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She zoomed up to me. “For what?” She gazed at me as if I'd grown horns.

“Because you left wearing Chloe's bracelet. Without permission.”

“I asked her if I could try it on,” Faith said, tossing her cousin a look of disgust. “Did I not?”

Chloe's chin shot up. “But you didn't give it back to me. You walked off with it on.”

Jensen spoke up then, in his laid back way. “Chloe, just chill out. Okay? It's Christmas.”

“You always take her side,” Chloe wailed, visibly shaken.

Oh, Lord.
A perfectly good occasion. Ruined.

Again.

I gathered my family and leftovers together minutes later and left.

On the drive home, Faith snorted. “Little drama queen did it again. She is so disgusting.”

Dan huffed disapproval and shook his head, yet refusing to be drawn in as he drove to our home. He maintained a distanced stance nowadays, leaving me feeling abandoned during Faith's misconduct episodes.

“Stop it, Faith,” I said. “You weren't totally innocent. You knew you had that bracelet on when you left with Jensen. It's never right to simply take over someone else's belongings. I think you enjoy prodding Chloe.”

I looked at her over my shoulder. She was gazing out into the night, her lips curved into a sly smile.

And I hoped — prayed — that the two of them would outgrow it all.

Unfortunately, Faith's and Chloe's obsession with outdoing one another did not go away. For a while after Faith married and gave birth to Maddie, an uneasy truce did develop between the two of them. Chloe could not resist little Maddie, and to get to her, she had to go through Faith so she began, at that particular time, to pick her battles more carefully.

The faux-peace prevailed until Faith's decline into drugs. In the past, Faith had shown discretion in how far she would push Chloe and vice versa. I think that, to Faith, taunting Chloe had, somewhere along the way, become a sport.

Chloe, still unmarried and attending a local college, had some of the same recklessness Faith possessed, and when the peaceful tide began to turn turbulent, Chloe's anger regained momentum.

After drugs clogged Faith's already warped sense of right, all stops were pulled out.

It drove the family crazy. Lexie and I tried to remain neutral, let the girls duke it out, but sometimes, maternal reactions would pop up.

“Chloe said Faith took one of her favorite sweaters the last time she stayed at Faith's to baby sit Maddie,”
Lexie said one day, looking a bit tense when she dropped by the house for a cup of coffee together. “Chloe looked all over for it and Faith pretended she didn't know where it was.”

“I'll talk to her,” I replied, uneasy with Lexie's accusatory leaning in the use of “pretended.” Faith had already told me about Chloe's “hissy fit” over a “tacky old sweater I wouldn't be caught dead in.” Faith swore she'd not seen the item and had to practically push Chloe out the front door to get rid of her. “I don't want her baby sitting for me anymore,” she decreed.

Lexie and I agreed it was difficult to know who was telling the truth. Both girls were pretty even-Steven in meanness and retaliation and stretching the truth to fit their purposes.

Today, as she prepared to leave, Lexie added, “Chloe said Faith shoved her out the door. She felt Faith was high on something.”

“I'm sorry, sis,” I muttered, confused and disappointed. Also a bit defensive.

What was to become of our family?

And more critically, what was to become of Faith?

Dan's hands-off stance with Faith's discipline continued. Oh, he showed her affection, but the old Daddy-Princess connection had slackened until the knot had slithered loose.

To understand Dan would be to know his background. His childhood was riddled by alcoholism and abuse and abject poverty.

“We never knew if we'd have food,” he told me.

From a family of seven kids, Dan knew what it was like to not have enough heat in the house during winter and to run out of food before being filled. He knew deprivation and what it was like to work odd jobs from the age of eleven and buying his own clothes.

“Nobody ever did anything for me from that time. I saved and bought my own cars. Dad even borrowed mine when he would wreck his during drunken rampages.”

Dan's was a heart-wrenching story of betrayal.

“The anger was the worst thing I had to deal with. Dad, when he was sober, was a fine man. But put alcohol into the mix and he was a nasty drunk. Mad at the world. Mama? She was his enabler.”

Dan's was a different perspective of life than mine.

“I had a peaceful childhood in which I was validated every day of my life,” I told him one day during our porch rocking, intimate sharing time. “How lucky I was to know I was loved. I had a place where life itself was sacred. Revered. Peace reigned.”

His next divulgence touched me profoundly.

“It was different in my family,” Dan said. “Kids ran wild everywhere I turned. I never had a space of my own,” he said. “So I found this little cubicle in the rafter of a new room being built on our house — one that remained unfinished for years — and I put all my little treasured things there so no one would bother them. It was mine, that space.”

