by Rebecca Lee
You don't just come down and fill out some paper work and sit on your duff for eternity.
So she worked and she worked hard. She worked, like so many in her position, without any real hope of ever not working that hard.
Her dreams were going nowhere. She quickly aged beyond her ability to get them met by a man with money. Her basketball player catch wasn’t in the habit of giving out money to his girls.
He believed (and correctly as it turned out) that you didn’t have to actually spend any money on women if you were rich. You just had to give them a smell of the bread baking. They’d simply hang around hoping for a taste.
But as time went on through the middle part of the 2000s, Chris’ money dried up. Not only was no longer making the big salary but for a while here and there he was no longer making any money. Yet he spent money like crazy. He behaved like the good times would never end, even though they already ended years before.
Many times it was Donna throwing money his way.
When she’d become exasperated and ask him why he wasn’t out putting that Stanford degree to good use, he would always fall back on a tryout he was having with some team.
Then he’d disappear like he didn’t want to talk about it. He's always come back a week or so later claiming he had impressed some team. At one point, he went to Europe for a spell and another time he went to Asia for a couple months. Both times he made a few bucks but then never seemed to have any.
He'd soon return to Donna’s life and Donna's bed. Chris, Donna, Brea, under one little roof.
Donna working harder than ever. She was constantly hearing rumors she would lose her job with the city. This was the one she couldn't afford to lose because it had the benefits for her and Brea.
The stress was enough without feeling like you were being used by the guy Donna got with because she envisioned him being able to make her life easier.
Everywhere she turned, Donna felt like she was trapped by her lack of money. It was an awful feeling but one that hung over Donna Casteel’s life since the day Darry walked out the door and left her on her own with baby Brea.
She knew the dream of running her own business was the key to breaking out from the cycle.
As time wore on, the idea of being a businesswoman became a bitter taunt of something that was never going to happen.
One thing Donna knew about being in the working poor: dreams, such as starting a business to make decent money and provide a better life for your family, were fleeting. If you pursued them, you often did so at the expense of something else. If you failed, you had no safety net to protect you.
Donna couldn’t afford to lose and when you can’t afford to lose, you can’t really try to go into business. Not on your own and not without the clear path being illuminated by someone who knew it.
Donna was caught in an endless cycle of fear. The world grew around her and seemingly prospered while she struggled.
Donna wasn’t a bitter person but she was a pessimist.
…
Brea Casteel was almost nothing like her mother. Not that they didn’t get along. They did. It was really impossible not to get along with Brea because she was fully and completely non-confrontational. She lacked any edge whatsoever.
She rejected, for whatever reason and no one really knew why, things like make up or the latest fashions. She read, and read a lot, but even that had a certain mystery to it.
What was she reading? Why wasn’t she spending her spare time with her friends being a high school girl?
It wasn’t a lack of physical beauty. Brea had her mom’s complection only slightly lighter skinned. She had a small nose and brown to black hair that fell wherever because she let it do so.
She just seemed like she was indifferent to the whole concept of trying to create beauty. She dressed in oversized corduroys and pullover long sleeve shirts or t-shirts. She wore a rubber band in her hair.
She was kind to her mom and did what she was told. She never showed much interest in boys or partying. Donna knew she had some friends. But for a 19-year-old girl, her existence couldn’t have been any different than Donna's at that same age. Donna was an alpha dog and one of the most outgoing and popular girls in school.
Brea brought home great grades but did nothing practical with them. She didn’t seem to care about going to college but she was quietly filling out applications to both schools and scholarship endowments left and right. This was just her and her way. Rather than talk about it, she’d go do it. She always would stay out of everyone’s hair in the process.
Wispy and non-athletic, Brea was hardly a hit with the boys. It wasn't hard to figure out. She didn’t respond to their signals of interest with any of her own. She came off as cold.
She would have loved to have a boyfriend. Brea told one of her friends once when they were getting really high in her friend’s backyard over in Hawthorne that she wasn’t going to go out of her way to do anything “abnormal” to make it happen.
Brea called it “not bending to social pressure”. People who knew her called it downright weird, even going so far as to say she was mentally disturbed.
When one of her counselors at school (who was desperately trying to get Brea into a magnet program for the gifted) told her people thought she was mentally infirm, she responded: “let them think what she want.”
