A positive pregnancy test shaking in her hands, Lacy Grubbs showed her Mom the irrefutable proof of her own carelessness and stupidity.
For the first time since the family's ideal life started to swirl around the bowl a couple of years earlier, Nancy sat and watched her Daughter breakdown. The disintegration of her parent's marriage never elicited a single tear, nor had the upheaval of moving halfway across the country. Lacy had never once showed any interest or concern in the day in, day out struggle her Mom faced to keep food in the house and the lights turned on.
Now the 18-year-old girl sat there in the chair across from Nancy, bawling her eyes out because she was suddenly with child.
"It's just pure vanity and selfishness," Nancy mumbled under her breath as she assessed the withering pool of tear soaked flesh her Daughter had been reduced to.
"It's just hitting her that she might have had her last good night's sleep for the next 20 years..its hitting her that she wont be the sole focus of her existence anymore..it's hitting her that she's gonna get fat," Nancy thought to herself, leaning back on the sofa and folding her arms as Lacy snorted and sniffled three feet in front of her.
"You do know who the Father is, I assume?" Mom asked dryly.
The silence of Lacy's initial response caused Nancy to ruefully shake her head. Before she could prick another verbal needle into her already debilitated Daughter, Lacy finally stifled her sobs long enough to say she thought she did, but she wasn't 100% sure.
The baby was most likely her boyfriend Shawn's, but given his penchant for sharing Lacy with a handful of his friends, only a paternity test would be able to tell for sure. Thankfully for both their sakes, Lacy didn't divulge that tidbit of information to her Mother.
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As the rest of the evening wore on, Nancy's anger and frustration with her Daughter gradually gave way to sympathy, and a willingness to help her. Lacy was her only child after all, and considering the nuclear wasteland the rest of her life had become, Nancy found herself strangely motivated by the thought of becoming a Grandma.
It wasn't like she was going back to church anytime soon. Having already been heartbroken over her secret discovery of Pastor Grady's moral indiscretions, not to mention her own sins of the flesh with the very woman he was having the affair with, there was no way Nancy could fathom setting foot back there. Even if Calvin was none the wiser, Nancy knew she'd combust in an instant if Simone ever laid eyes back on her.
While she knew plenty of obstacles would present themselves, Nancy prided herself on being a survivor. Little did she know how quickly those obstacles would arise, and what roads they would take her down.
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Within a week of finding out her Daughter was pregnant, Nancy was just getting home one evening from work when she saw Lacy's boyfriend's car parked in the driveway.
"What to do..what to do?" she pondered, her stomach rolling as she contemplated her options.
"This is your home," Nancy defiantly told herself. "Just march in there and if anything happens.....just deal with it."
Nancy's newfound courage remained strong as she switched off the ignition and stepped out the car. It continued to shine as she made her way up the walk, but the fizz of confidence quickly flattened when she heard the pair of arguing voices echoing through walls. Actually, it was more like the muffled sobs of her Daughter and the clearly agitated voice of her boyfriend, Shawn.
"Bet she just broke the news about the baby," Nancy correctly surmised as dusk gave way to darkness around her.
Tightening the strap of her purse around her shoulder, Nancy vacillated for several seconds, unable to quite extend her right hand towards the front door.
"Here you go again eavesdropping and being a voyeur," a voice chided inside her head. "You remember what happened the last few times you tried that?"
Stealing a few glances to her left and right to make sure no one was witnessing her display of indecisiveness, Nancy stood there a little longer trying to make some sense of the commotion inside. Naturally, Shawn's voice was much deeper and seemed to resonate.
"How do you know I'm the Father..the way you've been opening your legs to every guy you come across..and you're gonna pin this on me?" Nancy heard Shawn clearly demand through the wall.
If she could have heard her Daughter's sobbing response, Nancy would have known a lot of those guys Shawn was speaking of were friends of his he'd brought into their relationship just to satisfy his, and to some extent Lacy's, increasingly deviant urges. Standing on the other side of the door however, the only audible input Nancy was able to garner painted her Daughter in a very negative light. If she were to have walked into the house at that moment, Nancy might have been torn as to which side to take.
