Left for Garbage

reminding Keith that ‘unnatural’ was a word he probably shouldn’t be throwing around, even in private, I simply took a deep breath and suggested he use the couch as his bedroom for the immediate future.
    For the most part I have been far too busy with the trial to acknowledge Ke ith when we are at home and off-camera. Our communications have dwindled to him turning Deeley’s death certificate, which I had framed and hung over the fireplace, to the wall every night, and me turning it back in the morning, alongside the framed cover of the ‘Enquirer’ with Keith’s pathetic mistress’s picture on the cover to remind him of how he violated my trust. We have, however, managed to present a unified front when we arrive in court, and after the initial blowup following the revelation of his sordid affair during Liar Gutierrez’s opening statement, I have been filmed several times putting a comforting hand on his arm when the testimony becomes particularly upsetting.
    It ’s working, too, because last week, for the first time in years, I received a positive review from that biased witch, Charlotte Hope, and her review really made me think on how my own first appearance on the stand should go.
    M ost of what I am experiencing is being written down for posterity and our book, but I’ll tell you this much: I was amazing on the stand. My hair, which I had just had colored the day before, was for once the exact right shade of blond, and when I watched myself later that evening on the news, I saw it had picked up the lights beautifully.
    After I gave my emotional testimony about how careful I had always been to put away the pool ladder , and revealed my heartbreak upon finding out that all Denise’s stories to me about her job, her so called ‘Manny the nanny’, her friends, well virtually everything, were lies, I laid my head down on my arms and sobbed pitifully while the prosecution played the tape of my own distraught voice calling 911 all those years ago.
    I was masterful and in that single hour I changed the entire world’s perception. The words a bevy of adoring newscasters used to describe me were things like ‘heartbreaking’, ‘sympathetic’ and ‘moving’. One young woman even said she had never realized how pretty I was until she heard my testimony. All night long the accolades rolled in, including one from my then very pleased publisher telling me I was America’s new sweetheart and that sweetheart books sell in the millions.
    B ut I never get a chance to rest, not me, not Margaret Brown, thank you very much, because two days ago I was awoken at the ungodly hour of five a.m. by none other than old Liar Gutierrez himself.
    He was a changed man. It was all, “Please, Margaret, call me Salvatore and we need to meet right away. No, not Keith, just you and me, Margaret. Please, I have some personal messages from Denise, things she is desperate to say to you.”
    I went to meet him - I had to - t his was the first contact I’d had from my daughter in years. How could I say no?
    Well that’s curiosity for you , it kills the cat every time, and this little fiasco may have killed my book deal as well.
    I met ‘C all me Salvatore, please, Margaret’ at Goldilocks Diner, a nasty little place, but one he’d found which wasn’t targeted by the media or by the crazies who are living outside the courthouse hoping to be one of the daily fifty chosen ones to watch my family dangle in agony.
    Salvatore, my new friend, had decided he needed old Margaret after all, this after ignoring me for months and seeing me only one time, and that was to deliver his bomb of a defense so that Keith and I could have a generous two day warning before it exploded in our faces.
    A t first I wasn’t going to listen to a word he said but he got me the moment I sat down.
    “M argaret, thank you for coming. There’s something I have to tell you: it was my fault Denise refused to see you on Mother’s Day. I’m the one who advised her against it. She would have given anything to be able to see you on Mother’s Day. She misses you and loves you more than she can ever say. She wanted me to tell you so in person. It’s the only way she could think of to get the message to you without the media finding out. Can you ever forgive me for keeping her from you?”
    I’ll be the first one to admit how good it made me feel to find out it wasn’t my own daughter who had set me up to look like such a fool on Mother’s Day. Mother’s