Lost and Found

The Sweater

*Chapter one: The Sweater*

"Lucy, let's go! What's taking so long?!" Lucy's mother shouted impatiently.

"Where's my sweater!? I can't find my sweater, and I need it!" She answered frantically.

Lucy tossed her clothes around her room in a panicked search. She never left the house without one of her sweaters. She had quite the collection of them, but, if she was going to complete her outfit, she would need the light blue one.

"It's seventy-nine degrees out! Forget the sweater!" Her mom retorted.

Instead, Lucy grabbed a light green sweater out of her dirty clothes hamper. It matched well enough, and it didn't smell bad. She didn't particularly like this sweater though. She had worn it to her mother's wedding. A wedding which she did not agree with.

Since Lucy's father had passed away, her mother had gotten lonely. It made Lucy question how much her mother ever really even loved her father. She understood the need for company. Was she not company enough though?

The new man was nothing like her father was. He wasn't hard working, caring, or even sober. He always seemed to have whiskey on his breath. Her mother didn't seem to see all of his faults. She only saw the desire in his eyes. Keith made Meg feel wanted, and she liked that.

One day, maybe three months after the wedding, Keith announced his departure for the evening. He was already drunk and slurring every word. He grabbed his keys from the counter, but Lucy snatched them away before he could open the door. He smiled and kissed her cheek. She stepped back and wiped the saliva away.

"It's sweet that you care about me, Laura," He grinned before he opened the door and began walking in the direction of Grady's, which was the only 'gentleman's club' in the town. Lucy didn't correct him when he called her Laura. She felt that she could pretend he was talking to someone else when he called her the wrong names.

Meg, who had also been drinking, slapped her daughter across the cheek before growling, "Are you trying to steal MY husband!?"

Lucy narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth to state the betrayal she was feeling from her mother, but no words escaped her quivering lips. She instead walked out the door and began her way to her boyfriend's. Of course she had only been concerned for the other people on the roads, and that's why she grabbed the keys. She thought Keith was disgusting, and the fact his whiskey soaked lips had met her cheek had repulsed her. How had her mother picked a winner like him? And how could she have betrayed Lucy in such a way? Lucy covered her cheek with her hand. She shook her head as though these memories were drawings on an etch-a-sketch, and if she shook her head they would disappear. But they didn't.

Nobody wants their mother to be the bad guy. You want to believe that the woman who had once so tenderly carried you in her womb for nine months could never become a villain in your story, but how often do you find that she will, at least for a short time, be someone who you can't call a friend?

Lucy denied it in her mind. She didn't want to believe that the loss of her father had turned her mother into such a monster. This woman wasn't her mother anymore, and Lucy didn't recognize her at all, though she never stopped trying.

Lucy pushed these thought down, and, after spritzing her sweater with sweet smelling body spray, she trotted down the stairs.

"About damn time," Meg grumbled as she put out her cigarette.

Keith insisted that the entire 'family' should go to church every sunday. Meg hated it, and so did Lucy. Meg hated having to pretend like she was an innocent little church-going wife. Lucy hated it because she had to watch Keith and her mother pretend to be something they weren't, and also because the church had focused so much on perfecting yourself and what you shouldn't do. She felt like she couldn't be good enough. Not for the church's standards and never again for her mother's.

"There my girls are!" Keith sang as Meg stomped out of the house, and Lucy meekly tip toed behind. "I like that sweater."

Lucy grimaced and got in the car without a word. I used to too, she thought. I used to too.