Patchwork People XXVIII Departures
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Patchwork People XVIII: Beauty And The Beast free porn video
XVIII. Beauty and the beast.
So I finally got to meet the boyfriend. Surreal! He was one of those
big, burly, biker-types. His arms (and who knows what else) covered in
tats, the seriouso kind. I'll bet anything some of them are prison
tattoos. Long gray hair tied back in a grizzled ponytail. Grizzled
beard, too. He was exactly the kind of guy that every dad shudders to
imagine his daughter will bring home one day. And here my dad was
bringing him home to me!
See what I mean by surreal?
I guess you really can't judge a book by it's cover, though. His
intimidating appearance aside, he was super-nice. He came by for us in
his pick-up truck. Marcia sat in the front with him. I sat in the
cramped cab behind them. They chatted together just like any other
couple would. They could have been my mom and dad.
I allowed myself to imagine that for about thirty seconds. That's how
long it took to creep me out.
We went to this roadhouse sort of joint outside of town. A kind of
rockabilly place with a bar and pool tables and dead animal heads nailed
to the walls. Lots of wood. The music was loud so conversation was
optional. Minimal, at best. That suited me just fine. I could tell
Marcia was nervous. I was nervous, too, but I don't think it showed.
Walt was cool though. He didn't seem nervous at all. He said a few
things now and then but didn't mind just kicking back and listening to
the music He treated me like an adult, which I immediately held in his
favor. He even got Marcia to loosen up. I noticed he didn't drink.
We all shared fried mozzarella sticks. Walt ordered some gigantic burger
and a golden mountain of fries. Marcia and I ordered salads that looked
like hillocks. All that was missing were the cows.
Moo.
He persuaded us to split a dessert. When we both demurred, he went right
ahead and ordered it for us. What could we do? It was out of our hands.
So Marcia and I reduced a mudslide of chocolate ice cream and chocolate
cake all deliciously gooey with fudge and chunks of peanut butter one
dainty spoonful at a time. We pretended to need Walt's help to finish
the job. He was happy to oblige.
We went over to the pool tables afterwards and shot a couple of games.
Is that what you do at a pool table? Shoot a game? Walt did his best to
let us win. But it was a challenge. I'm not very good at the game but
I'm better than Marcia. Walt was trying to teach her how to line up a
shot. I stood back and watched. They were bent over the table together
and Walt had his big shaggy head at the back of her neck. His breath or
beard or both must have been tickling her. She was laughing. For a
moment or two she must have forgotten how nervous she was or that I was
even there. Anyway, I got a glimpse of what her life must be like now.
I'd never seen her looking so happy. Right then and there I knew they
were in love with each other. Somehow that took a little bit of the
creepiness factor out of the equation. Well, at least until he drove us
back to the horse-house and said goodnight and gave her a more-or-less
chaste kiss on the lips.
Yuck.
Anyway, all in all, it was an interesting night to say the least.
In other news, I've been helping out at the Blue Cat Curiosity Shop
lately. Nothing official. Actually, it's more like I'm just hanging out
there. Watching the characters that come in and out on any given day.
The lady who paints broken egg shells to look like ladybugs. The retired
plumber who makes dog sculptures out of nuts and bolts and odd bits of
rusty pipe. The gaunt widower who took up knitting which his wife used
to do until she died and now he brings in the most godawful blankets
you've ever seen. Then there's the homeless guy who literally brings in
junk he picks up off the street!
Grace takes it all without blinking an eye. She gives them all a little
corner of the Blue Cat and lets them put their stuff on display. No one
ever sells a thing, but it doesn't seem to matter. Not to Grace or the
people who leave it their on consignment. It's an utterly dysfunctional
way to run a business. I mean, as a money-making enterprise, it's pure
fiction! Marcia says it's not really a business.
So what is it then?
Marcia doesn't seem to know exactly. A place where no one is turned away
is the best she can explain it.
How does it make money?
Marcia frowns, as if she doesn't like to think too much or too closely
about this part of it.
