Chapter 4 - The Anatomy of a Parasite
Grant stepped forward immediately, placing himself between my mother and me, his jaw clenched tight. “Watch your tone, Marlene. You are speaking to your landlord, and more importantly, to the person who currently holds the authority to refer your financial dossier to the state prosecutor.”
Marlene let out a harsh, dry laugh that ended in a cough. She leaned heavily against the mantelpiece, crossing her arms over her chest. The pale blue dress, once so pristine, was now wrinkled and crooked.
“Prosecutor?” she mocked, though her voice lacked its earlier stability. “You won’t send your own mother to prison, Allison. You don’t have the stomach for it. You’re weak. You’ve always been weak. That’s why you worked yourself half to death at that greasy diner when you were sixteen. That’s why you paid for Brielle’s braces, that’s why you paid for my dental implants, and that’s why you bought this house when the bank came knocking!”
Marlene jabbed a bony finger in my direction. “You did all of it because deep down, you know you’re unlovable unless you’re useful. Without your money, without your little spreadsheets, who are you? You’re just the cold, awkward child nobody wanted to hug!”
Grant took half a step forward, his fists tightening, but I placed a gentle hand on his forearm.
I looked at my mother. For years, words like that had cut me to the bone. When I was nineteen and working thirty-hour weekend shifts while maintaining a 3.9 GPA, hearing her call me cold had sent me crying into the employee bathroom until my eyes swelled shut. I had spent a decade believing that if I just covered one more mortgage payment, paid for one more vacation, or bought Brielle one more car, Marlene would finally look at me with the warmth she showered on my sister.
Standing there at thirty years old, pregnant with my own daughter, I felt nothing.
The emotional well was completely, beautifully dry. There was no pain left—only the crystal clarity that comes when a lifelong illusion finally shatters into dust.
“Is that what you tell yourself to sleep at night, Mom?” I asked quietly. “That I helped you because I was weak?”
“You did it because you owed me!” Marlene shouted, her face twisting. “I gave birth to you! I gave up my youth for you! You think raising children is free? You think you don’t owe a debt to the woman who put food in your mouth?”
“You didn’t put food in my mouth,” I replied, my voice slicing through her hysteria with surgical calm. “From the time I was fifteen, I bought my own groceries. I bought my own clothes. I paid my own health insurance the second I turned eighteen. And while I was doing that, you were taking out parent PLUS loans in my name that took me six years to pay off, all so Brielle could spend two semesters at an out-of-state private college where she failed every single class because she was too busy partying in fraternity houses.”
Brielle, who was slumped in the velvet armchair staring at her designer phone, suddenly looked up, her eyes blazing. “Don't talk about my college years! You don’t know what I was going through! I had severe social anxiety!”
“You had severe laziness, Brielle,” Grant retorted coldly. “Let’s call it what it was. You flunked out because you didn’t attend a single lecture after syllabus week. And then you expected your sister to pay the tuition balance so the university would release your transcripts.”
“And I paid it,” I said, looking directly at Brielle. “I paid eighteen thousand dollars to clear that balance. Do you know what I was driving at the time? A nine-hundred-dollar Chevy with a cracked radiator that overheated every time I got stuck in traffic on I-85. I wore shoes with cardboard stuffed into the soles to keep the rain out while you posted pictures from a yacht in Miami.”
Brielle rolled her eyes, scoffing with immense irritation. “Oh, here we go again! The martyr routine! Saint Allison and her cardboard shoes! Nobody asked you to do that! You chose to do it!”
“You’re right,” I said. The realization hit me with the force of a freight train, and for the first time all afternoon, a genuine smile touched my lips. “You are completely right, Brielle. I chose to do it. I was a willing participant in your parasite circus. But the contract has expired.”
I reached into my handbag once more and pulled out a clean, sealed white envelope. I didn’t hand it to Marlene; I tossed it onto the coffee table right between the scattered envelopes she had attempted to steal.
“What is that?” Marlene asked suspiciously, eyeing the envelope like a cornered animal eyeing a trap.
“That is the formal legal notification regarding the vehicle currently sitting in the driveway,” I stated.
Brielle’s head snapped up. “My Mercedes?”
“It isn’t your Mercedes, Brielle,” I said flatly. “The lease is under Stonegate Properties LLC. When you begged me to co-sign six months ago, claiming you needed a reliable vehicle to take your unborn child to medical appointments, I didn't co-sign. I had the corporate entity lease it directly to prevent you from defaulting and destroying my personal credit score.”
Brielle stood up, her hand pressing against her stomach, real terror finally breaking through her vanity. “What did you do to my car, Allison? What did you do?!”
“The lease payments were conditioned upon your mother paying her three-hundred-dollar monthly residential stipend on time,” I explained. “Since she has failed to make that payment for three consecutive months, and since she used fraudulent wire transfers to divert funds this week, the lease has been defaulted.”
I checked my watch. It was exactly 3:45 PM.
“The flatbed tow truck should be pulling onto the street in approximately seven minutes,” Grant added, glancing out the front bay window.
Brielle let out an ear-piercing shriek. She dropped her phone onto the cushions and bolted toward the front door, yanking it open so violently that the brass handle slammed against the drywall, punching a hole in the plaster.
She ran down the brick front steps in her sandals, screaming toward the quiet suburban cul-de-sac.
May you like
Sure enough, turning the corner past the manicured oak trees, a heavy industrial flatbed tow truck was rumbling down the asphalt, its yellow warning lights already flashing against the afternoon sky.
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