Life Sentences Read Online Free PDF Page B

it first. They had agreed the book wouldn’t be dependent on a confession, or even answering all the questions, but the reader would need to believe that Cassandra had reached some kind of conclusion about her old school friend. Old school friend was the editor’s term, and while Cassandra had initially tried to correct the impression, using classmate and acquaintance, she soon gave up. What was a “friend,” after all, when you were ten or eleven? They had played together at school, gone to birthday parties together.
    â€œI can’t plan this book in advance. That’s what makes it exciting.With the first two books, they were already constructed, in a sense. I had lived them, I just didn’t know how I would write it. And they were very solitary enterprises. Solipsistic, even. But this time—I’m going to interview Callie, once I find her, but also other girls from the class. Tisha, Donna, Fatima. And Callie’s lawyer, I guess, and the police detective who investigated her…heavens, I’m not sure three months here will be enough.”
    â€œAnd, of course,” her mother said, staring into her tea, “you’ll be here for all the hoo-haw surrounding your father.”
    â€œOne event in a week of events,” Cassandra said. “A simple onstage interview, and I’m doing it only because it will raise money for the Gordon School’s library building fund. We do owe the school a great debt. Besides, it will be interesting, interviewing Daddy in front of a captive audience. He’s the king of digressions.”
    â€œYes,” her mother said. “Your father loved digressing. ”
    â€œIt’s not a big deal,” Cassandra said. She wished, as she often did, that they were a family comfortable with casual touches, that she could place her hand over her mother’s now.
    â€œI know,” her mother said. “I just hate the way he…romanticizes what he did, to the point where he won’t even talk about it. Or her.”
    Cassandra respected her mother for holding on to that “Or her” for all these years, refusing to say Annie’s name unless forced. It might not be particularly healthy, but it was impressive. Cassandra shared her mother’s talent for grudges—it was, she liked to say in speeches, a useful quality for the memoirist, the ability to remember every slight, no matter how small. They called it their Hungarian streak, a reference to her mother’s mother, who had gone thirty years without speaking to her son and lived just long enough to see her granddaughter immortalize this fact in her first book. Nonnie hadn’t minded, not in the least. It had given her a little bit of cachet in the retirement center where she lived, largely indifferent to her neighbors. On what would prove to be Cassandra’s last visit with her, Nonnie had insisted on going to the dininghall, parading her successful granddaughter past the other residents: “My granddaughter, she’s a writer, a real one, a bestseller.” Cassandra wasn’t sure if her grandmother had even read the book in which she took such pride; the volumes—only one book then, but Nonnie had purchased the hardcover and paperback—stood on a table in her apartment. They were, in fact, the only books in the apartment, perhaps the only books her grandmother had ever owned. Nonnie had been mystified, but proud, when her daughter had married a learned man, as she called him. And, true to her own unfathomable principles about loyalty, she continued to like Cedric Fallows even after he betrayed her daughter.
    â€œI’ve never understood,” Cassandra said at that last lunch, “why you could forgive my father but not your own son. What did he do?”
    Her grandmother waved the question away, as she had repeatedly while Cassandra was working on My Father’s Daughter. “Pfftt. I don’t talk to him and I don’t