The Vacation Story Continues, Pt. 2
Some Shitty Vacation is a fictional story about a vacationing hitman from the narcotics underworld who found himself being drawn back into the very situation he was trying to escape in the first place. His escape plan was for both the short as well as the long term. He had planned on using this short-term trip to Montreal, to further research his long-term get-out plan. but…
“What’s to become of us now, of our entire life? Where did we go wrong?” Mrs. Turner lamented. While rubbing her palms together on her lap and looking astray. She wasn’t looking at her husband on this day, the questions too, were rhetorical. She, of all people, knew the deal; Leo (Daddy Turner) had done all that he could. He was a good father to his son. To all his children as a matter of fact, and barring none. She wasn’t sure of herself, wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
They, (both of them,) were starting to question things. He came rather late in their lives; they were both flirting with middle age when Lance arrived. She was thirty-nine and he was forty-one. They were married twenty years earlier. Leo had not gone to college as his older brother and sister did. He stayed home and helped his father on the farm. That was probably why his father willed it to him.
Reggie had managed to have received a good education and would have gone on to practice law. Look at him, he’s doing quite well as it is. Lidia is studying medicine, but Lance just barely made it out of high school. It wasn’t for the lack of potential or effort though. He just happened to be the one on whose shoulders the bad luck had happened to fall.
He had to man up really quickly after his father got the stroke. Reggie had just started law school. Lidia was on her way through med school, and the family’s resources were already very strained. They could have managed alright if things were to remain at the current levels, but when the stroke happened. That changed the whole game for the family. Lance was game, though, so he stepped up.
“You are not going to drop out of no school,” he told his brother frankly, “we will manage here. I’ll see to it if it kills me.” He did step up to the plate and batted like a champion. He was closing in on sixteen then, and two years is a very long time in a teenage boy’s life. Long enough for a lot of things to change, and change they did. Not all for the worse though.
Reggie did manage to secure the scholarship he wanted, and other funding for himself. As for Lidia? She got herself a husband a year later. A husband who not only loved her world without end. But one whose pocket is rather deep and he doesn’t mind it one bit in reaching down into those deep pockets to give her whatever she wanted. What she wants now more than anything else is a good education. So, education it is.
She’s getting a rather elite type of education. Lance, on the other hand, was quick to discover that; he wasn’t cut out for the farmer-type of lifestyle either. Or he wasn’t quite ready for it, yet. He did manage to endure it for upwards of two years but no longer than that. As soon as he was of age, legally, he skipped the scene. Of course, he could have quit at any time, any time he liked. No one could have stopped him from doing so, really.
But his mother had concluded that; “he waited until he was of full legal age to leave because, he believed, (and rightly so.) “He believed that we would have done any and everything to try and prevent him from leaving, and he wanted to be on the right side of the law when that day comes,” she’d said. Was she right or what?” How ironic though, oh how things have changed. That was then, but this is now. To be continued.
An excerpt from my book called “Collect Call.” A collection of short stories and poems of the times, available wherever books are sold. If you don’t see it, ask for it, they’ll get it for you.
By writingelk, All Rights Reserved.
See pt. 1 of this story here.