Don't Wanna Try
Chapter 27
While her mother cleaned up, Jonathan pulled his sister aside into the adjoining room.
“Can we talk? Privately?” he asked.
“Yeah, hold on,” she paused. “Mom, Jon and I are gonna go to the store and pick up something, okay?”
“All right, but hurry back since our time together is limited.”
“I know,” she replied with exasperation.
They walked side by side for a block before he summoned up the courage to ask something he’d been curious about for years.
“Why do you hate Dad so much?”
“Jon, it’s just…” she looked away. “There are things that happened that you don’t know about. Stuff in the past.”
“I think I can handle whatever it is. I’m grown up now.”
She sighed. “Remember how Daddy wanted me to be a singer?”
“Yeah,” he nodded.
“One of the photographers he took me to raped me,” she whispered.
“Shit. What the hell does that have to do with Dad, though?”
“He didn’t believe me when I told him.”
“Fuck!” he exclaimed and stopped where he was. “Why the hell not?” Jon asked, clearly angry.
“I don’t really know, Jon.”
“Does Mom know…”
“Yeah, she knows. She knew the day I came home from the incident. She didn’t do one thing about it. That’s why we don’t get along, you see.”
“I thought we had a normal family,” he replied.
“How can we be normal when we went from millionaires to counting pennies?” she quipped bitterly.
“We were millionaires?” he choked. “I mean, I knew we used to have more money…”
“Dad is considered a legend in the music industry. He gambled all of our money last minute. It was like he knew he was gonna die and decided to fuck his family in the process.”
“I’m sorry, sis.”
“Yeah, well, it’s in the past.”
Vanessa leaned into the welcoming sofa as her mother set three mugs of coffee on the table. She was preparing herself for a long, harrowing talk.
“So, honey, how have you been?”
“I’ve been good. Yourself?”
“We’ve been all right. Do you plan on coming back to New York more often?”
“No, I don’t,” she replied honestly.
“Honey…”
“Mom, I hate this house. Why would I want to come back to it?”
“You’re being unfair.”
“Unfair was my virginity being taken by a forty year old man. Don’t you dare talk to me about what’s fair!”
“Jon, I think you should go finish up some homework or something,” her mother suggested.
“Jon knows, Mom.”
“You told him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“I can’t believe you knew, Mom.”
Her mother had to look away from Jonathan’s penetrating stare.
“Neither of you knew your father very well.”
“Not that that was any fault of ours!” Vanessa replied angrily. “He was a bastard, and you know it!”
“He was a good man,” her mother countered. “He provided for us for many years.”
“And every other woman who’d spread her legs.”
“Don’t talk like that!”
“You’re in denial. You’ve always been in denial, Mom.”
“I know your father had a few affairs.”
“A few? You’re not stupid. There were too many. One is too many, really. It was a new woman every weekend. I knew, Mom. If I knew, you had to have known. He was hardly discreet about his escapades.”
“Vanessa,” her mother said in a warning tone, “Please.”
“No, I won’t shut up so you can tell me more lies. Dad was a womanizer, gambler, and never around. He left us with so much debt and bills to pay; it wasn’t like he hadn’t known that he was spending too much or that he gambled away everything we had. He knew. Just like he knew that driving drunk at four am on mountain curves was a bad idea. I think he was tired of coming home to us.”
“Your father loved you both very much! He was a busy man!”
“He loved the image we could provide. He didn’t drag us to those parties so we could be cultured. He did it to impress big business clients, make him seem friendly, fatherly.”
“I can’t listen to this garbage!” her mother yelled and stood up. “I think you’ve insulted your family enough for one day, don’t you think?”
Vanessa sighed as she watched her mother go to her bedroom.
“You made her cry,” Jonathan said.
“I know.”
“Damn it, why?”
“Why? She’s been living a lie for over twenty years.”
“So let her live it. She’s a good woman, sis.”
She shrugged. “Shouldn’t she know that her husband was a liar, a cheat, and unfaithful? Why should I have to take that? Our father was an asshole.”
“Mom’s old with two kids grown up. There’s nothing left for her but memories, really. Let her remember them as good ones instead of tainting everything, damn it.”
Chapter 28Author: zines@aol.com
These stories are for entertainment purposes only. They are completely fictitious, and the authors mean no harm to EMINEM, his family, friends, or anyone else that may have been depicted as a 'real life' character. No money was made on the fiction here, either directly or indirectly, i.e. paid advertising. In other words - it's just a bunch of shit we wrote for fun. Please don't take it seriously.