Oops!
It was always crazy at their place. What with their mother being a raving drunk and the rest of the family and hangers-on needing very little excuse to party. With that, coupled with the whole family being very similar in looks, I guess it was bound to happen one day.
We had made the annual pilgrimage to my mother in-law's place about 2 thousand miles away, and the weather had slowly turned from the freezing winters of our home to the tropical north of Australia. The weather and the fishing were two of the few reasons I subjected myself to those people each year. How my wife came from this lot I'll never know. Unlike the rest of her family, she was actually very intelligent, didn't do drugs and rarely drank.
This year was different though. They were all celebrating the fact that the father of my wife and her three sisters had finally left. He was an abusive drunk who regularly beat his wife and daughters. My wife left home when she was just fifteen and moved to the other end of the country to get away from him, and that's where I met her. Not a day goes by that I'm not grateful she did. I truly love my wife and only in my wildest fantasies have I ever dreamt of fucking another woman.
It was the same old scene, all the same people rolling drunk. All the same people picking fights. Only two things were different that night. My wife decided to drink instead of looking after her younger sisters who were also drinking, and I decided not to play bouncer and get in between all the fights.
Around midnight the youngest sister, Amanda, who was fourteen at the time, informed me she was going to spend the rest of the night at her friend's house. This was a great relief to me as I always worried about the younger sisters at these 'parties'.
Carly, the eighteen-year-old sister was really throwing back the vodkas and generally having a good time; at least she wasn't picking a fight with someone for a change. She was a feisty one, and if she were in a fiery mood she'd take a swing at you just for looking at her the wrong way. She was really sweet natured when she was sober, a lot like my wife, but get a few drinks into her and watch out. The only reason I could come up with for her good mood tonight was the same one they were all celebrating.
Belinda, the sixteen-year-old sister, was so drunk by this stage that she had crashed on a deck chair by the pool and was snoring so loudly you could hear her over the music and general noise of the party.
My wife was also getting pretty smashed. I think she was mostly happy that something had gone right for her family for a change and I knew she was relieved for her sisters. She'd given up on her mother years ago when she came to the realization that her mother didn't even care for herself, so how would she ever care for her kids? As the night wore on I decided the best place for me was out near the pool. I could keep an eye on the sixteen year old and make sure she didn't fall in the pool or fall prey to some of the scumbags that were hanging around. Because the pool was around a corner, there weren't as many people there and it was a bit quieter too.
After about an hour of sitting and staring at the water and downing about half a dozen beers, I was starting to drift into sleep when someone sat very heavily on the other end of the deck chair. This woke me with such a start that I dropped my beer and nearly fell off the chair. Carly, the 18-year-old was sitting on the end of the chair laughing so hard at my reaction she had tears rolling down her cheeks.
"Yeah! Yeah! Very fuckin' funny, smart ass! It's a good thing I'm not little, or I think I would've ended up in the pool or over the fence."
At this she just laughed even harder. When she calmed down a little I said to her, "You're a lot happier tonight than I've seen you in a long time."
"You would be too if you'd had to live with that asshole. I'm so glad he finally did the right thing and got out of our lives. Apparently he's shacked up with some bird up the coast somewhere. She can have him."
