Home For The Holidays

I went off to college that year, and all was well. For the next two years, our little family of five was trudging along just fine. Dad had gifted them a house down the street from us because he could afford it; Tom went to work for the family business as has always been expected while Deidre stayed home as per their agreement.

It’s not like she wasn’t pulling her own weight. Sure they had a housekeeper who came twice a week and a personal chef since Tom has always been very particular about his meals, but Deidre had very lucrative hobbies. Her portraiture art has been making her commissions since high school, so the girl was no slouch. It’s just that with the hefty sum dad had given them as a start-up, plus the nepotism pay Tom was making at the family bizz, she could relax and work on her own schedule.

Everyone was happy those first few years; there were no schisms, no fighting for anyone to worry about, and my family was always here when I came home for the holidays or the odd weekend when dad would send the plane to get me. Aka when I wasn’t flitting around with my dorm mates and was available to bless the ‘rents with my presence.

Then Deidre fell pregnant, and life was complete. I must’ve been the world’s most excited aunt. I started shopping even before I knew what we were having. The excitement was so strong among the family; you could cut it with a knife. Then all of a sudden, everything changed.

Since I was away at school, the signs were subtle at first. Calls became rushed, and there was always a tone in mom’s voice that gave me pause. Dad was no use because it was a busy season for him as the head of the department stores that have been in the family since the eighteen hundreds, so he knew nothing of what was going on.

I came home weeks later to find Deidre looking and acting like a shell of herself, and no one was talking. Tom, who used to share everything with me, was suddenly closed off, and mom was a tight clamshell. Anyway, long story short, the slag, whose given name is Tessa, had once been Deidre’s bestie.

As the story goes, Tom and Tessa fell in love while Deidre was pregnant and started an affair. A little after the twins were born, Tom moved out and in with his mistress and had since turned his back on his family. He refuses to see his girls and acts as if Deidre doesn’t and never has existed.

To say I was gobsmacked is like saying Vesuvius is a little mountain. Tom has just never been that type in my eyes, but no matter how much I asked him what was going on, he’d just shut me out. I was hurt and confused for a very long time, and even dad, who has always been my rock, just kept telling me to leave it alone that everything would work out in the end.

Welp, since no one, not even Deidre, seemed to think I was old enough at damn near twenty to know the ins and outs of a broken marriage and what caused it, I decided to do some digging on my own.

It’s funny what you can piece together if you go way back in someone’s social media. I’m guessing some people, like Tessa, have no idea that there are services that can find and dig out shit you deleted even ten years ago. As the saying goes, once you’ve put it on the net, it never leaves.

Add the fact that I’m a software major, aka the beautiful nerd, and Tessa has got hell on her hands. I went through her life with a fine toothcomb, starting a year and a half ago, which is where I found Jared. Did I tell you about Jared? No? Okay, well, here goes, another little side trip to bring this all together.

Samantha

TWO YEARS EARLIER

I came back from my weekend home, still no wiser to the truth of what has caused the breakdown of my family. I dropped down on the bed in the dorm room I shared with Michelle, my new introverted friend who knows a thing or two about computers even though she prefers to use that knowledge in the gaming world, unlike me who wants to build the shits so I can make my first billion by forty.

I was feeling despondent and just a little bit lethargic, having spent the last couple of days with a crying soon to be ex sister in law and helping her with newborn twin girls who were the latest family blessing. My brother hadn’t been as friendly as he had always been with me, and it was only the last day that I learned he’d moved out of the family home away from his wife and kids. No one was saying anything about where he was or what the fight they’d obviously had was about.