Together with Angela

I haven’t been around for a while, but came up with this idea and thought you all might like it. Please leave some feedback if you do. I can make this a series if needed.

My sister and I have always been friends. If fact, I can’t recall one time in our lives that we actually had a fight. Oh, maybe once or twice we argued about something on TV or maybe who’s turn it was to take out the trash, but it always ended with one us of giving in before things escalated into something bad. I kind of think that the reason we got along so well is because our parents didn’t. The fact was that they fought constantly.
When I was twelve and Angela was eleven our Dad came home from work one evening and informed us all that he was, “sick and tired of our shit and was moving out”.
“So what’s stopping you,” our mother screamed. She threw a coffee cup at him? “And plan on paying for the rest of our life,” she added as he closed the door behind him barely missing the second cup that shattered against the wall.
We visited our father a couple of times at his new apartment right after he left. It was a nice place, furnished well with a new sofa, a liquor cabinet and wet bar. He also had a pretty fine looking friend named, Dora, who stayed over on the two occasions that Angela and I spent the night. Shortly after our second sleepover our mom broke the news. Dad did pay for the rest of his life which ended in a head on collision out on highway twelve exactly two months to the day that he moved out.
At the funeral the only sobbing came from Dora. Angie and I sat stoic while Mom stared with icy eyes at the distraught woman.
And so, Dad was laid to rest along with any alimony or child support that might have come our way. Oh, and later on our mother learned that Dad had dropped us from his life insurance adding Dora in our place. I think at that point Dora may have stopped crying. In fact, shorty after her check arrived she headed home to Puerto Rico and was never heard from again; at least not in the continental U.S.
Mom went back to work at the hospital as a nurse’s aid She worked crazy hours so we didn’t see a lot of her except on her day off. Angie and I went on to finish middle school and and start high school with the same close ties we had shared before Dad’s death. Everything was back to normal or as normal as it could be under the circumstances.
With Mom working all the time Angie and I relied on each other for nearly everything.
Angie had grown to be an attractive young woman with deep blue eyes and pouty ruby lips. Her hair was black as night and straight as the proverbial arrow. She stood very statues at somewhere near five-eight with a smile that could melt any boy’s heart. It surely melted mine, and that was a problem I dealt with daily.
When I was seven years old my Dad enrolled me in one of those, Chuck Norris karate schools. I loved it an although I only got to brown belt when Dad died, and the tuition was cut off, I was good at it.
As I said, my sister was a looker and I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
I tried to stay out of Angie’s business. She had a few dates and even though I did not like it, I didn’t interfere.