VENGEANCE

Prologue

1989, May...

I had never even realized anything was wrong. Mom and Dad had never even had a fight, they never argued, they never so much as raised their voices at my brother and me. Then, without warning, Dad hands Mom some papers and she signed them and threw them in his face. She yelled at him then for the first time. She let it all out, finally venting her rage, over the last six months of lies and betrayal that she had known were taking place but accepted as a midlife crisis that she naively thought would pass.

My brother and I didn't understand the words at the time but later we came to realize that it meant that our father had been unfaithful to our mother, and her heart was broken. It also meant that we were going to be separated. I'm not sure how they chose which one of us went with who, but in the end, I went with our dad and my brother went with our mom.

After a month living on our own, dad finally had his girlfriend move in with us. She was nice, and we got along well, but it wasn't long before everything changed. It started with her bringing letters from my mother into my room and showing them to me. She never let me read them, or even touch them. She would write return to sender on fronts and take them away; telling me it was my fault that I didn't get to keep them.

1990, July...

After she and my father got married, it got worse. She was what anyone with a brain would classify as a lazy, selfish, gold digger. She sat around the house reading Cosmo with her perfect hair and perfect face while my father made all the money and did all the work. As soon as I turned ten, I had chores. They included the laundry, the dishes, vacuuming, and anything else that she didn't want to do because it would mess up her manicure.

1991, December...

I remember once when I was eleven, I had gotten the chicken pocks, and I was so sick I couldn't get out of bed. She came into my room and beat me that day for the first time. I had bruises over the backs of my thighs and my butt that no one ever saw because they were gone before I got well enough to go back to school. The beatings came more often after that. At first they were once a week, then once every few days.

1993, August...

When I was thirteen she caught me doing what nearly every boy that age is bound to do at one point when he is alone in the shower. She yelled at me and squeezed it until I cried out from the pain. Almost a month later she began coming to my room and forcing me to do things with her, perverse thing. I had threatened to tell once. She said that she would take my father away and leave me there, that I would never see him or my mother again. I decided to keep it to myself.

1996, September...

When I turned sixteen, the abuse had been going on for a little over six years in one fashion or another. I had my drivers permit, I was already a senior in High School and I had a 4.0 grade point average. No better time than the present than to run away, I rationalized. I packed one bag with my schoolbooks, a few changes of clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste and my deodorant. I took all the allowance I had been saving, secretly hiding, from under the loose floor board under my bed, and I left.

I bounced from friend to friend for the first few weeks, always having to leave when she found out where I was. I couldn't go to my mother because she was sure to look there. Ultimately, I ended up living in a homeless shelter having to sleep curled around my bag to keep it from getting stolen. It was not a good life for any one, let alone a teenager.

2016, November...

I had been away for twenty years. I hadn't sent word to my father about anything in my life for fear of that woman, but I was a man now and it was about time I acted like one. I had recently turned thirty-six and things seemed to be finally looking up. I had decided it was time to move on, in a way, and go see my family. I wanted to visit my father first and get seeing his evil she-devil of a wife over with; then I would go see my mother to wash all the filth of my stepmother out of my mind for good.