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She cried every night, my sister, so unused to the lifestyle I had been raised in that meant a different motel or hotel room every few nights while the summer vacation would allow for her indecisiveness. She knew that by the end of August, she would need to pick a town, and plan on being there for the nine months out of the year that school was in session. If we were lucky. Usually, she had a rough break-up halfway through the school year, and uprooted to a new town for the remainder of the year, never quite allowing you to feel like you could make friends or get used to the teachers and the classroom layouts.
But I was thirteen. I spent my first eight-ish years of life never putting down any kinds of roots, knowing they would be ripped out. I was world-weary. I didn't need any kind of comforting. That was just life. It sucked. Our mother was a selfish woman. I long since gave up hope of her changing.
Letha, though, actively and constantly sought her approval. In the summer, it was in the form of making her bed in the morning, keeping her toys neatly put away when she was not using them, and making big pieces of adorably awful kid artwork that always said 'I love my mommy' on it, and she would rush up when Mom would come home to show her, to try to get a little bit of praise.
Once we settled down in Miami that year and school started, she tried to get her approval through perfect grades, through her dedication to Girls Scouts and the dance classes I had had ten rounds with my mother about allowing her to take. Since, y'know, the child support checks were meant for things such as that, not to feed her Jimmy Choo habit.
Mom didn't care about her grades. And she never showed up for recitals.
It made my chest deflate when I would see Letha's eyes watering up when she looked out hopefully into the crowd.
In fact, it bothered me enough to dig through my mother's paperwork and find his cell number.
The next time she had a recital, despite it being against the law given their arrangement, Jake was sitting next to me in the audience.
He had even brought her pretty pink tulips and a little jewelry box with music and a dancing ballerina inside.
She still had one of those flowers pressed in between the pages of her diary and the jewelry box was long-broken, but sitting under the floorboard in my apartment, along with her diary.
I had watched the whole interaction with the cynicism of a skeptic, not understanding what would possess him to fly across the country to come see her dance, to bring her little presents. His actions simply didn't make sense to me. Hell, my mother forgot my last birthday. She had been out with one of her guys. And my father, well, who the hell even knew who he was? I certainly didn't. I wasn't even sure that my mother did.
It just didn't add up.
All I could conclude was that Letha was simply the sun, and everyone and everything wanted to be close to her warmth.
I got that.
I felt it myself.
Our mother married her next husband when I was fifteen and Letha was nine. It was the man who had done her breast augmentation, taking her barely-As to definite Ds that on her very slim body with her very blonde hair that she recently got from a bottle because, she claimed, Letha and I were turning her gray far too early, gave her the appearance of a cheap porn star. That wasn't helped when Dr. Ralph convinced her that her lips were losing their plump and she could use some fillers so that, as the creepy fuck put it, she could have lips like mine.
It was the first time my mother's eyes really sliced into me.
It was like she was noticing right then that I was no longer a little girl. And while I was then - and would always be - a bit straight up and down, with very little in the curve department, there was simply something about me that was more mature, more womanly that year.
I wasn't sure if it was simply that my becoming a woman made her aware of her age, or if maybe she was jealous of my youth, but Letha finally got to fall into obscurity in her mind, and all her bitterness and anger was suddenly directed at me.
But that was okay.
I, unlike Letha, could take it.
It didn't hurt my feelings.
It didn't make me doubt myself.
It just reinforced my already low opinion of my mother.
When the good doc cheated on her with a woman who had just turned nineteen, she had ripped us out of school with one night's warning, packing us into a car loaded down with her designer clothes and, well, little else since unlike Jake, this husband had insisted on an iron-clad prenup.
