Chapter 11 — What I Saw Through the Gap
Above me, my father played his part better than any actor I have ever seen.
He made his voice waver.
He got dates a little wrong on purpose.
He let Damian feel the full pleasure of winning.
“So this house,” my father said, doing the tremor beautifully, “this is going to fix your money troubles, is it.”
Damian laughed — an easy, arrogant, awful laugh.
“It’s not trouble, Glenn.
It’s an investment.”
Then my father made a show of getting up to fetch the sugar bowl from the counter, and through the gap beneath the tablecloth I watched my husband do a thing I will see for the rest of my life.
The moment my father’s back was turned, Damian took something small from inside his jacket, and quickly, practiced, tampered with my father’s coffee — doctoring it with something he’d brought for the purpose, meaning to leave my father too clouded and confused to resist, so he could press an old man’s thumb to a page and later swear he’d signed it willingly.
I am not going to describe what it was or how he did it, because that is a mechanism and it stays out of this account; what matters is only that I saw it, and that a camera Otis had placed saw it too, in far better detail than I could through a gap in a tablecloth.
My father came back and set the sugar down and sat, unknowing, in front of a cup he must never drink from.
I bit down on the meat of my own hand to keep from screaming his name.