It doesn't really, she admits.
So how does it stay open?
Here I am, the intrepid reporter, the cross-examining attorney, getting
to the bottom of this lunacy. I'm almost afraid of the answer.
She shrugs.
By Grace alone, I guess.
It's worse than I imagined.
Marcia finally had the heart-to-heart conversation she'd been waiting to
have with Phoebe since her daughter's arrival in Hope Crossing. But like
so many "important" conversations in life, it didn't go the way Marcia
had scripted it in her imagination. All the things she'd for so long
wanted to say to her daughter never got said, or they got said
incompletely, in poorly worded fragments, shoe-horned into a
conversation that Phoebe had taken in an entirely different direction.
It was as if Marcia had made her entrance into a play for which she was
perfectly prepared, her lines painstakingly memorized, every gesture
rehearsed--except it was the wrong play.
What Marcia had wanted to say was how hard she'd tried to be a parent.
She'd never wanted anything more than to be a good parent. She never
intended for Phoebe to feel abandoned. She was sorry if she had. She
wanted to make it clear that her alienation from Phoebe hadn't been her
choice. Without coming right out and blaming Claire, Marcia wanted to
explain how she herself had felt abandoned, marginalized, and then
completely alienated as a parent. What she wanted to do, she realized
later, was to justify herself.
Phoebe, on the other hand, had no interest in all that. What she wanted
to talk about was money. She needed it and she needed a lot of it.
"At least twenty-seven thousand. That should cover it. For now."
"For now?" Marcia didn't even try to hide her shock.
"For the first semester."
"But I thought you were on a scholarship?"
Phoebe was sitting on an armchair across from the couch where Marcia was
sitting. She was wearing a knee-length t-shirt with a university logo.
Her hair gathered on top of her head with a scrunchy; her forehead slick
with anti-acne medication. She had drawn her legs up under her and she
was picking with her fingernail at a square of gingerbread Marcia had
fixed for her. She indolently licked a bit of lemon sauce from her
finger. She'd hardly touched the frittata she'd requested for dinner.
Marcia didn't think she'd seen the girl eat a full portion of anything
since she arrived. By now it was pretty clear to Marcia that Phoebe had
some sort of eating disorder.
"It was never a full scholarship," she explained.
"But your mother wrote..."
Phoebe snorted. "Well, there are additional costs. Maybe she wasn't
aware. Lab fees, books, room and board...blah blah blah...living
expenses."
It had been a point to consider, these living expenses. Why couldn't
Phoebe have gone to a far less expensive state school? She would have
been able to live and commute from home and save on room and board. It
was a subject Marcia didn't dare broach now. Besides, she'd been
secretly pleased when Phoebe insisted on going away to school. Implicit
in her decision was the statement that she needed to get away from her
mother.
Spitefully, Marcia imagined Clare having to understand first-hand the
pain of losing Phoebe, just as she'd had to after the divorce. At the
same time, she could also understand Phoebe's natural need to break away
and experience some freedom. Marcia had secretly hoped that Phoebe's own
desire to break away from Claire would be something she could share with
her daughter, a bridge to the understanding why Marcia herself had left
home. Ultimately, that hadn't happened. Why should it have? Ultimately,
nothing had worked out the way Marcia had hoped.
Phoebe was sharp enough to see the difference between an adolescent's
need for independence and the escape of a spouse from a collapsing
marriage. Instead Phoebe rose in defense of her absent mother, as it
seemed she was always destined to do, whenever Marcia made so much as
the feeblest defense of her own indefensible actions.
"Twenty-seven thousand dollars," Marcia repeated, wondering how she
could work something like that out. Nothing came immediately to mind.
Except, of course, the money she'd saved for her surgery.
"Yeah."
"Can't you take out some student loans?"
"And wind up graduating like those poor losers who have a diploma and
some no-paying entry-level job building up massive debt for the next
twenty years of their lives? Is that what you want for me?"
"No. I just thought..."
