------ Part Three - History ------
Over the next two months, I made morning coffee visits two and mostly three times a week, and we met for lunch more than a few times. I found myself padding all of my purchases, giving my wife inflated numbers each time I'd put gas in my truck or make a purchase at the hardware store. It wasn't a significant amount of money, but my intent was to stay under the radar, and for the most part, things were seamless. There was one slip up when my wife logged into the checking account online and noticed that I had given her an amount of $85 for gas but the actual amount was $78. I just looked at her and said, Oh, I thought it was $85 and that was the end of it.
During our morning visits, there was no particular pattern to how I would find Veronica dressed. Usually, it was the same panties and t-shirt thing, but other times, she had on shorts or yoga pants - thank God for yoga pants - and even other times she was fully dressed in jeans and tennis shoes. I preferred the panties look, but who wouldn't?
Our conversations seemed to become these intense, twenty to thirty minute therapy sessions, one day me revealing my deepest, most intimate secrets, the next time, her confessing the sins she had committed in her youth. There is an intensity to sharing so honestly with someone, opening up and being willing to accept that they might look at you oddly when you admit to something. There was a lot of talk about sex, but it wasn't with the intention of moving things to the bedroom. It could be sex related one visit and the very next visit I was learning about Veronica's childhood, living in a house her grandfather owned on the West side, because her mother was never consistent enough with rent to live anywhere else. These conversations often included tears, and at least once, I felt compelled to hold her and let her get it all out.
I learned that the mother and father were fairly immature, incredibly irresponsible assholes, as can be the case when people put their party before their kids. Veronica's father was a white guy, had never really worked in a steady job situation but rather went where the wind blew him. He had done construction, worked on an oil platform for a while, driven a truck and as far as she knew, he was now working in the rich Eagle-Ford Shale in south Texas, making good money and occasionally sending a nice check to the grandparents so the mother wouldn't spend it all.
Veronica showed me a small photo album with pictures that ranged from her childhood to fairly recent. The mother was stunningly beautiful, Hispanic, tall and lean, with the same beautiful hair as Veronica. She referred to her as her mother, but called her by her name, Kathy. In truth, they had grown up almost as siblings, given the constant need for intervention by the grandparents who lived just up the street. The grandfather had purchased several houses in their neighborhood over the years, turning them into rental properties and used them as retirement income. The father, Ken, transferred to Kennedy High School from out of state, immediately fell in love with Kathy, and before they were both sixteen, they were parents. Even though Ken continued to live with his parents until he graduated high school, there was another baby girl resulting in an insistence by Veronica's grandmother that the marriage be made official.
Her and her sister were mostly raised by the grandparents, but by the time she was about four, Ken, Kathy and the two girls had moved into the small house up the street, an effort by the grandfather to force some responsibility on his hard partying daughter and son-in-law. It wasn't much later that Ken began taking this odyssey of jobs requiring him to be away from home more often than not. And it wasn't long after that Kathy began using what the good lord gave her to earn money. "My mom danced for a really long time, but she also did house cleaning and other personal services. While we were still little, she would have us stay with the grandparents, but eventually, I'd say when my sister turned six or seven, she would give us dinner, sit us in front of the TV and she'd go to work."
"So, what do you mean by personal services?" I asked. "Is that like picking up people's laundry, walking the dog or taking dictation?"
"Yea, I think taking dictation pretty much covers it." She laughed in a sad sort of way.
"It was kind of funny. My mom would always introduce us to Uncle this guy or Uncle that guy. I would say shit like, well, if this is our uncle, why doesn't grandpa know him?" She said by the time she was in the 7th or 8th grade, she was really running the household, writing checks and sending the electric bill, making dinners and helping her sister with homework. When the father would show up for a week at a time, there would be lots of action going on in the room but equally lots of fighting about finances, or some other guy's underwear being found in a drawer. She loved her dad when he was around, but it just wasn't that often.
"I'm curious. In that environment, how did you pull off high school and college?" I asked.
"Oh, that was all my grandparents. My grandfather knew where this was all headed by the time my mom was slutting around in high school. Ken may be the one who got her pregnant, but apparently, and my mom has even told me this, there were quite a few guys before him. She was an early starter." "Who has these conversations with their kids?" I asked incredulously.
"Oh c'mon, you have to understand that by the time I left the house, I was more of an adult than my mom was. She would come home all drunk and cry about some guy treating her badly. She pointed out a guy in a store once who she said had the biggest cock in San Antonio and then she held her hands out like this (showing me about a foot worth of space between her hands). My mom started teaching me her dance moves when I showed interest in being a cheerleader in high school. Yea, how many fifteen year-olds do you know who can give a proper lap dance?"
"Well, I can honestly say that I have not met such a 15 year-old, but I'll keep my eye out." We both laughed.
"Do you know that one night, my mom told me and Mari how much she loved tossed salad."
I snorted coffee through my nose. "She what?"
"Yea. We had no idea what she was talking about - thinking she was hungry or something. Then she just flat out told us that was when you licked a man's asshole. We were all screaming eeew and gross, but Kathy just said, don't knock it until you try it."
"That's child abuse!" I exclaimed.
"No, child abuse would have been if she showed us what she was talking about. Information is information. There is nothing inherently abusive about learning about sex. The information is not bad. Granted, I think I could have waited to see that one on the Internet rather than have my mom describe it." Veronica laughed.
I just shook my head and smiled. "So anyway, the grandfather and the college?"
Veronica picked up before we took the trip down memory lane and the dancing mother. "Yea, so basically, when I was in high school, grandpa told me that if I stayed in school and worked on getting any sort of scholarships or grants, he would do his part to help me get through college. And he did the same for Mari. In fact, Mari got so much in scholarship money that Grandpa is helping to pay her living expenses in Austin."
"I got the usual grants, I spent an entire year writing essays and applying for every $50 and $100 grant I could find and sure enough, when I graduated, I was headed for UT. Then I kinda screwed up a bit. I had this idea that instead I would go in the military. I didn't start school the first semester and I actually lost quite a bit of money from that mistake. But, grandpa kicked my ass and I dropped the military thing and started at St Mary's with this idea that maybe I could be a lawyer or some sort of engineer. I just knew that I wanted to be something."
