

“We’re going to have to live with this,” he said.

“So what?”

“You’ve always been this way,” Donal said. “You make up your mind and you just know.”

Kathryn shrugged.

“What makes you so sure of everything?” Donal asked.

“I’m not sure of anything.”

“But then what makes you so strong?”

“It’s just the way I am,” Kathryn said. “Dad picked on you three boys because he could tell you were weak.”

“I guess we’re all glad he’s gone,” Donal said. “Might as well admit it. I look in the mirror sometimes and I see his face, but it’s me. I hate that I look like him.”

“Don’t dwell on it,” Kathryn said. “You don’t act like him, and that’s what matters. Don’t forget the cream.”

Kathryn realized that if she didn’t start looking for a lawyer for her mother on her own, the court would give her a public defender, and Kathryn was sure that meant a death sentence. You could not kill a cop and expect to get away lightly, even if you were his abused wife. Once a week she went to visit her mother in jail. Her mother was in the psychiatric ward now, and looked terrible.

“I’ll never forgive your father for not getting me a nurse when I was so sick,” her mother kept saying. “That was the worst thing he ever did to me. It was the Valium that made me shoot him. If he had gotten me a nurse, the way I wanted him to, I wouldn’t have been so sick, and I wouldn’t have needed a tranquilizer. I’ll never forgive him for the Valium.

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