Instead, she remained on the front step, frozen in place as the tension rose inside. Needless to say, Nancy was lost in a dumbstruck haze a minute or so later when the front door suddenly swung open and Shawn rushed like a bull from the house. Obviously not seeing the motionless woman standing on the stoop through the blood flaring in his eyes, Shawn literally steamrolled through Nancy as he bolted through the door, desperate not to do anything he'd later regret to his impregnated girlfriend inside.
The adrenaline of the moment had shielded Nancy from any immediate pain after her collision with Shawn. Easily a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the petite older woman, the fact that Shawn had lunged from the door with a full head of steam could have been much worse for Nancy. Luckily, she'd escaped with nothing more than a loss of breath and a minor scrap on her right elbow from the fall. Another two inches further back and her head may have struck the edge of the concrete walkway.
For his part, Shawn did reach down to help the fallen woman up, even brushing a few specks of dirt from her clothes before continuing on with his blind rush to the car.
By the time she'd gathered herself and headed inside, Nancy could hear the music blaring upstairs in Lacy's room, a sure sign her Daughter really didn't want to be bothered for awhile. Within an hour or so, Nancy also found herself in bed, the covers pulled tight to her chest as she contemplated the further commotion of her life.
Other than her elbow which was throbbing a little, and the center of her forehead that caught a good bit of the brunt of Shawn's chest when he'd barreled from the house, Nancy felt like she was OK on the outside at least. The longer she laid there however, re-living that moment of impact over and over, the more the insides of her thighs began to twitch. As she'd done so many nights in the past, those hands that were bunched on top of the covers found their way beneath it after she'd switched off the light beside the bed.
Just as she always did when the burn became too much and privacy provided the opportunity, Nancy sunk both her hands deep into the musky warmth between her legs. Often times imaging the seemingly unattainable prize of Pastor Grady in her mind, or the real life interlude she had with Simone to help alleviate the nagging pressure, occasionally other things would randomly pop into Nancy's mind, things that didn't really need to be spoken of in the light of day.
Eventually, orgasm would come (if she was lucky more than one) then Nancy would be able to clear her sweaty conscience for the time being and drift off to sleep. Where she would find herself the following day however would serve as the first domino in making many of those unspeakable visions become all too real.
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Riding around some of the not so friendly streets of inner city Canton in her broken down Mom-mobile wasn't how Nancy pictured her ideal afternoon off. Even though it was clearly her hands on the wheel, something deep and conniving inside her soul seemed to be steering it.
The "Church-Going Nancy" could have certainly used the excuse that she was down there scouting for a few ideas where the congregation could possibly make a difference in the lives of the town's poor. Even the "Socially Conscious and Curious Nancy" could say she was down there on that sunny, early Spring afternoon getting an idea of the lay of the land since she hadn't seen all Canton had to offer since moving there the previous Fall. The "Nancy" that was currently at the wheel was down there on a much more base and personal mission however, to find Lacy's boyfriend, Shawn.
Just from word of mouth, Nancy heard he liked to play basketball at some of the parks lining that side of town when the weather was nice. Turning up one street and down the next, inevitably a fist a dread began to tighten in her belly as she negotiated the narrow roads, diverting her eyes every so often from the clearly curious looks of many of the locals she passed.
"God..please don't let me break down out here," Nancy's inner fear babbled every so often, even though she was pretty sure nothing horrible would happen to her in broad daylight.
"This isn't Watts in the 60's," she reminded herself, but an unsettling sense of trepidation continued to linger.
In a strange way, that intangible fear of the unknown added to the angst riddled excitement coursing through her loins each time she turned down a new street, or made fleeting eye contact with a stranger. Much like the proverbial mutt chasing after a speeding fire engine, Nancy had no clue what she was going to do if she actually stumbled upon Shawn.
"Hell Nancy..most of the boys down here would serve his purpose," a sly and slippery voice whispered like the forked tongue of a snake into her ear.