Love's Prison

My mother returned home one week after my father’s fatal accident.

She wore a dress of shockingly bright colors, her meticulously applied makeup a stark, glaring contrast to the black-and-white portrait of my father that watched from the living room wall. Behind her stood a man with slicked-back hair, all polish and no substance—her new lover, Raymond. They had come for the money. The three hundred thousand in compensation my father had bought with his life.

…

My father Henry’s funeral was a simple affair. He had fallen from a construction crane on-site and was gone instantly. The foreman paid three hundred thousand, a private settlement was signed, and that was that. For the foreman, a human life was worth three hundred thousand. For my mother Lisa, that money was her ticket to a new life. For me, it was my only hope—the hope my father had left for me to go to college.

After the last group of relatives had left, my aunt Lauren pulled me aside. The cloying smell of cheap funeral flowers still hung in the air, but her words cut like a knife.

“Brooklyn, look… your father’s gone now, and with the family situation being what it is… maybe you shouldn’t go to college? What’s the use of a girl getting all that education anyway? I could get you a job at the diner—steady work, meals included. You could clear three, four hundred a week easy.”

I stared at her face, at that plastered, hypocritical smile, and felt nothing but nausea. My father was barely in the ground, and already she was scheming to sell me off to some factory so she and my mother could split his money.

“Auntie,” I said, my voice hoarse but firm, “my father’s greatest wish was for me to go to college.”

Lauren’s face fell immediately. “Why are you being so unreasonable? Do you know how hard it’s been for your mother, raising you alone? And you still want to spend that money on school? That’s your father’s life compensation! It’s for your mother’s retirement!”

I snorted—a dry, humorless sound. Retirement? Lisa was only forty-two, in perfect health. While my father broke his back on the construction site, she was in the city, spending his hard-earned cash on romantic escapades. She hadn’t set foot in the dank basement flat we rented in the run-down part of town for over a year. If my father hadn’t died, she probably never would have come back to that dark, damp place again.

Just then, the click of high heels sounded at the door. Lisa was back. And the man behind her—I recognized him. Raymond. A small-time contractor who ran his own little outfit. She’d been involved with him even while my father was alive.

“Mom,” I stood up, my voice brittle.

Lisa glanced at me. Her eyes held no warmth, no relief at a long-awaited reunion—only impatience. She walked straight to my father’s portrait, offered a perfunctory bow, then turned and got straight