Nery Legacy (3): Troubles at Home*

    For a week, Charlie had been lying low. She tried to avoid her mother every chance that she got. Her father had relented and finally put his foot down with Mama, telling her that Charlie could work the homestead with him and do her lessons on the go. Though she didn’t particularly like the brutal hard work of the homestead, Charlie was grateful to the point of crying real tears when Daddy had told her that he would allow her to come with him instead of dealing with her mother all day, every day. She was still a little bit sore from the strapping that she’d gotten on the night that she’d broken her grounding, and she didn’t want to risk rubbing her mother the wrong way.

    It had mostly been a quiet seven days. She and Daddy didn’t talk all that much when they were doing their chores, and she found that if she didn’t bring it up, he mostly let her go without doing the lessons at all. It wasn’t that Charlie minded school; what she minded was the way that her mother was constantly on her case and always seemingly looking for reasons to be angry with her. The truth was that she was feeling pretty intimidated, especially after she’d snuck out of the house on Saturday.

    The nightmare that night had been terrible. It was rare that she woke up screaming in fear from a dream. In fact, Charlie thought the last time it had happened was when she was twelve years old. This time, a combination of the alcohol and the punishment had left her weakened, and she’d awakened feeling as though somebody was standing on her chest and strangling her. Daddy had stayed with her all night, rocking her until she fell back to sleep, comforting her and reassuring her that in spite of what she’d done, she was still loved. She’d needed it, and it still hurt her to think that her mother hadn’t been there when she’d needed her.

    Mama had always scared Charlie a little bit. Even when she was little, she’d felt very much as though her mother didn’t particularly like her, and more than that, she was sure that her mother didn’t love her. It had hurt then, but after last Saturday’s punishment, it was really sinking in for Charlie that her mother’s feelings for her weren’t ideal. She’d overheard fights between her parents that left her feeling vulnerable, confused, guilty and ashamed. She’d asked for some things that she’d wanted, and to hear her parents discuss how they couldn’t afford it, and her mother saying that she felt like Charlie was selfish and a brat... Well, those things had broken her heart, and she’d promised herself that she would ask for nothing else.

Nery Legacy (2): Playing Favorites

    The day had been pleasant. The weather was growing warmer, and Ruby enjoyed working outside. The garden was her baby, and it saddened her that her husband, Ben, wound up doing most of the work that she wasn’t able to do because she was inside home schooling their daughters. He’d talked to her about him taking over their older daughter’s education, but she’d asked him to give her one more chance. She had no idea how Charlotte felt about them being indoors together all the time, but if she had, she would have put it out of her mind, anyway. Ben was right; they had to act more like a mother and daughter than like sisters who were constantly sniping at one another. Separating themselves from one another wasn’t going to resolve their differences. This was something that they were going to have to work through, and Ruby wasn’t going to learn patience if she didn’t practice it.

    Because today was Saturday, however, Charlie was out with her father doing the chores that she had been assigned as punishment after the last big fight on Thursday. It was also a way, she hoped, to stop Charlie from continually asking about why she couldn’t see her boyfriend, Greg. The punishment, therefore, served a double-purpose of reminding Charlie to watch her language and the way that she spoke to her parents while also separating her, however temporarily, from a boy that both parents felt was bad for her. Besides, Ruby was pretty sure that Charlie would be exhausted by the time that she was done making up for the chores that she hadn’t done during the week. She’d found three more assigned duties that hadn’t been done, but this time hadn’t passed the information on to Ben, since it was apparent that they’d been left before Charlie had been punished for not putting the horses away on the night of the last big storm.

    Supper had been cleared away, and Rissa was in the living room, curled up on the couch with one of the Harry Potter books. Ruby wasn’t sure about Charlie, who seemed to have gone upstairs to shower and then retreated to her own room. Ruby stood in the kitchen, finishing off the dishes, when her husband came in through the back door. She went to the laundry room door and watched as he pulled his boots off. “I’m thinkin’ about orderin’ some more chicks,” Ben said. “Maybe get us some roosters. Work on sellin’ more of them. Or the eggs. Get a better production goin’ so that we can make more money.” There was a brief hesitation, and then he said, “I heard from Raph this afternoon.”

Nery Legacy (1): Rights and Responsibilities

    

   It seemed like the days were getting longer, though perhaps that was because spring was creeping into summer, and that was the way that things went that time of year. The days had been getting longer and longer since December, but that wasn’t what was really getting Ben down. He was finding, as time went on, that there was more to do than he could handle, and worse than that was the fact that the money just wasn’t coming in the way that it used to. The family was mostly self-sufficient, but they still relied on the sale of small livestock and their produce stand to make it through some of the more difficult months, especially when winter rolled around and they were surviving off the canned food that Ruby put together and shelved in the cellar for the rougher months.

    Ben was just thinking that maybe it was time to go big. Rabbits and chicks weren’t going to support his family, even if the chickens and the rabbits did produce both meat and manure that could be used to keep their gardens going. The family owned dairy goats and a single cow, of course, along with their three horses, which they kept for both work and pleasure, but that wasn’t going to do what he needed. They had the acreage from when his grandfather had been alive and left the property to him, but they didn’t have the livestock to breed and then to sell for meat or for dairy. He’d have to do the research to decide where they were going to go from here. He had a family to support, and Charlie was getting expensive.

    There was a lot on his mind as Ben walked through the back door of the house and shuffled off his boots. It took him several moments to catch the raised voices, and he frowned, then sighed and shook his head. One, of course, belonged to his oldest, and the other was his wife, Ruby. He ran a hand back through his black hair and ruffled it, then rubbed at his temples before stepping through the back mudroom into the kitchen in his stockinged feet.

    The kitchen was a war zone. Ruby stood on one side of the table and Charlie on the other. Charlie’s hands were clenched into tight fists, and her face was red with anger, tears streaking her cheeks. Ruby’s blue eyes were bright with her own fury, and her red hair looked unkempt. He’d begun to think of it as her “crazy look” that she got when things really deteriorated at home, especially during a schooling session.

    “Charlotte Nicole, go to your room,” Ben said to his daughter, keeping his eyes on his wife with a warning look. “I’ll straighten this out.”