It’s Halloween. And it’s also a beautiful, sunny Saturday in Denver, even though it’s the end of October. But the only way I know that is because I walked the rather short distance from my house to the basement of my dad’s office, which I jokingly refer to as “the Dungeon,” where I’ve spent the rest of the day so far, after volunteering at the homeless shelter earlier, when it was gloomier outside.
There’s only a small window that’s just above the ground, but no light can even get in from there, because it’s covered with boxes. There are boxes everywhere, because after my dad died, we consolidated his offices and a few other cities to this one near the house in Denver, to better manage them here.
It’s a thriving medical equipment supply company, and it’s doing great, or at least it was, before his untimely death. I’ve made it my goal to understand his business and make sure to save it because I don’t think my step mother cares about it at all.
She seems content to spend the money shopping and taking extravagant trips to Vegas, L.A., and last month she even went on a cruise to the Caribbean. I know she probably has a new boyfriend even though she denies it.
Who else would she want to go to the Caribbean with? She certainly didn’t take my step sisters, which is surprising, because the two of them were always stuck so far up her ass I would have thought they would need a medical extraction before my step mom could go on a trip “alone.”
As if her ears are ringing, my step mother burst in through the door of the dungeon, without even bothering to knock. Just like Sheila, she always assumes that what’s mine is hers, starting with my father and ending up with his business and his office.
“Oh, there you are, Ella,” she says, as if I would be anywhere else. She makes me do all the grunt work, but I’m the only person competent to do the important stuff – and she surely doesn’t even try to lift a finger to do it on her own, nor does she make my step sisters do it, even though they benefit from the business as well. So, if I don’t do the grunt work, along with all the other work, it doesn’t get done.
When I was little, my mom used to say that money doesn’t grow on trees. There isn’t a whole lot I remember about her, but her euphemisms were one of them. Apparently, my step mother and step sisters think that not only does money grow on trees, but businesses also magically run themselves.
There are still office workers and assistants that my dad had hired, but I use them on a contract basis only. I don’t trust them enough to run the business.
I do give them all the grunt work that I can shuffle off to them, but when my step mother finds out, she always gets mad. She seems to think it’s my lot in life to do tasks that are beneath my knowledge or experience, even though I’m also the main contributor to the operational side of the business.
“Here are the invoices for the orders this month,” my stepmother says, putting a large file on my desk. “These need to be sent out before midnight. And the spreadsheets need to be filled out along with them.”
How very nice of you to be telling me this now at three o’clock in the afternoon, I think, but I know better than to say anything by now. I’ve argued a lot of things with my stepmother, but it never does any good. She doesn’t seem capable of listening to reason or having empathy. And she holds grudges like no other.
I’ll never understand why my dad married her. I guess he saw something in her that no one else does. Or maybe he just felt sorry for her because her husband had died around the same time my mom had, and she had been a single mother until then. But she’s certainly good at playing the victim, whereas my dad was never that way.
I still remember when he sat me down on my bed and told me that my mother had died. It had been a horrible freak accident. She had volunteered at a homeless shelter and she was crossing the street with a large crockpot full of food she had made, when a speeding car ran her over.
My dad told me the doctor said that the impact had killed her instantly; that she had never known what was coming and she had never felt anything. But one of the wonders of my youth was whether the doctor was right.
Part of me wanted him to be, as I knew that meant my mom hadn’t felt any pain. But another part of me hoped that he was wrong. That somehow she hadn’t feel pain or fear, but she had thought of me and my dad and knew how much we loved her. She knew we would always think about her and miss her. And she knew she died doing the one thing that she loved to do – taking care of other people.
Since that tragic day, my dad and I took up her favorite weekly ritual of volunteering at the homeless shelter every Saturday. In fact, that’s where I had been before I drove home to change and then walked here to the office.
It always gives me a little bit of comfort knowing that I’m continuing to carry out the thing my mother would be doing if she was still here. And I met some very interesting people along the way, homeless veterans as well as shelter staff and co-volunteers who would tell me lovely stories about my mother as I grew up, to help keep her memory alive. Everyone said she was the most beautiful, caring kind and loving person they had ever seen and that she was a whole lot of fun to boot.
I honestly don’t know how my dad could’ve gone from someone like her to someone like my step mom, no matter how many years passed in between. But I try to understand, because I think that life hardens us and makes us cynical. Look at me: I had always had a sinking suspicion that Paul wasn’t the right guy for me, and I turned out to be right.
I don’t believe in fairytales. I don’t believe in love or happy endings. So maybe my dad is like me and he became practical and decided that two widowed people with children were better off making a life together than apart. But ever since he married her, my step mother, she and my step sisters have been so cruel to me.
I never burdened my dad with it because I didn’t want him to feel bad. He’d been through enough. I just suffered in silence without seeing any way out.
And now that my dad is gone, I do the same thing for him that we did together for my mom. I carry out his legacy, what he would have wanted, even if I don’t understand as much as I did with my mom.
All I know is that for whatever reason, he loved my step mother enough to marry her and wanted there to be peace in our family. He even said so in his Will. So that is what I am aiming for now, even though it’s often a lot more easier said than done.
Suddenly there’s a knock at the door, and I open it to see Sharon and Nikki. I practically squeal, I’m so excited to see them.
But then I remember that my step mother will be upset because she wants me to work. She always has to ruin everything, but I’m not going to let her ruin this surprise visit from my two best friends.