What Else Do You Not Know About Your Parents?
While going through their mom’s belongings following her death, one of the brothers discovered an envelope buried inside her chest of drawers. Frail-looking, the envelope had an embossed seal across the back. Folded inside was a divorce certificate. “Did any of you know?”
The question hung in the air. No one answered. One shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. Another looked stunned. Out of five boys, none of us had known about mom’s first marriage. When mom died, she and dad had been married for over forty years. For some reason, she had kept this fading envelope with a certificate of divorce tucked away in her bedroom.
Why? And who was this fellow she had married and divorced in less than a year? Did she have to get married?
Based on a true story, Lesser Angels follows two siblings – a brother and a sister – who took divergent paths as adults and find themselves in a common pursuit of their family’s history: to find the man on the divorce certificate. Along the way, Rita makes peace with mother’s memory as well as her own spiritual underpinnings. Sandifer, the oldest, set out to change the world only to become embittered. In the end they found something neither knew they had lost.
