Left for Garbage

doing it, too.
    I know what people think of me. They hate my daughter, and if a monster is born, then it didn’t come from nowhere, right? Blame the parents.
    Well, I’m not going to say my daughter’s a monster, thank you very much, but I guess I can see why people might think she is, what with real monsters like Charlotte Hope and her kind telling everyone how evil Denise is and showing those pictures, those goddamned pictures of my beautiful girl grinning like a monkey and dressed like a whore, and then right on top of them, pictures of my angel, Deeley … a devil and an angel is what those photos show.
    Do people really think I’m so stupid I don’t catch what they’re doing? And don’t think I can’t see the writing on the wall , or should I say the writing on the teleprompters , about how they’re painting me and Keith either.
    There has to be a bad guy in the house that bred Denise , right? And for whatever reason, the media has decided it’s me, Margaret Brown, wife, mother, grandmother, nurse. I’m the bad one. I’m the one at fault here. Poor, sad Keith, with his sappy suicide note and his pathetic volunteer work at Disney World in the lost children’s section … oh, I know what all of you think. Hell, I hear what all of you think.
    Calling me ‘Maggie Monster’ and him ‘Poor Keith’. You think I’m a castrating bitch who made Keith ignore Denise’s little escapades and helped turn her into a liar, then a thief, and finally a baby killer? And after all that occurred, why then I tried to cover up what happened to Deeley, while poor Keith, poor old Keith, grieved to the point of wanting to die.
    God forbid I should get to be sad too. Everything I do backfires. I admit publicly that I too have considered suicide, even inviting the media into my house to see the several dozen suicide notes I printed. Do they come in? No, they don’t, thank you very much. So then, in the interest of the public’s right to know, I send the five most heartbreaking ones I had written to ‘Good Morning America’, ‘Geraldo’, ‘Dr. Drew’, ‘Joy Behar’, and that nice looking Vinnie Politian. Notice I did not give Miss Charlotte-crucify-Margaret-Brown a shot at such a personal thing. But do you know, not one of those people even read my suicide notes? Or if they did, they didn’t bother to mention them on TV. But Keith’s notes were a nine-day wonder. Poor Keith, poor old broken-hearted Keith. Truth is, the whole so-called death dinner party I’m being crucified for was for his sake, but media genius that he is, he has again managed to make me look like a monster and painted himself as a saint.
    What I think a great many people are not aware of is that both Keith and I have been asked to leave our jobs. Now , in his case, it hardly matters. I mean, a security guard? Yeah, his fifteen-hundred-buck-a-month salary before taxes was a big help, but losing my salary, well that was a blow, me being basically the sole support of the Brown family.
    As always , Keith took the news that we were unemployed, and would probably lose our home, just as he always takes bad news. He slumped down in a kitchen chair and said, “I don’t know how we’ll go on, Margaret.” Then he added a little more self-pitying nonsense about how none of it mattered now that our little one was gone, leaving me, like always, to shoulder the responsibilities, just like I had to when raising the kids, like I had to when I was protecting my daughter from first her father’s judgment, then the world’s.
    Did I love our granddaughter one iota less than Keith? Hardly! That child was my whole life, but thanks to Keith’s chronic ineptness, I was never given a chance to grieve. Since I knew he wasn’t going to raise one finger to save our finan cial bacon, I did what I had to, what I always have to do, and took matters into my own hands, and called up ABC. I said we’ve got a story to tell and you’ve got a checkbook, so can we make a deal? They said, “Yes, we can, Mrs. Brown,” thank you very much.
    Things moved pretty quickly after that , and before I had time to think, Keith and I were off to Los Angeles to tell our story to a series of very sympathetic producers for ABC, and to discuss, as well, a book that would finally tell the truth of this situation.
    We were still in L.A. , packing to come home, when we got the call confirming that the remains the authorities found the week before were those of our Deeley. Of course Keith