There was much in the letter about things that were going on between her and the old man that I knew nothing about, and didn’t understand, including a business proposition he had going in Detroit that never got off the ground. The contents were overwhelming, staggering, especially the sheer panic in the words at the very start of the letter: Help, I fear for my life.

Of course, I knew that snooping around wasn’t right. But still, it took my reading of that letter to know the truth about what she was feeling and to know that she was trying to get help. For the next few days I watched her, making sure she didn’t suspect that I’d found that letter. Without realizing it, I had already developed the family skill of being able to keep a few secrets myself.

As a result, when at long last I came up with a viable method of killing Freddie and began to concoct the lethal potion that he was going to mistake for alcohol, nobody had a clue about what I was doing. My first feat was to slip off with his cup, his stainless steel drinking cup, the only one he drank from and treated as lovingly as a silver goblet embedded with jewels. Next, without any watchful eyes, I poured a little liquid bleach in, some rubbing alcohol, with healthy doses of all the cleaning agents and medicines that had poison warnings on them, and finally mixed it all together by adding near-boiling water. All bubbling and foaming, it was better than anything any Dr. Frankenstein could cook up in a movie, but the horrific stench was a problem. How was I going to get Freddie to drink it now?

One possibility was to leave it in the bathroom and just hope that he would take a sip out of curiosity. Great idea. Except, when I got in there and heard voices coming near, I got nervous that he’d make me drink it out of curiosity. My next thought was to try to trick him that it was one of those fancy flaming drinks. Ridiculous as that was, I lit a match and tossed it in. Poof! A towering blue and orange flame shot up in Freddie’s big steel cup! Besides my death potion being a bust, I was now going to burn myself up. The only option I could see was to empty the burning, foaming mess down the toilet. Throwing the top down, I figured that it was over but smoke and flames began to issue forth from under the lid.

“What’s that goddamn smell?” came Freddie’s voice.

Flushing the toilet—which miraculously made the smell disappear and didn’t cause an explosion that burned up me or the house—I stepped out of the bathroom, returned Freddie’s cup to where I’d found it, and answered, “What smell?”

Depressed that my effort had come to naught, I tried to comfort myself that it was a trial run and my next attempt would be successful. My latest plan was to try to do it in his sleep. Little did I know that my mother, with her gift for secrecy, was being pushed to a similar extreme. One night, after another brutal beating, she said out loud, to no one in particular, “He ain’t never coming back.” She added that if he did, she would kill him before he could hurt her or us again, stating matter-of-factly, “I’ll do it when he’s asleep.”