It is the summer of 2011, and while every news station across the United States is reporting on the trial of Casey Anthony, a Florida woman accused of murdering her two-year-old daughter, my grandmother Mercy commits suicide. I’m living in central Florida and haven’t seen Mercy in more than seven years. Only once in all that time has Mercy called to see how I’m doing. That was three weeks ago. She was sixty-nine years old.
It’s my cousin Bobby who phones me with the news. They found five empty bottles of sleeping pills on the floor next to Mercy’s bed. They also found a gift she’d left for my little cousin Lia: a necklace with an angel pendant. And they found a suicide note.