“We just
happened
,” Dan said. “Sex was for procreation. Period. Our walls were thin. When we heard the night noises, we knew. Soon another baby would arrive. And the food wouldn't go as far. And the drunkenness would get worse. And the anger would be like a wildfire.”

He looked at me then and smiled tenderly. “It took you to show me the difference between animal coupling and real love. Romance was just a word until I met you.”

And that he had wanted a baby as much as I had still amazed me because I knew Dan's early life deficits. He'd come so far during our marriage. That man of the past had disappeared behind our pitch perfect family harmony in the first years of our marriage.

“I want to make life beautiful for Faith. To give her the happiness that I never had,” he declared over and over through her early years.

More recently, however, after that disastrous Christmas day at Lexie's, I saw the struggle as Faith pushed her father more and more to the limits. Dan bought her a white 280Z and she was ecstatic. She and Jensen were proud of their near identical cars.

Dave and I felt that, despite her lapses, our daughter was equipped for a life of happiness and success.

Success to Faith, we soon found out, did not include college.

Though we'd hoped for her a degree and her choice of career, she'd long ago grown bored with book learning. With her fancy car for mobility, she'd secretly dropped out of school in her senior year, using her daily food and gas allowance to hang out with friends.

By the time we discovered her truancy, she'd been expelled for her absences.

Broken-hearted, we tried to look at the bright side of things. During those hooky days, Faith met twenty-fouryear-old Jack Kenyon, who, we discovered, was a nice man who loved her and wanted to marry her.

Not exactly our dream for her but, at least, it offered a solution to her finding safe haven. Maybe our prayers were being answered after all.

Now a beautiful nineteen-year-old, Faith seemed ready to settle down.

Her wedding was grand. Much grander than we could afford, actually. But Faith loved beautiful things and wanted to have a memorable event. And she was our only child. The funny highlight was when Jensen stood in as Faith's attendant. But she didn't care a fig about what people thought.

At the time, I laughed. Later, that same trait would come back to haunt me.

“
There is no pain equal to that which two lovers inflict on each other.”

— Cyril Connelly

 

 

In the beginning, Faith easily slid into her housewifey role. She and Jack purchased an attractive three-bedroom house in our middle-class neighborhood. She never wanted to be far from us, which never ceased to intrigue me, given her assertive, don't-tell-me-what-to-do spirit.

Yet, at that time, there was a redeeming balance to her.

“You and Dad come over for dinner tonight,” Faith would suggest at least once a week. “I'm barbecuing a roast. It's already so tender it falls off the bone.”

Jack quickly flowed with our extended family. Everyone loved Faith's spouse. Especially Ginger and Betty, Priss' girls, both in college and, according to them, definitely
not
blind to his beauty. I noticed Chloe's eyes covertly following him, too.

“Jack's a hottie,” was a common, shared sentiment among our females. And he was with his smooth, blond good looks. His work ethics were exemplary. He was ambitious, yet not obsessed with work.

The men loved Jack just as heartily as the females. While too lean and handsome to be considered an iconic tough “man's man,” Jack fit into the family's masculine order of things. We knew he'd come from a broken home and that he felt that set-adrift thing at times, the flashbacks peculiar to kids shuttled back and forth between mother and father's residences, never quite tethering securely to either home.

But for a long time, he seemed well-adjusted and, while not overly attentive to Faith, seemed content and provided well for her.

“He's not romantic,” Faith told me one day in her detached, up-front way, like describing the milk man.

“Maybe you should tell him what you need,” I suggested.

“I have,” she replied and rolled her eyes. “It's like talking to a chair.”

“Keep trying. Sometimes, it takes a while for men to catch on.”

I admitted to myself that from the beginning, Faith and Jack's relationship lacked the intimacy, the passion that earmarked my own marriage. Little things, like holding hands or hugs or soft words … long warm looks … were rarely there.

Faith's pregnancy soon pushed aside the romance subject because she was totally in awe of the emerging tiny new life inside her. It was during those magical months of change that we spent the most quality mother-daughter time ever together. I was so proud of my daughter's brand new maternal leanings. Definitely a new facet of her.

“I'm not smoking,” she understatedly announced one day.

“Great.” I wished fervently that the vow become permanent.

“It's not good for the baby. Besides, it makes me sick.” And she stuck to that decision until Maddie was nearly a year old. Then she took up the habit again but indulged outdoors, not exposing her daughter to second-hand smoke.

I was happy. Dan, too, was elated that our daughter was settled in to a good life with a great man.