AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the one-hundred-percent honest truth,” I said.
“I’ll try,” she said slyly.
“None of that,” I said. “No lies. I need to know the truth.”
Her jaw set, but she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t going to give me a confirmation, but she wasn’t going to outright deny it either.
“I need to know how the fire started,” I said. “I need to know, for sure, that you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Excuse me?” she snapped, her brow furrowing. “How dare you!”
I held my hand up to stop her.
“I don’t need the indignant bullshit,” I said. “I need answers. When Dad died, you spent all of, what, one day? One day mourning him? Then you were right back to business. You were calling people and trying to set up how to get the bar back. You refused to tell us any details of what happened, only what we were supposed to say to the police and the insurance people. It felt slimy. It felt wrong. And it felt like a coverup.”
“If it was such a coverup, why didn’t you say anything?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell the police you thought your mother did it?”
“Because I don’t want to believe that’s true? Because I want there to be some other reason this happened? Why won’t you tell me what actually happened?”
“Because you don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“Don’t you see? That makes you sound guilty! Do you have ties to one of the crime families? Did you have the place burned to appease one of them and Dad just got caught? What happened?”
“No!” she shouted. “It was nothing like that! It was… it was an accident!”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing!” she cried, and then collapsed into tears. They fell from her eyes in cascades, and it was honestly the most I had seen her cry since I came home for the funeral. More, even.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’m so confused! Mom, please, tell me what happened!”
She sobbed as she slowly slid down to the floor, tucking her knees into her chest and covering her eyes with her hands. I let her sit there, letting it out, as I sat heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t. Not until I knew what happened.
Slowly, the tears slowed, and she reached up to grab a washcloth to wipe her face with. Her skin was red and her eyes were puffy. But as she turned them toward me, there was a clarity there I hadn’t seen in a long time. An honesty.
“Your father,” she said, her voice low and scratchy, “was an alcoholic.”
“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He never drank at the bar.”
“Because he was already drinking before he got there,” she replied. “Trust me, he kept it very quiet. I didn’t know for years. But, it started to affect him a few months ago. He was forgetting things. Simple things. His mind was going. His father and his grandmother, same thing. Dementia. It was exacerbated by the alcohol. He was so young for it to be taking him the way it was, but there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop him from drinking, and I couldn’t make his brain work. I just… I tried to cover for him.”
“Dad had dementia?”
“Yes,” she answered, nodding, her eyes drifting off into the distance now. “When he was all there, it was like old times. But the alcohol, it made it easier for him sometimes. He was in a good mood, and people forgave him for forgetting things a lot. But then it got dangerous.”
“How?”
“He forgot who people were. Important people. People who got angry about that sort of thing,” she said. “It would upset him that he couldn’t remember, so he would drink more. The drinking would make him sleepy. He took lots of naps. Then, one day, he put a pan on the stove with olive oil in it to warm. He was probably going to make pasta. There was ground beef on the counter.”
“When…” I began, but I didn’t need to finish. Mom nodded.
“He must have forgotten about the pan. He went upstairs and took a nap in the little room. I was at the house, and your sister had a cold, so she was staying home. The only reason the fire didn’t burn everything down was Mr. Sullo called the fire department.”
“Mr. Sullo from themob?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He was coming over to the bar to collect on a loan your father took out. Business had taken a dive in the last year or so. People weren’t coming in as much.”
“That’s why the insurance money was so important,” I said. “Because you had to pay back the loan too.”
