Fallen Woman by Stephie Walls
Magoo…I love you more.
Prologue
Pulling the pantyhose up each leg made this feel more glamorous than it was. There was a time in my life when I loved to dress up. I couldn’t get enough of the fancy clothes, the shoes, the beautiful jewelry. I didn’t have that life for long, but the years I did were unforgettable. Sitting on the edge of my mattress, getting ready to interview for a menial job, I realized how different my life is now compared to the prosperous one I’d worked so hard to obtain. It was like playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes—it was all a fa?ade. I shimmied my skirt down my thighs, slipped into my shoes from a previous era, and stared at my reflection in the mirror for final adjustments to my overall look. I no longer recognized the woman in front of me and didn’t much care for the person I saw.
When I was in my teens or even my early twenties, I never imagined the curveball life would throw at me. I never had much, but I worked hard and kept my nose to the grindstone, determined to escape the hell the kids in my neighborhood endured. They all lived under the same assumption—they’d never be free. The belief we would live the same tarnished lives as our parents wasn’t one I was willing to accept. I came from trash, but I’d be damned if I would stay in that dumpster. I was bound and determined to escape. By the time my senior year came around, my dad had disappeared and my mom was strung out. I knew what it was like to be hungry and cold because the bills weren’t paid, and if I hadn’t kept the forms filled out for our section eight housing, I would have known what it was like to be homeless, too.
My entire life depended upon my getting a full ride to college, so I invested every waking moment in sports, school activities, and academics—one way or another, I would make it. In the middle of my senior year, Dartmouth awarded me the full ride I was so desperate to obtain. I counted down the days until my departure to Hanover and never looked back at the filthy streets I came from.
Ryan and I met my freshman year—he was escaping the confines of his own hell. He’d come from a family with tons of money, but with that came an abusive father and an alcoholic mother. We were thick as thieves throughout college. He was the only man I had ever loved, and to this day, I doubted I’d ever love another the way I did him—regardless of how things ended and the legacy he’d left me to deal with.
After graduation, Ryan got a job on Wall Street, and I followed him to New York and Madison Avenue. We did the obligatory family thing with his relatives a couple of times a year, but after we had married, that ended abruptly. At our first New Year’s Eve party as a married couple, Ryan’s dad was rip-roaring drunk, and I said something he took the wrong way. When he slapped me in front of a hundred of their closest friends and relatives, Ryan bowed out of the family—and their money and prestige. He had a fantastic job, and I was doing well. I’d never had anything that resembled family anyhow, so I wasn’t all that disappointed, but I knew my husband was.
He kept his head held high, but shortly after, the greatest recession of my lifetime hit, the stock market crashed, and Ryan and I lost everything we’d earned.
I was pretty young at the time, a newlywed, with twins on the way. Ryan and I had only been married a year, and I was six months pregnant. Suddenly, thrown back into my past, money was an all-consuming obsession. I had done life by the book. In every way possible, I followed the rules and played it safe. I figured the stock market would bounce back; I assumed Ryan would have no trouble finding another job. But I quickly realized, we were in deep, and everyone around us struggled to stay afloat. Barely able to tread water, the weights holding us down kept getting heavier—the ability to swim without drowning became almost impossible. And there was no one on the horizon with a life raft to save us.
When nothing else could go wrong—it did.
The details of then led to now, but the intricacies were no longer important. The only thing that mattered was I was a widow with three kids under the age of five and didn’t have two nickels to rub together, much less food in the pantry. I couldn’t remember the last time I ate a decent meal or held down a respectable job. At that point, the only things I cared about were my children eating and staying warm—I could survive a lot longer than any of them…but I was beyond desperate.
Chapter One
Never in my life could I have imagined interviewing for a minimum-wage job as a mail clerk in one of the high-rises downtown. With a college degree, I’d believed a good paying job was a guarantee. But here I was nonetheless, getting ready for an appointment and praying I’d get the job that would do nothing more than feed my children, hopefully keep them clothed, and possibly afford Emmy the medical care she needed. Every time I dressed for one of these interviews, I remembered a time when I could afford the finer things, and I wondered if my wardrobe was what kept me from getting job after job. But surely, if someone recognized the designer, they would have the knowledge that not only was I not wearing this year’s fashion, but rather five seasons ago. Pre-baby clothes, pre-recession clothes, pre-catastrophe clothes. They were merely a shell of a former life, but they were all I had.
As I put the final touches on my makeup—which I now solely reserved for interviews to conserve what little I had—I called to my two oldest. “Megan, Trace…come here please.”