To Brea, this was just more judgmental behavior from judgmental people. This behavior she detested more than anything. To her it was just one more reason not to seek out and connect with people.
She believed the connections she was making were of greater depth. There just weren’t many of them. This was fine. Because to Brea, secrecy was paramount. The people she met and the lives they shared together were always on her terms.
She could be powerfully attractive because she was so intelligent and also so difficult. If you were a woman, you’d sense your own mental superiority being let into her inner circle. If you were a man, you doubtlessly saw an understated beauty who would never fail to turn you on by her appearance, despite her outward indifference to “being made up”.
Donna had always taken a hands-off approach to raising Brea. She found her brilliant but complicated. Something that Donna found to be total happenstance and having nothing to do with her parenting. She figured the girl would find her way, whatever it was. As it was, Brea was not a lot of trouble. She was also very light in the expense department compared to what Donna could have seen with other girls her age.
Conversely, Donna was forever fixated on things Brea could care nothing about if you forced her at gunpoint. Things like the latest shoes or how to apply mascara.
Donna never stopped chasing her youth through the rebirth of her appearance. She had a natural curiosity that was never satisfied. She was chatty and had a quick cadence, and often a poor attention span.
Where Donna came off as high energy and engaging, Brea always appeared lethargic.
When asked about her mom one day by her counselor during Junior year, Brea remarked that she loved her and Donna was a great mom. The relationship might have been one of the only semi-normal things in her Brea's life.
This was the “puzzle of Brea” as Donna called it. Together they lived under the same roof but wholly separately in spirit, personality, and outlook. As it turned out, it was this long-standing acceptance of each other’s differences and lack of any great need to force themselves on the other which kept their relationship intact during whatever trauma.
…
Donna never asked how it got started, but she knew. He had a lot of extra time on his hands while Donna was off working her day away. Brea was home earlier in the day from school. She never worked and wasn’t particularly active.
Donna knew Chris was never faithful. Do she could hardly act surprised when she surprised them in Brea’s bedroom one afternoon.
The interesting part was how it all came to pass.
They had begun “fooling around” as Chris called it to his hoops buddies or “hav
ing sex” as Brea described it to Lacey her friend from Hawthorne. Neither of them were in a social support structure that would give them the faintest idea what they were doing was wrong. She certainly wasn’t going to learn it from Donna who didn’t believe in getting deep with people about sex or their morals. This belief extended to how she raised her young daughter.
One day Chris was laying around the house when Brea came home. He’d been thinking about it for a while. This skinny young girl with model features and a somewhat aloof bitchiness (as he saw it). She was never with a guy.
One big thing he knew was Brea would never say a word to anyone who would let it get back to Donna. He and Donna were stilling having sex most every night he was there. le.
Brea came home. She did her usual of not saying much to the people there and went right to the fridge to search out a snack. Chris came into the kitchen and playfully bumped into her on his way by to get a glass from the cupboard.
For the first time in weeks that Chris could recall, he saw skinny little Brea smile. He invited her out back to chill and share a bong. They did and after she got high, he put a lip lock on her. She reciprocated.
Before long they were in her bedroom and the former pro jock was peeling off Brea’s clothes. They made love a couple times. Each time, they separated a few minutes after and went about their way. There was little discussion beyond clarifying that they wouldn’t be letting this get out to anyone.
Brea loved the feeling of his large muscular frame cradling her and putting her into different positions. He loved that it passed the time for a few hours and she was so young and tight.
It was indulgence in their carnal pleasures and nothing more.
As strong-willed as Brea could appear, her clothes would come off for him almost instantly every time she got home from school. They’d go on and off for a couple hours, then part. No cuddling or tender kissing in between. Not that the the love making was distant or hurtful. On the contrary. She loved it really slow from him and he loved that she loved it.
“He is so attentive when we’re doing it,” she told a surprised but not indignant Lacey one day when they were smoking. “I feel like I am the most important thing in the world. It is totally addicting.”
“Are you sure your mom won’t find out?” Lacey asked.
“No, but I am not worried about it,” Brea said with no indication she was worried about it. “I don’t think they are in love. My mom doesn’t seem like she cares to be much of a lover anymore. She’s gotten all frumpy. Put on weight everywhere. She comes home all dog tired and doesn’t seem like she cares to fuck anymore.”
