1.
All through his life my father believed he was cursed.
This belief began with his mother’s cancer diagnosis when he was ten. Dad made a promise to God that he’d join the priesthood if He saved his mother from the vicious disease. She went into remission, and Dad’s fate was sealed. However, when he was sixteen, he met my mother and his promise fell by the wayside. The two of them were head-over-heels in love, and a year later Mam became pregnant with me. Nine months after that, she died from complications during childbirth.
Then, his mother’s cancer returned, and this time she didn’t win the fight.
Both deaths broke Dad’s heart, and he swore it was God’s punishment for him not becoming a priest. Over the course of the next couple years, the few family members he had left passed away, leaving him alone in the world with a child to raise and protect. It was just the two of us for a long time until he met and married Vee. I gained a stepmother who tolerated my presence but was far from loving.
The tolerance turned to resentment when Dad’s curse finally came full circle. Two years ago, he lost his life in a collision with a drunk driver, leaving me a modern-day Cinderella, though I didn’t hold out hope for a fairy godmother.
I did, however, have a wicked stepmother.
“My brother is coming to visit,” Vee said as she sat by the weathered kitchen table, smoking a cigarette in a holder like a red-headed Cruella de Vil. “You’ll need to air out one of the guest bedrooms and make it up for him.”
I was stunned by what she’d just said. “You have a brother?”
She pursed her lips before exhaling a plume of smoke. “Yes, a younger brother. Sylvia had him late. He hasn’t been home in a long time.”
Sylvia was Vee’s mam, though she always called her by her first name. Never Mam or Mammy, and not even the more formal Mother. It was a little cold and distant if you asked me, but that was Vee for you. A total ice queen. I felt bad for Sylvia who was left to live with such an uncaring, cruel daughter.
Vee treated me like an unwanted, ratty little servant girl at the best of times, but at least it wasn’t going to be forever. In a few months, I’d finish school and finally be able to break out from under her tyranny.
“What’s his name?” I asked in a quiet voice, making sure to not look her directly in the eye. Quite like a wild animal, she sometimes saw that as a threat. I pulled some tinned soup, a bread roll and a banana from the cupboard and set to work on my dinner. I kept a stash of chocolate bars hidden under my mattress, mainly so Vee wouldn’t find them and berate me for eating too much junk. My stepmother wasn’t big on grocery shopping, or food in general. I rarely saw her eat anything aside from the olives she sometimes put in her martinis, so I usually had to fend for myself.
“What makes you think I’m in a mood to answer your questions today, Estella?” she asked with cutting bluntness.
“Sorry,” I murmured, opening the tin and pouring the soup into a pot to heat up on the stove. Some days I wished for a microwave, but aside from the few items Dad and I brought when we moved in, everything here was stuck in a previous century, dusty and old. That was what you got when you lived in a big, creaky, creepy old Victorian house on the coast.
Vee continued smoking, watching me through her narrowed green eyes.
“Your uniform is looking a little snug. Perhaps go to Foley’s and have them take it out for you on the weekend.”
“Mm-hmm.” I bit my tongue to keep from snapping at her, running my hands down my navy and forest green uniform with the Loreto Convent crest over my left breast. The crest was made up of the cross, an emblem of salvation, the heart of Jesus, to symbolize his love for us, the pierced heart of Mary, to depict her courage in guiding us, and lastly the anchor, a symbol to encourage us to trust in God.
Vee knew good and well I had no money to go to Foley’s. What little she gave me barely covered food. And sure, I wasn’t the thinnest girl in the world, but that wasn’t the reason my clothing was tight. It was tight because I’d been wearing the same uniform for the last four years.
A girl didn’t have the same body at eighteen that she’d had at fourteen. It embarrassed me because my appearance was so opposite to Vee’s. Her chest was flat, her hips narrow. She had the body of a catwalk model.