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Sugar & Spice Anthology-

I will die if I stay here …

Shannon’s entire family sat at the dinner table enjoying a meal which took her three hours to prepare, while she mowed the jungle of their front yard, seething the entire time. She stopped to empty the bag, but froze when her mother-in-law’s voice carried from the open pantry window, “I had to fake a damn heart attack to make this stupid heifer get with the program.”
Faked a heart attack? Wait. What?
Monique Hallerin had faked that entire one-month ordeal so Shannan would take over the daunting task of shopping, preparing, cooking, then serving Sunday dinners for fifteen people every week, only to criticize nearly everything that Shannan did. Faked it so Shannan’s husband, Zach, would pick up the slack on her bills. All while her brothers-in-law and most of her children parked their lazy behinds at the dining room table every Sunday and didn’t lift a finger to help. Shannan was way past tired—exhausted was a better word.
“Guests don’t wash dishes,” her husband said when she mentioned they could pitch in with clean up. Well, to be honest, neither did he and he hadn’t been a guest since they’d said, “I do.”
What she should’ve said on the day they were married, fifteen years ago was, “I don’t,” then ran past his overbearing mother and four shiftless brothers then out the church doors to freedom.
“I had to fake a damn heart attack to make this stupid heifer get with the program.”
Shannan, who had seven children of her own, was now responsible for duties that her mother-in-law had done for most of her non-married life; catering to those grown ass men sitting at her dining room table at this very moment while Shannan was outside doing something she had first asked her husband, then one of them, to do.
Rage hit Shannan full force.
She staggered away from the mower, rushed into the house, ran up the stairs and snatched up her tote. She halted at the threshold of her bedroom for a moment, extracting the small shoebox in the back of the closet. A set of credit cards, passport, birth certificate, social security card, and all of the hidden cash found its way into the tote. She glanced at the summer wardrobe spilling over into Zach’s side and decided there wasn’t anything she wanted to take. She tipped down the rear stairway into the kitchen, snatched the keys from a hook near the door to put as much distance between herself and those people as possible.
Shannan only vaguely heard the youngest of her seven children call her name. Her heart constricted as she ignored them, tears blinding her as she slid behind the wheel of an SUV that was almost a second home. Basketball. Volleyball. Football. Gymnastics. PTA. Never any breaks between or any time for her to simply breathe.
I will die if I stay here.
Those seven words came to mind, summarizing her current status. Something that first hit her when she had the argument with Zach before his family arrived…
“My mother raised five boys on her own and never complained about having to manage a household,” he said, still keeping his focus on the circuitry in his hands.
“And she was on her own because she ran your father off,” she replied. “Let’s be real about that.”
Zachary’s face twisted into a mask of annoyance as he glared at her. “I can’t talk about this with you.”
“I’m done talking. I’m tired,” she snapped. “There’s going to come a time when I say to hell with it.”
Zach paused at the end of the wooden bench, scoffing as he asked, “And where are you going to go? Who’s going to be a father to seven children?”
“They have a father,” she said, and the sorrow of her reality was heavy indeed. “I need a husband.”
I will die if I stay here.
The moment Shannan hit the expressway, she wiped her tears with the back of a trembling hand. A startling thought hit her. She could not leave her baby girl in that house.