Brea was not above rationalizations for behavior which by most measures was wrong, not to mention completely self-indulgent. But this was her self-centered side. Her heart was never in much of anything for herself, so forget it ever being in anything for others.
Donna’s passionate nature didn’t run to her daughter except in one distinct area. Chris could attest to the similarities.
“The daughter isn’t near as good a lay,” he told one of his buddies who still worked for the Lakers. “But she’ll do whatever I ask and looks pretty hot naked.”
Right before the whole sordid thing came to light, it was clear Brea was struggling with the emotional aspect of everything that was happening.
She talked with another friend she knew from high school whom she was not as tight with. She said she thought she might have been falling in love with her liaison partner. The obvious carelessness of sharing that sort of information with someone she didn’t fully trust or know, indicated that Breat was a confused young woman.
When the girl began to blab it to another friend or two, things got up the chain fast. It was a sordid live triangle. Here was a “sort of” celebrity, a student, and that student’s mom who was well-known and well-liked.
A a woman who worked for the City who had a neice at Brea's school,circulated things to the degree it made it’s way over to Donna one day. That’s just how things worked with sex, secrets, and well-known people.
None of what she heard surprised Donna.
Her ego was bruised. But the normal parental type response when you have a man staying in your house preying on a young girl barely of age, would be some level of concern for your daughter. Maybe also some rage for being cheated on.
Donna wasn’t even too sure she was interested in putting a stop to it.
But She did want to see them squirm and feel the ultimate embarrassment. After all, she was working three jobs keeping food on the table. They were contributing nothing and fooling around behind her back. She had to do something and make them feel some pain.
If doing things like this indicated someone who was not engaged in the normal duties and responsibilities of being a good parent, Donna didn’t care. She never pretended to be one.
Her plan was hatched.
Chapter 3--Dream On Dream On
With the day off already arranged, Donna was betting that Chris and Breat having sex was a pretty regular occurrence.
The funny thing is she wanted to ask how her blabbing co-worker how long the affair had been going on., but thought that it would make it look like she wasn’t properly outraged.
News getting around that she didn’t seem upset would just invite more gossip.
Donna was hurt, but there wasn’t any deep animosity. It bothered her mostly that these were two freeloaders being highly disrespectful to her and her hard work.
She worked really hard doing things she totally hated. People had better respect the time that went into that discomfort and the grit it took to not totally give up.
She spent the morning the day before piecing together the contingencies. She needed to guarantee that Chris the couch potato was gone for a significant amount of time during the morning. She was flying blind a little bit on where these trysts were taking place, but she assumed it was in Brea’s room because a woman could always tell if if there was funny business going on in her bedroom. She scrolled through her memory bank and nothing stood out. So it had to be Brea’s room.
She had a friend who worked in the city call and invite Chris to a mixer at ESPN Zone downtown near Staples Center where the Lakers play and dropped a couple big names who would also be attending. Chris, in his perpetual laziness, always thought there was huge value in being at places where other much more accomplished famous people were. Even though he was years removed from an NBA career, he was still hitting the parties and get-togethers and still reaping nothing from it.
Maybe it was the lack of action on the follow-up. When an opportunity presented itself but it seemed a little too much like work, he would just blow it off. Better to keeping smoking down, nailing one of his many willing women, and dreaming about hitting it big away from the game.
Donna’s friend agreed to set up Chris and get him downtown for the morning because she had been two-timed by him as well. Something she shared with Donna as she gleefully agreed to help out.
He returned home to Donna’s place (he hadn’t had his own apartment or house for two years) at about noon seething that he had been duped. He needed to chill and hopefully Brea would be coming in around two from school. He went out back on the patio, took a seat in a small wobbly unbalanced iron chair, and got high on some fresh stuff he’d picked up Northwest of USC in a little neighborhood he hung out in off the Santa Monica freeway.
He heard a bump from the direction of Brea’s room but was too tired out to get up and check.
He decided to have a sandwich and maybe a grab a nap before his little lover returned from school.
He often sat and contemplated the idea of getting caught by Donna. He felt like he could talk her into letting him stay no matter what. His level of respect for her and her authority was beyond low.