Phoebe rolled her eyes. "Jesus Christ."
"It's just that it's a lot of money, Phoebe. What about the money that I
already gave you mother? We signed an amended settlement agreement...I'm
not sure if you know that. After I was laid off and I began my
transition, my financial situation was pretty dire and my employment
prospects pretty dim. Well, the long and the short of it was that under
the circumstances our lawyers agreed on a lump sum payment in lieu of
continuing the monthly support obligation for the next three years. That
pretty much cleaned out whatever savings I had, as my share of our joint
401K. These funds were supposed to be used in part for your college
expenses."
"Lump sum payment of support obligations. Wow, that sounds very caring."
"You're missing the point Phoebe."
"No I think I'm getting the point exactly. Dad."
Marcia felt the word strike and twist, exactly as the weapon Phoebe had
intended it to be.
"Sweetheart...please try to understand."
"Oh I understand." Phoebe sat up suddenly and dropped her plate on the
coffee table.
"No, I don't think you really do. I don't have an unlimited amount of
money and what I gave your mom was supposed to cover these expenses."
"Is it my fault you decided to get a menial job at that stupid junk
store? I guess you're conveniently forgetting that Mom had a stroke. A
stroke, remember that? Oh, that's right, you don't give a shit about
that or her. Or me either, apparently. You've met your obligations. You
made your lump sum payment. Now you can wash your hands of it all."
"Can we just keep all the emotional muck from the past out of this? Just
for now? What I don't understand is that your mother apparently just had
this stroke. How can the money I gave her for you already be gone? How
come it hasn't already been used to pay your tuition?"
"She had to use it."
"Yes I understand it. But use it for what?"
"For other things."
Marcia wanted to ask "what other things," but what would have been the
point? With Claire, there were always "other things." At the time of
their divorce, these "other things" had forced Marcia into personal
bankruptcy.
Claire's stroke, Claire's failed second marriage, Claire's expensive
tastes and lifestyle, her selfishness, her spendthrift ways, her dreams,
her desires, her various schemes and inevitable tragedies, unfortunate
as they might be, were not Marcia's responsibility to finance anymore.
They hadn't been for over a decade. At least not theoretically.
Marcia had agreed to the lump sum payment, which had basically left her
dangerously close to destitution, just to be done with Claire once and
for all. As punitive as the agreement might have been financially, it
was worth it to Marcia if it would buy her freedom from Claire and her
"other things" once and for all.
Marcia knew that the money she gave Claire in trust for Phoebe would
likely not be kept in trust. That it would more likely be frittered away
on god-only-knew-what-other things. She'd hoped that she was wrong, that
Claire might have changed, but Marcia strongly suspected otherwise.
People could change; it was true. More often than not, though, they
remained exactly the same.
"Sweetheart, I just don't have that kind of money."
Phoebe's face darkened, and, for an instant, Marcia thought she could
see, peering out of its shadows, Claire's face, scornful and disgusted.
Phoebe must have seen that expression a lot over the years. She had
probably absorbed it without even realizing it, the way a child absorbs
so much of a parent's expressions, gestures, and words, a kind of DNA of
mimicry.
"You have the money, you bastard!" Phoebe yelled, her face full of tears
and fury. "You're just too fucking selfish to part with it. Mom was
right. You are and always have been nothing but a sick selfish son-of-a-
bitch!"
"Phoebe!"
"It's true."
"That's really enough, Phoebe. I won't have you talking to me like
that."
Phoebe twisted her face into a sarcastic sneer. "Or what? You'll throw
me out. Go ahead. You've already abandoned me once."
Marcia had never hit Phoebe before but she understood the natural urge
to do so now. The words her daughter had spoken stung, and she wondered
if they stung the way they did precisely because there was at least some
degree of truth to them.
"You ran away and abandoned me to that woman. Started a whole new life
to get away from her. And you never gave me a second thought."
"Not true," Marcia shook her head sadly at the horrible enormity of the
misunderstanding. "That's just not true."
