Take The Mom Take The Debt Chapter 2

My father, Arthur, didn't argue. He hadn't actually wanted to go to Europe in the first place. The thought of navigating a foreign country where he didn't speak the language and knew no one terrified him.

In the last life, Dad had begged to come home after a year, but Harper wouldn't let him. She and her husband had three children back-to-back, and they essentially used my father as an unpaid, live-in nanny so they could maintain their jet-setting lifestyle.

Thankfully, Dad had the patience of a saint. Treating his grandkids like his old students kept him sane, but the exhaustion aged him a decade in a matter of years.

Meanwhile, my mother had spent that entire life seething with jealousy, claiming Dad didn't know how good he had it. If I were the one living in that European mansion, she used to spit at me, I’d actually know how to live. She made sure to only call Harper when I was in the room, dropping passive-aggressive bombs about how my blue-collar husband could never provide a life worth living.

Seeing that my mother wouldn't budge, Harper crossed her arms, her diamond rings catching the light. "Fine, Mom. You can come. But Europe is incredibly expensive, and you don't have a dime to your name. If you want to come, you and Dad need to sell the properties and bring the cash."

My parents owned two modest, aging bungalows in our working-class town. In the last life, they liquidated both for barely over three hundred thousand dollars. My mother had packed every single cent of it into her suitcase and took it to Harper, weeping about how expensive her "baby girl's" lifestyle was.

This time, I didn't wait. I cut in, my voice dead calm. "You can sell one house. But Dad is keeping the other one to live in."

Having lived through the suffocating hell of the past decade, there was absolutely no way I was letting my father move into my house. I needed a boundary.

Before Harper could even open her mouth, my mother exploded from her chair. "Excuse me? Why the hell should we keep a house? Your father is moving in with you! That's what having kids is for!"

I swallowed the sharp spike of rage in my throat and kept my tone level. "You know how small our place is, Mom. Dad wouldn't be comfortable crammed in there with us."

"Oh, please!" My mother sneered, looking me up and down like I was trash on her shoe. "That’s your own fault for marrying a loser with no money. If you had an ounce of sense and married well like your sister, you’d be living in a McMansion by now!"

The absolute contempt in her eyes was a physical blow.

It’s a brutal truth: when you have no money, the first people to look down on you are your own parents. The overt favoritism hadn't started until Harper and I said our vows. Harper was allowed to buy three-hundred-dollar boots on a whim and be called "stylish." If I bought a ten-dollar pint of premium ice cream as a treat for my daughter, I was "reckless and financially irresponsible."

Harper rolled her eyes, sighing heavily. "God, Sarah, stop playing the victim. Dad has his teacher's pension. You won't even have to pay for him. Both of these houses should be my compensation for taking on Mom."