The Father/Daughter Dance started it all

“Want to come hang out at the Town Talk with Billy and me for a while?” Linda asked her long time friend. Classes had been rough on that day and Linda figured Kelli could use some relaxation, as bad as she needed it, herself.
“Oh my, Honey, I would love to but I just finished my period and I’m so horny. Uncle Don’s prob…” Kelli cut her sentence short when she realized she had almost given away a forbidden secret.
“Uh… so, what did you start to say?”
“… Never mind, it’s nothing.”
“Oh my God, Kelli,” Linda complained, “Don’t be keeping any secrets from me. I tell you everything. Tell me; what about your uncle? Tell me!”
Kelli began to wonder if she should lie to her best friend. They had always been as close as sisters since the second grade.
“Oh Lord,” she thought, “my big mouth could get us thrown in jail… she won’t tell… I’m sure she won’t say a word. She can always tell when I’m lying… Shit. She loves me, and she loves uncle Don. She won’t tell…”
“Kelli! What’s going on?”

Kelli had lost almost thirty pounds in the last year and a half. She had been a chubby senior in high school when it all started. Now her figure was envied by many of her college classmates.
Since none of her classmates were interested in the ‘fat redhead’, as some of them had called her, she didn’t care enough to fix her hair attractively or learn how to apply her makeup to enhance her beauty. As a result, she had no date offers for prom dances or other activities.
Since her parents had been killed in a terrorist incident overseas, she had lived with her uncle, who was barely nine years older than Kelli.
Immediately, Don’s wife objected to the girl coming into their home. Don, however, had put his foot down, “I’ll only tell you this one time; Kelli needs a home where her family loves and welcomes her. She’s staying; there’s nowhere else for her to go. That’s the way it’s gonna be, like it or not.”
His wife left the next day, before Kelli’s arrival. His explanation to the girl was that his wife left him for someone else.

“Okay, Linda, text the others and tell them something came up. You can hang with them tomorrow.”
The girls sat on a park bench, two blocks away from Don’s home. Kelli told Linda that if she ever told anyone her secret, she’d deny it and start a lot of shit about her friend, “I’m not kidding, I’ll go to jail, uncle Don will go to jail, and I’ll hate you for the rest of my life. I trust you more than anybody in my life, except uncle Don… deal?”
Linda hugged her best friend, “I don’t care what you tell me, I’ll never breathe a word to anyone; even if uncle Don is fucking you, I won’t tell… unless he’s forcing you. Then I’ll just go cut his balls off.”
That brought chuckles from both the nineteen year-old college freshmen.
Kelli took a deep breath and said, “Okay, here goes…”

It had been on her eighteenth birthday, six weeks before graduation. The father/daughter dance happened to be on the same night, and Don had no problems accompanying his overweight niece. He already knew most of the kids in the small town, as well as their older siblings and parents. Nobody would dare make wisecracks about Kelli while he was escorting her.
“We had so much fun that night, Lin.