Hello again from Milborough; it has not been a quiet four weeks here. You know, of course, of the mess Michael got himself into; I thought that things were going so well for him and Deanna, too. I don't know why the pressure got to him, why it made him slide back into his old bad habits, why he seems almost ready to give up when there might be a chance or even what the thing that made him snap was. Liz and Georgia are down there giving Deanna moral support while Phil is, shall we say, using strong practical urging techniques to try to remind Mike that not everything in the world is doomed to fail miserably.
This, of course, brings me to Elly. I didn't know that Fiona had spirited her away to the billiard parlor she owns until one of April's friends saw her there; I'd thought that she was getting better. It didn't sit well having to be told that as far as the CMH was concerned that she was good to go; that's because it reminded me of the horror stories Phil told me about his and Elly's grandmother. Y'see, after her breakdown, she too had been put back together wrong and cut loose. All the orderly that looked the other way got was a slap on the wrist; that's because Fiona made her move about two or three hours before the courts were about to declare yours truly the official and permanent baby-sitter of an over-grown child living in the past. It horrified me when she insisted that I was my father and that a cruddy pool hall was the cruddy house we lived in all those years ago. In case it sounds like I'm angry with Fiona, I'm not; she might think she beat the system and all but, well, better her than me. Let her deal with the social worker every six months and let her deal with Elly's bullhuckey; I've been there, done that and gotten the T-shirt.
That's because I found out some interesting things about her while Connie was ranting about how her 'cousin' Jean-Christophe (who turned out to be an illegitimate son she had her childless older sister raise) wouldn't cross the street to spit in her ear if her pea brain caught fire. Did you know that Elly didn't actually GO to University in the first place? Hell, she didn't even get her high school diploma back in '69; all she's got is a GED she barely passed after she married Watson. No bloody wonder his family and the Days thought of her as being a gold digger; of course she never had Connie's moxie or smarts and never saw the possibilities but you can't blame them for having their suspicions. In any event, Connie managed to get the prof she shook down to smooth Elly's path a little for her and the rest is (like my reputation in this town) history. I guess this explains why she looked down her nose at Gordon, why she got all snooty when the kids sounded 'uneducated' (in other words, they didn't talk like they ate a dictionary) and even why she was so awkward at parties. I could deal with that if she were lucid, I really could but there comes a point wherein you have to know when to fold your tents; I simply cannot be bleeding myself white trying to fix something that doesn't want to be repaired, that prefers to be broken.
This would be the part in the letter where I'd say "Chee!!" before thinking 'out loud' but I'm sort of not in the mood; I think I have a bit of broken glass in my heart right about now. Not only do I have to deal with Elly becoming a human write-off, I almost think that Mike be tearing himself to pieces to prove to himself that he cares about what happens to her. At least April has got her classwork to keep her distracted; I almost wish that the only thing we had going wrong was Big Daddy Caine making an idiot of himself. Sure, it might bother Anthony but that's about it; no one else in our family cares about that old buzzard so, well, it's not a secret he should have kept.
In any event, I've got to cut this short; despite the attempts he and Arsenault made to turn the inquiry into a circus, the hearings into Milbrogate are proceeding as planned and I have to be in Ottawa post haste; I'll tell you about the results next month. Till then, here's hoping that all of us have a quiet March where things get fixed.
Yours,
John.