Stardew Valley - Dark Blue: When The Chickens Came Home To Roost (Shane)

Chapter 14: Where We Find Ourselves

Shane's mom was pretty.

Obviously, that isn't all she ever was, but it's all she ever cared to be.

He was only a small boy the first time that one of his mother's friends pinched his cheek and told his mother that he looked just like her. He scarcely understood the concept of beauty at the time, but even then, his toddler sized brain had taken it as a compliment. Deena's little boy, they'd call him. As he aged, he understood that they'd likely just never remembered his name, but when he was small, they might as well have been calling him a prince.

Deena Slater was too good for this fucked up world, even though Marnie wouldn't agree, and Shane's father specifically said that the Fern Islands were better off without her. In Shane's eyes, Deena was a saint, simply because she was all he had. It's easy to assume that someone hung the stars when you're made to believe they invented the whole damn sky.

To Shane, his mother was... home. Granted, that home may have been frightening, and dirty, and littered with cigarette butts, but home is home. He learned to grow comfortable in what was known. He learned to idolize what he feared.

Even well into his adult life, Shane could still vividly recall those days that Deena would pull up in front of his school, blasting retro rock music in her beat up old sports car with all the windows down. She'd have a long cigarette hanging from her smiling lips, and knots in her long black hair from the wind. The other boys would tease him for having a pretty mother, and eventually, Shane came to resent her for it. Why did she always have to be the center of attention? Why couldn't she just be normal, like the moms in their clunky minivans with their bobbed hair and snack-filled purses the size of duffel bags?

Shane was eight years old when the resentment finally grew roots. He still loved her — he still worried for her — but more than anything, he was angry with her. He was angry with her for being reckless, and careless — and he was angry that she got herself killed.

Just as quickly as she lived, she died, and Shane grieved. Not just for the wild animal that served as a placeholder for a mother, but for all that she'd never been, and all she'd never have the chance to be. Shane never really forgave her for all of it — not that she'd apologized.

Once Deena had passed, Shane and his piece of shit father, Michael, moved into a small, sleazy apartment on the bad side of town, and for a little while, things weren't so bad. Life carried on. Michael drank a fifth a day, and Shane fell in love with gridball. They weren't tiptoeing around each other — they were living two separate lives. Shane preferred it that way, because when Michael did bother to acknowledge him, it was just cruel.

Even then, Shane had known why his father was cruel, apart from Michael simply being a shitty person. Shane looked like his mother, with his black hair and his round nose, and he acted like her, with his hair trigger impulses and powder keg temper. Despite his father's disdain, Shane had actually liked himself, then — if only because he believed he was keeping Deena's memory alive.

Shane grappled for anything that kept Deena's memory alive, really. He liked to spray her old perfume on his pillow, and keep her hairbrush in a box under his bed. He liked to listen to her CDs when his father wasn't home. He liked to pretend that she hadn't died at all, because really, Shane had never felt so alone.

Their new apartment was quiet, and nothing had ever felt so foreign. When Deena had still been alive, every day was like a circus, and every night was like a bank robbery. Shane could distinctly remember the way that he used to lie awake at night and listen to his parents scream at one another. He remembered the sobbed threats, the crashing sounds, and the dread in his gut that made his head hurt and his limbs feel spacey. He'd count the seconds between the front door slamming and the red of his father's tail lights illuminating the small window above his dresser. He'd watch the crimson glow fade to nothingness as the tension went with it, and then, his mother would come into his room.