Rich

1 (Selene)

         There was a pit in my stomach growing with every new item I packed away in sad brown boxes. If what you own is what you're worth then it isn't much. Money and I have a complicated relationship. As in, I never had any, but my mother always chased it. 

There's a lot I can say about my mother. How beautiful she was. How money hungry she always was. How she instilled in me all the wrong values in life, and how I had to become my own person to detach myself from it all. Trisha Medeiros-Moore, mother to me, wife to David Moore- one of the seven wealthiest investors of the world.

        When she caught him on her baited line she'd finally gotten the big fish she's always been looking for. Men and I have a complicated relationship as well. It was always a new face that never stuck when it came to my mother's dating life. Nobody was good enough. Not until David.

 My father is a dead beat, that sums up half the complications I have with men, but I was also let down by my uncle today. When mom was alive she paid an allowance for me to live with her sister after she married into the Moore family. 

I tried living with the Moore's at first, but David's children are evil, greedy, silver spoon fed assholes and idiots that tortured me until I fled my own mother and sought asylum in my aunt's house. I've lived here since I was 14, but now that my mother is dead my uncle says he can't feed his own 4 children and me anymore.

        I won't lie and say I wasn't shocked when I found out my mother had a prenuptial agreement with her billionaire 50 year old husband. That should anything happen to her while they're still married I would then be entrusted to him. I begged my aunt and uncle that I'd find a better job and help pay my way, but my uncle insisted I should go reap what my mother sewed. 

I even went to my deadbeat dad's side of the family, to the few I speak to on very rare occasions, but they told me my father didn't allow it. Godforbid him and I crossed paths, he'd be furious. He has his own family now.

So, I pack 18 years worth of accumulated memories, and scraps of clothing from my tiny paychecks, and I stuff them in this box while constantly being reminded that I'm unwanted.

        "Do you need help packing anything else? I can start carrying some boxes down" my oldest cousin Trevor offered me. He was tip-toeing around me all morning knowing how upset I was to be leaving, and feeling guilty for not being able to help me stay. 

Even though he's 25 he still lives at home. The cost of city rentals is such a ridiculous amount these days that even this college graduate can't afford his own place and his student loans all on the same paycheck. 

Under him is my cousin Adeline who's 23 and also still living at home, Jesse who's 20, and Christine, the youngest, who's 17 and still in high school. I graduated this year from high school, but college isn't in the picture for me yet.

I felt uncomfortable having David pay for it as my mother offered while she was still alive.

        Two months isn't a very long time after burying your 38 year old mother. It was sudden and still a mystery to us as to why she died. When I was 13-14 years old I made an effort to see my mother even though I wasn't living with her anymore. I looked forward to the visits, but they became less and far in between as I grew up. 

She would ask to meet for coffee between shopping sprees or drop off a gift on holidays. She got so wrapped up in her world of diamonds and luxuries that I became less precious to her. Maybe I never was.

You can feel rich and fulfilled without having your pockets full of money, but that isn't how she viewed the world. She wanted more, and more, and more. Funny how she ended up with Moore. David Moore.