Something a little different, a homecoming with a twist. Enjoy!
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My Dad was always strict and was defiantly the head of the household. Don't get me wrong: Mom was no beat down mouse, afraid of her own shadow. Mom was a business woman who ran her own chain of office temps. It's just that once she entered the house it was always clear who was in charge, my Dad.
Yeah, I resented it as a kid. You don't get to run wild like your friends seemed to be able to. Homework and chores came before play time. Curfews, what clothes you were allowed to wear, what television programs you were allowed to watch, what music you were allowed to listen to, all were controlled by Dad.
Saying it this way makes it sound like he was some kind of Nazi or right wing fundamentalist preacher, nothing could be further from the truth. Politically Dad was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal with a libertarian bent. Religiously he was always looking for answers, but was unwilling to take anything on faith.
"Son," he would say. "If you can't pick it up in your hand, prove it mathematically, or recreate the event, it's not real, it's fiction."
Anyway it got me through high school with an A- average and into a pretty good college. Now I'm back home for the summer break, first time in three years and things have changed. Boy, have they changed.
Oh, a couple of things I should have mentioned, the first being my siblings. Two sisters, one older and one younger. When I left for college my older sister Catherine was already at some fancy girl's finishing school/college back east and my younger sister was in her second year of high school and constantly getting in trouble. The second thing is that I didn't tell the folks I was coming home for summer break.
I hadn't planned to come home but my summer internship fell through when the senior partner in the law firm caught the junior partner with his trophy wife in a very hot, hot tub.
So late on a Friday evening, I arrived home bag and baggage and let myself in. I dumped my bags in my old room and headed for the kitchen for a late night snack/dinner. Ok, I was starving. I had driven straight through on coffee and drive through crap and hadn't bothered to stop for dinner.
The house was so quiet, I figured everyone had gone to bed, so I was being extra quiet myself not wanting to wake the family. I eased open the kitchen door cause it used to have a tendency to squeak and got the shock of my life.
A woman stood with her back to me at the kitchen counter doing dishes. Ok that I could handle. The fact that from my vantage point she appeared to be nude from the waist down was a little disconcerting. The broad leather strap with D rings around her very thin waist was a little unusual as were the chains leading from the D rings to the leather cuffs on her wrists.