The forever wait

From when she was a small child bringing home report cards in which her teachers extolled her general excellence, Michael had been waiting for the day when Stephanie would go off to university and make him proud. He was so certain that his daughter was going to do well and so excited to see how well that after Stephanie told him that she was done with exams he started opening all of the mail that arrived at the house that was marked "Glendale University". His expectation was that when he opened the envelope that contained her semester results he was going to be blown away. And he was.

Course code

Subject

Ass Mrk %

Ex Mrk %

Yr Mrk %

ECS101

Economics 1

90

0 (A)

18

FAC101

Financial accounting 1

80

0 (A)

16

BMN101

Business Management 1

70

0 (A)

14

FNM101

Intro to Financial Maths 1

90

0 (A)

18

CML101

Commercial Law 1

90

0 (A)

18

The idea of his daughter failing had never entered Michael's mind. The sight of her results sent him into a depression the depth of which he hadn't experienced in years. He left the toast and coffee he'd made on the kitchen counter and went back to bed where he intended to remain until Stephanie returned home and they could get to the bottom of this.

Jo-Ann found Stephanie's results stuck to the refrigerator door when she returned home from work. They'd been put there by Eric, who had spent years warning his parents about his sister without them ever listening to him. Jo-Ann was disappointed by the results but not surprised by them. She had suspected from the beginning that Stephanie's only reason for studying accounting was so that she could continue taking advantage of her father. Stephanie had let them down before, but this time her screw up came with an enormous cost that Jo-Ann didn't want to begin to think about how she was going to pay. She made herself a cup of tea, sat down in the lounge and braced herself for an explosive evening. Michael emerged from his room while Jo-Ann was still drinking her tea. He made himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen and sat with Jo-Ann in silence in the living room, waiting for Stephanie.

“Hey mom, hey dad, sorry I’m late, we were doing some research at the library and lost track of time,” Stephanie said when she entered the house.

She walked into the living room, saw the murderous look on her father’s face and the fear on her mother’s and knew that there was trouble. She realized how much when she saw the sheet of paper with her results on the coffee table. It wasn't like Stephanie to allow herself to be cornered like this, but she had been so busy with the pregnancy that the issue of dealing with her exams had slipped her mind. Now, because of her sloppiness, she was walking into a major confrontation without any means of defending herself.

“Stephanie, sit down please,” Michael said coldly, using everything at his disposal to stop his control from slipping away from him.

Stephanie walked sheepishly to the seat opposite her father’s. She sat down and looked in his eyes and saw that there was nothing that she could do to elicit mercy from him.

“Tell me, what is this?” He asked, lifting up the report.

“It’s my report,” she said stupidly.

“Yes I know it’s your report, what I want to know is why it’s so bad. Tell me, how is it that you managed to fail everything?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Listen here Stephanie, don’t sit there and talk shit to me like that, okay; DON’T TALK TO ME LIKE I’M SOME SORT OF FUCKING IDIOT!!”

“Michael please,” Jo-Ann whimpered.

Michael, blinded and deafened by rage, continued.

“Tell me Stephanie, how did this happen? You were spending almost every night with your study group; you got As on all your assignments; if you understood the work so well you should have had no problem with the examinations, so why didn’t you take them?”

Stephanie kept her head to the ground and said nothing in response, chastising herself in her mind for having been so sloppy.

“ANSWER ME!!”

“Michael, shouting isn’t going to get us anywhere, just please calm down.”

“Jo-Ann, don’t tell me to calm down, okay, because maybe if you’d spent less time worrying about getting drunk and more time worrying about your daughter’s studies this wouldn’t have happened!”

Jo-Ann had expected that at some point Michael would find a way to blame this on her and had thought that she was prepared for it, but like always her husband's words cowed her into silence.

“Tell me Stephanie, have you been lying to us again like when you were sixteen and sneaking out to nightclubs?! Is that why you failed, because all those times you told us you were studying you were out gallivanting with Laurelle?!”

The more her father shouted at her, the closer Stephanie came to losing control. She’d resigned herself to not being able to extricate herself from this and was focusing all of her attention on making sure she didn't break down and say something she’d regret.

“Still don’t want to talk huh? Okay then, why don’t you tell us how you managed to get such good marks on your assignments. You obviously haven’t been studying, so where did those marks come from? Were you cheating, getting somebody else to do them for you?”

Her father pushing her for answers about her assignments flooded Stephanie’s mind with the memory of taking Brian Wesley’s dick in her mouth. She couldn’t believe what a fool she’d been to have allowed herself to be subjected to this, to have thought her parents would rejoice at the news of her pregnancy, to have thought Angel wanted to raise a family with her, to have ended her friendship with Laurelle, the only person who had always been there for her. Recollecting all these huge mistakes she’d made while being relentlessly berated by her father was all too much for her to take. She lost control of her mind for just a fraction of a second but it was enough; she’d lost her composure and there was no getting it back.

“What are you crying about, huh? Just what the fuck are you crying about?! You’ve abused our trust, you’ve humiliated us by failing so miserably, you’ve stuck us with the responsibility of repaying KPMG, so tell me, JUST WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU CRYING ABOUT?!!”

Ordinarily the sight of his daughter being reduced to tears would have been enough to get Michael to pull back, but with his daughter having committed a failure of this magnitude nothing was going to get him to ease off until he’d extracted an explanation from of her.

“Are you really just going to sit there and say nothing? Are you really not going to make any effort whatsoever to provide us with an explanation for why you’ve put us into such trouble? Are you that fucking irresponsible?!”

