An Unpolished Jewel Is Just A Stone

Jewel Betancourt never wanted to be a mother.

If her husband Richard had only listened to her, they never would’ve been saddled with a child in the first place. Let alone such a willful, embarrassing daughter.

But Richard was always I need a son. I need a boy. Give me a son.

Seven years of that whiney nonsense before her birth control pill failed, magic sperm-killers she swallowed in secret, and for what? Her accidental baby popped out a gory eleven-pound daughter, leaving Richard equal parts devastated and determined to try again. Men will have their copies, their replicas, their legacies.

Jewel slides a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses up her straight nose and sighs. “Shows what men know,” she mutters and switches on her turn signal. Richard never suspected she asked the doctor to tie her tubes before he sewed her up.

She is proof of one thing: Women who don’t want to be mothers should not be forced.

Jewel steers in front of an oncoming truck. It passes her rear bumper by inches, giving her a rush of tingling nerves and indecent heat. She glances in the mirror and sees her daughter’s rattletrap Toyota sitting behind the white line, awaiting her next green light. Susan is such a mousy old pushover.

If she couldn’t recall every second of pregnant agony, she’d wonder whether Susan was her daughter.

Richard was never part of her plan, either. Jewel Albright had PLANS. ALL CAPS. And they did not include being a teenage bride, marrying some hick boy going no place.

Jewel bloomed from a round (read obese) girl of six to a slender vision by twenty. Creamy, firm skin. Silky light blonde curls framing her oval face. Her gray eyes were exquisite tractor beams. They mesmerized everyone they landed upon. She’d just been crowned Miss Longhorn Queen of Cinderella, Texas. Ironic, right? And she had her pick of any eligible man for more than a hundred miles.

And boy, did men line up to woo her.

Unlike her awkward seventeen-year-old daughter who couldn’t buy a boyfriend, Jewel juggled four oblivious suitors in tandem at Susan’s age. Quite a feat in a dusty, microscopic town where everyone knew everyone else’s business five nano-seconds after it happened. At twenty-three, she spent a whole week engaged to two men at the same time, but she broke it off with one after he gave her the pearl necklace she demanded for her birthday.

Jewel strung every man along, working as a file clerk for a drilling company and running to the post office for the letter that trumpeted, “You have officially been accepted to a Dallas secretary school!” She spent too many years crammed up America’s rear end. In her mind, she had too much potential.

Breaking men’s hearts was a way to pass time. Until she met Richard.

TO BE CONTINUED………….

This post is the beginning of a fiction series. Come back next Monday for another installment.

To see what else Andra has been writing in series fiction, visit The Aftermath of Death, She Was Venus in Fur, Grief Out of Balance, For the Love of a Gun, Death by Toilet, Biscuits, Gardenias and a Funeral and Everything Dies. She’s also on Medium with a new story HERE.