folklore: the novel

1. the last great american dynasty

"Mom... Mom!" Betty's voice echoes in the bathroom, sounding on the edge of hysteria even to her own ears.

She waits, listening intently as she continues to survey the shocking scene before her, but the upbeat music coming from elsewhere in the house is her only answer. Hesitantly flicking off the light, she follows the sound to the kitchen where her mother, long blonde hair the same shade as her daughter's messily piled on top of her head, is happily baking to the tune of "All You Need Is Love."

"Mom, what... happened to your bathroom?"

"My bathroom?" Betty's mom pauses, both hands on her wooden rolling pin, and nods at the fresh cookies on the counter. "Want one?"

Betty grabs one. Snickerdoodle, her favorite... but back to the topic at hand. "Yeah, I couldn't find my blow dryer so I was going to borrow yours but..." She shakes her head, not able to find the right words.

"What is it, hon?"

"It's... Everything is green."

And she doesn't just mean the rugs and towels and shower curtain—though those were all a pretty cream color before... whatever has transpired. She means everything has flecks of green on it, dotting the wallpaper and floor and even ceiling, and the once-white tub looks like the scene of a grass stain commercial gone horribly, absolutely wrong.

But her mom shrugs, the epitome of innocence as she uses her forearm to sweep loose hair from her forehead and starts humming along with The Beatles, flattening the dough with her pin.

All Betty can do is shake her head again and enjoy her cookie. Her mother is known for being... eccentric so Betty reasons this may just be some new thing of hers to—

They hear their neighbor before they see him.

"Rebekah!" He shouts, followed by a handful of hard, insistent bangs on their front door. "Rebekah, you open this door! I know you're home!"

"Mom, you didn't..." Betty all but pleads.

Her mother's too-innocent grin is her only response, but it's a response enough.

Betty groans, helplessly watching her Mom wipe her flour-covered hands on her apron as she heads to the front door. When it opens, their neighbor is fuming so hard his toupee is out-of-place and hanging crooked on his head.

"What can I do for you—"

"My dog... is green," he interrupts her mother. "Key lime green, in fact. And I know it was you, you mad-woman!"

"No, you don't."

He pointedly looks at her mother's hands—where her fingertips and between her fingers, now wiped clear of flour and dough, are stained... green. Key lime green. The same shade that's currently covering her mother's bathroom.

"Mom," Betty quietly groans again.

Her mother pulls her dish-towel from an apron pocket and shoos her daughter off with it. As Betty heads up the stairs, she hears her mother saying, "Well, if someone did happen to kidnap your dog and dye it green, it might be because you ran their tulips over with your lawnmower. Again."

In her mother's defense, she did spend all summer cultivating the red, pink, and white blooms to perfection to compliment their two-story yellow home, nicknamed Holiday House because it was rented out as a BnB for nearly fifty years before their arrival. They had been her mother's pride, those tulips, second only to her beloved daughter.

It's really no surprise to Betty that the beautiful flowers have fallen victim to her mother and their neighbor's long-standing feud.

It began when they moved in years ago upon her father's sudden, unexpected death. Betty was too young to remember it or, really, much of anything about her father, Bill, unfortunately, but it hit her mother hard. She packed up her newborn daughter and the handsome amount of money left behind by her deceased oil-tycoon husband and moved to a nice, charming neighborhood in Rhode Island.

Rebekah always claimed that the sunshine yellow house had immediately caught her eye, a bit run-down but nothing a little TLC couldn't fix, and she'd persuaded the previous owners to completely vacate with a large incentive that came from tapping into the aforementioned wealth she'd recently inherited. She was thrilled, happy to go back to the small-town life her husband's well-off status had brought her out of.

Their next-door neighbor... Not so much.

He's never liked them, claiming that Rebekah is too loud, too middle-class, too gauche, too... everything. 

His views parallel quite closely with Rebekah's former in-laws who didn't approve of her and Bill's marriage, especially considering she had already been married once before him—a spur on the moment decision she made when she was young and reckless and a bit too headstrong, much to her parent's chagrin. It didn't last half as long as it took to sign the marriage papers, but that didn't matter to them. She was tainted in their eyes, a divorcee that could only want one thing from their son: his money.

They never even attempted to speak to her—or check on their granddaughter—after Bill's passing.

Perhaps that's why Rebekah gives her all into besting her neighbor's self-righteous attitude: because he reminds her so much of the disapproval she's dealt with time and time again throughout her life. Or, perhaps she's simply just as mad as he claims her to be.

Either way, Betty thinks to herself, their feud doesn't seem close to finding an end any time soon.

But she doesn't have enough time this morning to dwell on her mother's sanity or her neighbor's safety (her mother has resorted to kidnapping his pets now) because she has to get to school, lest she be late—and her perfect attendance would not agree with that.

Pulling on her backpack in her room and grabbing one last cookie from the kitchen for the road, Betty kisses her mother's cheek, edges around her still-ranting and ever-angry neighbor, and sets off on her bike for school.

Just another day in Betty's life.