Phoebe leapt up, ready to storm out of the room, but Marcia stopped her.
"Get one thing straight if nothing else. I didn't abandon you Phoebe."
"Like hell you didn't!"
"Sit," Marcia said, in a voice that surprised even her.
The tone must have surprised Phoebe, too, at least long enough to cause
her to pause.
"Sit," she repeated.
Phoebe didn't sit but she stayed put for the time being. Marcia decided
that was close enough. She was already rapidly losing confidence in her
ability to control the situation, or even hold her own.
"I didn't abandon you. What I think, though, is that you want to think
that I abandoned you. I think that's become a part of your identity,
it's something you're using to define yourself. To defend yourself
against the complexity of the truth. You are the little-girl-who-was-
abandoned. And I'm the nearest closest safest target of the anger you
feel about that. The only reason you wanted me around was so you could
keep on rejecting me. That was my only role in your life and I have to
tell you it wasn't enough for me to live for. I'm sorry. You're
biological parents, they gave you up, for their own reasons. And whether
they were good ones or not, I'm not to judge. But you can't keep using
me for their stand-ins, Phoebe. As the stand-in figure for every
disappointment, for every rejection, for every unhappiness in your life.
Well, actually you can do that, and you have, but I'm not the real
target. I'm trying to love you. I'm trying got be there for you. But you
can't keep shoving me away. Someday you'll understand that."
Even as she was speaking, Marcia was asking herself whether or not she
should even be telling Phoebe all this. Maybe she was still too young to
hear it. Then again, she was nineteen. More to the point, Marcia didn't
know if she'd have another chance to talk to her daughter about the
things that really mattered. The truth. Even if Phoebe were too young
and too angry to understand, maybe what Marcia told her now would stay
in her memory and help her later, even decades later.
It was like being on a sinking ship, Marcia thought, and telling a young
child the few essential things you knew, the essence of a life's wisdom
condensed into a few sentences. Something you bade her to always
remember before you kissed her goodbye and sent her off on the lifeboat.
"Someday this will make sense to you..."
Phoebe stood there, her face smooth and pale with rage, waiting for
Marcia to finish.
"Are you done?"
"Yes," Marcia said, suddenly exhausted. "I suppose so."
She knew that the essential thing that she wanted to communicate above
all others hadn't been communicated at all: the fact that she loved
Phoebe beyond all measure and beyond all reason. She would always fail
in doing that, even if she had a thousand years to do it. There was no
way to express that love in words.
"Good," Phoebe said and turned to leave the room.
"Phoebe, please listen to me..."
But the girl wasn't listening any more than Claire had ever listened,
and while Marcia kept telling herself that these comparisons were unfair
and pointless, that Phoebe and Claire were two different people despite
their similarities at this moment, in reality, right now, Marcia had a
hard time distinguishing between them. It all came back to her. It was
the same hopeless feeling of frustration and abject inadequacy that
Marcia had felt in her marriage.
Let her go, she told herself, as Phoebe banged her way into her room.
There's nothing more to be said at the moment. She won't hear you no
matter what you say. Let her be angry and she'll calm down later and
then we can talk, then we can try again.
But it was hard not to follow Phoebe, to keep talking, to keep
explaining. As hopeless as any further explanations would be at the
moment, Marcia was tempted to keep trying.
Let her go, she repeated. Because it was hard to stay put, hard not to
go after her, even though Marcia knew it would be pointless to do so.
Hard because Marcia knew from experience that people didn't always calm
down. That they didn't always listen to reason later on; that,
sometimes, there wasn't even a "later on."
Marcia knew that sometimes you said goodbye "just for now" and it turned
out to be goodbye forever.
* * * * *
Author note: I plan to publish "Patchwork People" in its entirety in
weekly installments here on Fictionmania. In the meantime, the complete
novel is currently available as an Amazon Kindle ebook for $2.99.
For more of my writings, drawings, erotica, and photos please visit my
blog Bad Pussy
sissyforlife(dot)blogspot(dot)com.
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