Worth Every Penny
(Prologue)
Slowly painting her lips a deep red, Penny leaned in to the mirror on the wall and didn’t like the reflection she saw. Her eyes were still blue as the ocean waves, but lines and wrinkles had began peaking through that even her make up couldn’t quite hide. Aging sucked and she hated it’s game of slowly creeping into her life, uninvited and sneaky as hell.
Rubbing the lipstick together with her lips, she capped the tube and looked down at the sink, almost embarrassed she was now forty two and not much money in her one measly account. Her car barely ran but it still was her favorite from her big brother Paul before he had died. Together they barely scraped by for food, her dad in jail for a murder he was framed and her mother, well… that was a memory she tried to erase.
The booze and the smell of cologne on her clothes, her hair always messy from messing around. Mama couldn’t keep her hands to herself, and Paul would lecture but it never worked out as her father knew and just closed his eyes til he had the last straw and wound up in jail for nothing at all but the frame of a man who took her mother away.
Cops came to the door and cuffed her dad without question while he turned his head before leaving the house and told her to call his lawyer right that second. But the money he had didn’t pay for much, ending up in jail for ten years plus. Her father was gone and her mama didn’t care, that she knew without a doubt. Mama just watched with the blue lights on, then pulled out a drink and called her boyfriend of the week to come pick her up.
Her brother was shocked heir mama actually left, not giving a dam about the kids needing food or clothes to wear to school. The harsh reality set in to both, knowing that now, they needed each other more. That’s what the twins did, confided and helped each other when needed. He got a new job to help pay the bills and gave her his Jeep that he bought from a friend. They both worked and lived in the house they grew up, until Paul had a wreck from a drunk driver in his lane.
Penny swore to herself somehow she would make it. She didn’t know how but wanted to strive through the pain and despair her family had left. It was too much to bare so she worked at two jobs, paid off the house and left to be free of the walls that closed in from her childhood pain. The walls that actually used to keep her sane. But as time passed, the walls were only a reminder of what she somehow endured and managed to survive with a few hundred dollars left from her brother.
Now alone in the city, New York was her home. A tiny apartment she paid with her tips from a top notch bar for only the rich. Serving drinks she knew very well, seeing her mother drink life away while her father ran a business to keep a roof on their head. A small town grocery, but none the less it paid all the bills. She wanted to be stronger and wiser but somehow always managed to fall back on her brother. But since he was gone, she swore to herself she’d make it alone and be the strong women her father tried to raise. “You got this” she whispered as she looked back in the mirror, winked to herself and turned the light off.