Chapter Five
Sometimes when sleep won’t come and living becomes torturous, remembrance is all that remains. Once, Robin wanted to marry her father. Perhaps she still did. Wally Anderson owned the liquor store started by his gangster grandfather and brought her candies each day from work. He doted on her. “His baby,” he called her. He didn’t bring her sister, Kathryn, any candy.
Wally was a life of the party man; played poker with the guys on Friday nights and danced with their wives at VFW parties on Saturdays. He drank to excess and fell dead from a slippery apartment window early on a Sunday morning. The gossips riddled the neighborhood with scandalous accusations of his death and connected him with skanky women and shady financial deals for years afterwards.
Robin was never a confident child, believed she was plain, wanted to take part but sat on the sidelines, got A’s in school, but feared life, hated her mother, Deloris, and got into trouble at each opportunity. Why not get into trouble? After her father died, her mother married Eugene, her father’s brother before summer turned to fall, and had his baby a few months later.
“Boys don’t care what a girl looks like if she f***s,” she had overheard Betsy Hildebrandt brag one cloudy day. It was common knowledge among the boys that Betsy f****d. She was a hog-headed girl with a big butt.
Before her nineteenth birthday, Robin lost her virginity to a twenty-three-year-old College Junior. Tom was meek, was shy, not good looking and made up for these deficiencies with laughter and s****l suggestions. These had snared Robin. Having s*x with the same man intrigued her and soon became addictive, so much so she kept notes about it. Each time they did something new or tried something different, she wrote about it in her diary, and when Tom didn’t give her an orgasm, she found relief with her fingers.
During her junior year at University, while Tom was drinking with the seniors, she was giving head to the football coach in the back seat of his Land Rover. “You’re a better cocksucker than any girl I’ve ever known, Miss. Anderson,” he told her, “much better than my cold-hearted wife.” Robin recalled the sublime happiness she experienced at the compliment and afterward spread her joy too many men in an assortment of clandestine relationships and one-night stands throughout the rest of her college experience.
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Robin Anderson married Franklin Miranda on a whim, eloped the day after graduation. Why would she not? Her mother hated him. He enjoyed having his c**k sucked, and she enjoyed sucking it. He had finished law school the year before, had passed the bar exam, was a perfect fit for the family business, in which she, her mother, and her two sisters shared ownership. Seven months later Jason was born. With her son leaving for college soon, she wondered if she had ever loved Frank. He didn’t care for her very much.
Frank stopped snoring and Robin stopped remembering. Quietly, she tossed under the bedcovers, her anger lasting less than the night. She turned, cracked an eye at the unfairness of her life, glanced at the sideboard clock, climbed from bed, gathered her clothes, and headed to the bathroom. It was four in the morning, her body still rebelled against wakefulness, and the dawn would be late today.
Robin showered, painted her face, wrapped herself in white lace, and added a burgundy blouse. She slipped on fashionable brown heels, a beige sheath skirt, and nude tone nylons. She penned a going to work note, snatched her laptop, grabbed the SUV keys on the way to the garage, and headed for Starbucks. A dark roast coffee was just the thing to pick her up after a humiliating two hours of on-line m**********n for Thick Rod’s friends. Already she missed the power he held over her.
She plopped down at a dark wood table, fired up the laptop, sucked hot black brew through a straw, and connected to WIFI. Online submission should be safe and entertaining, not cruel. Code deigned, read the drop-down.