With each word of condemnation from her father Stephanie cracked up further. The problems in her life that she herself had created swirled around faster and faster in her head and the chaos became unbearable. She had to get rid of some of it to stop her mind from exploding and opened her mouth without thinking.

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re what?” Michael asked incredulously, his daughter’s confession taking him completely by surprise.

“I’M PREGNANT!” Stephanie wailed, unable to contain the pressure her father had been piling on her since the beginning of this discussion.

The room was enveloped by silence, the only sound to be heard was that of Stephanie crying.

Michael couldn’t come to grips with what he was living through. How was it possible that his daughter had been perpetrating this deception this whole time?

Jo-Ann, sitting quietly on the periphery, was equally disoriented by her daughter’s confession. She couldn’t believe that this was the end product of the control that Michael had been exerting over their daughter her whole life. She was furious with herself for having been so submissive all these years and with her husband for being such a blind idiot. More than anything else, though, she was concerned about what lay in store for her daughter in the near future. Unlike her husband who could only think about how much it hurt to be betrayed by the daughter he’d always thought of as being perfect, Jo-Ann understood that there were now much bigger issues that needed to be discussed here, issues that she couldn’t bring up because with Michael having found out that his daughter was pregnant he had more questions that he wanted answers to.

“You’re pregnant, okay, so how about you tell us how that happened?” He asked sardonically.

“Michael, don’t you think we should…”

“Jo-Ann, SHUT UP!”

And she did.

“Let’s have it Stephanie, how did this happen? You know what never mind that, there’s something else I want to know first: who’s the father?” He asked, lurching close to and staring a hole through Stephanie.

“His name’s Angel,” Stephanie answered. She’d given up trying to protect herself from her father’s onslaught; she was depleted and decided to just tell him the truth about whatever he asked her.

“Angel, okay, where is this Angel from?”

“He’s from Marianridge,” Stephanie answered, looking lifeless except for the tears running down her cheeks.

“Of course he is, I should have known you were still in contact with those people; so that’s what’s been going on this whole time, you and Laurelle have been getting up to your old tricks again, using the car we bought for you to pick up boys and fuck them!”

“Yes.”

“Yes? That’s what you have to say? Yes?...YES!!!”

“Michael please, this isn’t helping,” Jo-Ann interjected, afraid that her husband was on the brink of doing serious physical harm to their daughter.

“Okay then, let’s ask some questions that would be helpful, like how old is this Angel?” Michael asked.

“He’s twenty eight.”

“He’s twenty eight and you’re eighteen, okay. Does he have a job?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t have a job, okay. Where does he live?”

“He lives with his mother.”

“So the boy who you’ve been seeing behind our backs, who’s gotten you pregnant is ten years older than you, unemployed, and still lives with his mother. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

At this point Michael stopped his inquisition. He got up from his seat, took a few steps, put his hands on his head and took some deep breaths. He realized there was no point in being so angry; these weren’t simply mistakes that his daughter had made. All of this irresponsibility and lying and sex was who his daughter really was. She wasn’t the only one who’d been deceiving him, all these years he’d been deluding himself.

“Stephanie, what are you going to do about this baby?” Jo-Ann asked, taking advantage of the silence that had prevailed in the room to ask the question that most needed asking.

“She’s going to get rid of it; if she keeps it then her whole life is going to be ruined.”

Michael’s words sent a cold shudder through Stephanie’s body that she suppressed. She knew that if she gave the slightest indication to her father of her desire to keep her baby then they were both doomed.

“Michael, don’t you think we should take some time to think about this first?” Jo-Ann asked, discomforted by the conflict between the sensible solution of an abortion and her Christian faith.

“Jo-Ann, what is there to think about? If she has this child then she’s going to be stuck with this Angel character in her life and she won’t be able to finish her studies, which you are going to do by the way,” he said, turning his attention back to his daughter, “you’re going to retake all those modules and this time I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

None of the words of Michael’s plan for saving Stephanie’s future from her poor decisions got through to her, she was too busy focusing on how she was going to save her baby from him.

“Jo-Ann, do you agree with me?”

“Yes, unfortunately I do, Stephanie is just not ready to have a child,” Jo-Ann responded, with little conviction.

“Right, so, here’s what’s going to happen: tomorrow your mother is going to take your car to work and that’s where it’s going to stay until we’ve sold it. That’s only fair, given that all you’ve been doing is abusing it, then you and I are going to go to an abortion clinic and find out what the procedure is, okay?”

Immersed in her thoughts about how to escape from this man Stephanie failed to notice that he’d asked her a question.

“Stephanie, I said is that okay?”

This time his question did register with her and she nodded her head in acquiescence, thinking that if she did she’d be allowed to leave.

“Okay then.”

Satisfied that everything had been resolved and that by this time tomorrow all of his daughter’s problems would have been gotten rid of, Michael left the lounge and went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee to drink while he sat outside and cooled off. Jo-Ann wasn’t far behind him; the tea she’d made when she arrived home had gotten cold and she went into the kitchen to make herself a second cup, affording Stephanie the opportunity to slip away quietly to her room.

She went into her room, closed the door, put the light off, and lay on her bed in silence hoping that if anybody came in to check on her they’d think she was sleeping having worn herself out with all of her crying and leave her alone. She did this for five hours until midnight, when she decided it was now safe for her to start putting her hastily prepared plan into motion. Acting as quickly as the need to be quiet would allow she retrieved a bag from her wardrobe and started packing clothes. She still had the car keys with her and when her bags were packed she snuck out of the house and left in her car with no plans to ever return.