A Wine Stained Sugar Bowl

This post is the continuation of a fiction series. Andra is reworking a discarded chapter from her existing WIP manuscript and sharing it in pieces here. If you missed the first three installments, read 3 Posts in 1 Before the Storm before reading this post. Come back next Monday for another installment.

Richard’s fingernails brushed the stained wood. “Okay. Your sister’s opening a bottle of wine before we head out to the Super Dome for the Sugar Bowl. Don’t suppose you want a glass?”

Jewel’s frame grew a couple of inches in the bathroom mirror. When she flung open the door, her face was a twisted mask of fury and pique. Ignoring his clueless-man-gape and his big outstretched hands – she used to love his hands, touching her, teasing her, groping her everywhere – she pushed past him. Through the living room. Into the microscopic kitchen at the back of the New Orleans house.

Her older sister Irene was a foot shorter than Jewel, a schoolteacher spreading into early middle age. Jewel used to be proud of her sister for avoiding marriage, devoting herself to her classroom. But she grew to resent Irene’s singular focus on her career. It didn’t matter that nobody’d marry Irene because she was honest about the fact that she couldn’t have children. Her insides weren’t plumbed right, leaving a fertilized egg no place to land. Jewel craved that gift, and she hurled her ire at Irene every chance she got. Without a hint of struggle, she grabbed the open wine bottle from Irene’s hand and marched past her frozen husband to the bathroom.

Catching his eye, she held the bottle over the toilet and started pouring. “Our mother was a drunk, Richard.”

He leaned against the door frame, his Hollywood face a question mark. “You never told me that.”

“Doesn’t matter. I won’t have my baby’s father wind up a drunk, too.” She tossed back her head and yelled, “Like my dear sister, who’s well on her way.”

The last drops of red wine stained the toilet. Jewel plopped the empty bottle in the trash and brushed her hands together to signal the finality of no more booze. To further drive her point home, she put her hands on her hips and announced, “From now on, Richard, I expect you to give up alcohol.”

Jewel bites her lip and speeds through a green light without a care for whether her daughter Susan is behind her. The stupid child knows her way home. She can’t avoid her reckoning forever, much like Richard never side-stepped his. Oh, he’s lived with the consequences of her fury every second since that New Years Eve.

Jewel still feels the power of controlling another person’s life. She sharpened her teeth that night on her husband, and she sinks them into weakness whenever she can. 

Richard left Jewel that night. He and Irene went to that old ball game. They abandoned her, standing triumphant beside the commode, its bowl stained as wine-dark as the brewing storm of her temper.

How dare they prance off to do God-only-knows-what and leave her alone?

Yes, she told them she didn’t want to go to a stupid football game, but they were supposed to succumb to the unspoken wishes of the too-many-months-pregnant woman and stay home. Couldn’t they read her mind from the constant hints she trotted out since she and Richard arrived? How she asked Richard to rub her swollen feet? Massage her aching back? And bring her a cold glasses of water while she lay down for a rest? And hold her after she threw up for the umpteenth time that day? They were supposed to be too busy babying Jewel to go anywhere, because if life wasn’t fun for her, it wasn’t fun for anybody.

Jewel still tingles with the memory of what she did. She showed them, is still showing them the layers of her power, broken open and peeled away like a Russian doll. Susan never had a chance. Jewel made sure of it from the beginning.

TO BE CONTINUED……..

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 discussing Jenny O’Dell’s book How to Do Nothing HERE.