If Not For You

Chapter 15

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So i'm not sure if there is anybody out there reading this, besides my sister in law, HI CELESTE!  But if there are people actually reading this i would appreciate any comments.  i can take them even if it's negative or just a grammar correction but im starting to get a complex here.  at this point someone telling me i suck would make me feel better than not getting any responses.  i am not too good to beg.

Also, this chapter has very little action but i feel it is crucial to the story of setting up Ben's homelife.  i will hopefully be able to post a more exciting chapter tomorrow.

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Ben heard the television on and he walked into the living room where his father and brother both sat watching some sitcom that Ben had long ago stopped watching.

Ben had grown up in a household of chaos and he had grown up feeling envious of the characters who got to be a part of a loving family.  It disgusted him to see these scenarios being played out on television about these unrealistic families.  Always the same plots on all the shows.  Kids sneaking out and somehow teaching the parents a lesson on trust, kids hiding bad test scores and the parents always giving them hugs and telling them as long as they did their best that’s all that matters.

That wasn’t life.  In real life bad test score got you beaten and sneaking out at night only counts if someone is actually going to care enough to look for you.  In Ben’s world you didn’t get hugs and he couldn’t teach his dad anything because he already knew it all.  His brothers always seemed to like the escape.  They watched television whenever they couldn’t leave the house and they weren’t being worked to the bone.  But not Ben.   He would rather not know what he was missing because he wouldn’t try and pretend that his reality was ever going to change.  But tonight it was calm.  Tonight there was peace. 

He stood there for a few moments looking at his father sitting there.  Every now and then he was like this.  He was calm, almost human.  If someone was looking in on them they would see a normal family.  He would see a father and his two sons sitting together, spending time together.  A mother in the kitchen doing the dishes.  They would never know the truth.  They would never know that this house was their prison and his father their warden.

Ben’s father owned everything they did.  He had them for life.  Lucas got out.  He was the oldest.  He bore the heaviest burden while he lived there.  He took the beatings and accepted the punishments, but he was lucky.  He was able to leave in the end.  He knew that his mother would be taken care of.  He had two little brothers that grew into men.  He was able to move on with his life and move out because there were two others that would stay behind.

When Lucas met Jackie she came from a broken family.  Her father had left when she was seven and wasn’t interested in being a dad anymore.  Well he hadn’t ever been interested in being a dad but that was the year that he decided he was interested in a petite blond cashier at the local grocery store.  He left Jackie’s mom and her little sisters.  The ironic part was that the little blonde cashier had two little kids of her own.   He didn’t want to be a father to his three daughters but he apparently loved being a stepdad to two fatherless boys.

Jackie’s mother wasn’t good by herself.  She didn’t like being alone.  Needless to say as an uneducated women with low self esteem and high regard for any mate who would have her, she didn’t attract the right kind of men.   She left her daughters open to a life where nightmares become reality.  The scenes in movies that are too horrible to watch, when the scene goes out of focus and it’s left to be implied, that’s what Jackie’s memories were made of.