Brandi's Last Dance - A Short Story

"Are you ready, sweetheart?" Isabelle Reese asks her daughter; peeking behind the makeshift changing space they've made using an old room separator. Behind the sheer-paneled separator, Brandi Reese sits on a cushion wrought iron seat dressed in her mother's wedding gown, head held up with her hands between her knees.

"I need a minute, Mom, okay?" Isabelle hears some shuffling of satin and tulle. She hears Brandi sniffling, too. Her makeup is probably a mess by now. She has been wiping her eyes for the better part of an hour now! Isabelle paces back and forth in front of her daughter's space. She bites down on her lower lip and considers other options. Should she let this wedding happen, when it so clearly should not? What would everyone say if it didn't? All of their church friends and both sides of the family would be heartbroken, but this is her daughter we're talking about. Brandi's happiness should come before all things, shouldn't it? Should she punish her daughter for the rest of her days using guilt and disappointment as her weapons?

Oh for Christ's sake! It is 2009! Why can't she let go of the old demons that haunt her and see this for what it is: Brandi made a mistake and the mistake made her pregnant. Now, her father, Lionel, is practically dragging the girl to the altar and Isabelle herself is helping, to marry Jonathan, even though everyone knows the pair has no love for each other.

John and Lorraine Grift are no better than they are. They told their son this is what God wants for them. As if God wants unhappy children! Isabelle and Lionel only met them once before, but they are also trying to force that boy to take on a wife and kid when he doesn't love Brandi. Granted the kids made their bed and they should lie in it but...to what extent is it ok to punish our children? Is it ok to ruin their lives to show them what's right and wrong?

Brandi told her parents the truth of what had happened between she and Jonathan. They were lab partners and working together in the library. He said her dress was pretty and she melted at the compliment. One thing led to another and, even though they weren't dating exclusively or anything, they ended up having sex in a back room by the reference books, where there were no cameras. Brandi was beautiful, but unaware and thus really at the mercy of the first compliment to be sent her way. Isabelle remembered the first boy who flipped her skirts with a kind word! She excelled at school but failed socially. Isabelle and Lionel figured that in time, and on her own terms, she would come to be more socially graceful and more outgoing. "If the kid got her face out of all them books once in a while, maybe she wouldn't be so unpopular!" Lionel had argued once with Isabelle, unaware that their daughter had cracked open her bedroom door and heard it all.

The thanks she got for her honesty was that her father blew his top. He called her names she couldn't even repeat. Isabelle tried to diffuse the situation, but she was also livid with Brandi. How could she be so dumb!?

By the time Brandi figured out she was pregnant, the class project was over and so was any relationship or contact she had with Jonathan, who was a popular boy, but wasn't about to date anyone seriously. Although Isabelle tried to hold him back, Lionel grabbed a handful of Brandi's long, red hair and yanked her to their car. He yelled for his wife, who ran out and jumped into the car with them. He drove like a drunk to the Grift home and started pounding on the door.

Lorraine Grift was the first to step out. "What in holy God's name is going on!? Who are you!?" She asked of the man at her doorstep with the insane look in his eyes. "Well, now, Mrs. Grift. Looks like you and I are about to know each other real well," he pushed Brandi, who was cowering behind him, out front. Isabelle stayed closed behind them. "This is my daughter. She is 16. Her name is Brandi. Brandi, meet Mrs. Grift, your future mother-in-law!!"

Lorraine Grift was about to pass out when Jonathan ran to the door and grabbed her arm. He was wearing a black rock-n-roll t-shirt and green checkered boxers. "Mom! What's the matter!?" Lionel looked at the boy with utter disgust and contempt. "Is this the boy?", he asked Brandi, gritting the words through his clenched teeth. Brandi was unable to speak, so she just nodded. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. "Brandi? What the fuck!?" Jonathan said to the girl.

That was the unpleasant way in which Jonathan Grift found out that when he had "scored" with the nerdy girl, he had left something very valuable behind. John Grift was working late when the Reese family showed up to throw rocks into the perfect Grift Family existence. Now everything had changed.

"Mom, are you still there?" Brandi called from her dressing space. She sounded so childlike and fragile to Isabelle. "Yes, darling. I am. Do you need anything?" Isabelle's hands were shaking and her heartbeat was rapid and uneven. "Mom, I just can't...I don't want to...Please, Mom! Oh God, please! I'm sorry, Mom. I am so sorry!"

By now Brandi was sobbing and there was no chance in hell that she could walk herself down that aisle without Lionel holding her up in a mess of sobs and snots. "Mommy, please!! I just don't know how I...I just can', Mom!"

Something suddenly entered Isabelle Reese's body. It wasn't so much a strength or power as it was a resolute fact. Her daughter's cries came into her mind more prominently than any other noise or sound in the world. She did not care what Lionel said or did. She did not care if the Grifts approved or disapproved. She didn't care if that little prick Jonathan ever saw the baby! She couldn't think of anything she cared about less than the stuck up, righteous, overzealous bunch of assholes in this town, where she had lived all her married life. She was an angry, determined mother bear and she was about to save her cub from a fate similar to her own.

Her life came to her in flashes now. Her wedding to Lionel, a good and honest man with whom she had nothing in common, except her parents' religious views. Lionel forcing her to leave college in her freshman year to have babies, when she wanted to go on in school. Her two miscarriages, which she believed were because of all her evil thoughts against her husband. Then finally, with the birth of Brandi, who became the center of her life. And here she was, a hypocrite if ever there was one, ready to throw her one child to the lions, as she too had been thrown. For the sake of what? Religion? Keeping up with the Joneses? The fear of what-will-they-say? All of it was bullshit and she knew it as well as she knew her own damn name. No! She would not let her Brandi follow those crooked footsteps. It all stopped here, right now - she'd let this go far enough. She was once a beautiful, intelligent, promising young woman with a knack for science and biology. Look where being a good girl got her! She was in a sexless marriage led by the nose on the Bible as interpreted by Lionel Reese, which didn't resemble the actual Bible in the least! Her daughter was a brilliant and beautiful girl whose potential would never be reached, if she let her go through with this sham of a wedding. "No! It ends here!"

Isabelle peeked behind the paneled separator. Her daughter was still in a heap on the wrought iron seat, weeping. She looked like a lost child. Isabelle's heart filled to capacity, ready to burst at the slightest word or look from Brandi.

"Brandi? Don't ask me any questions now. Just get out of that dress and put on your regular clothes. You left them in the bathroom. Go to the closet in there and pull out the gray suitcase on the floor. Inside of it, take out my bra and jeans and the only T-shirt in there. Oh and take my Nikes, too. Now, take that ridiculous tiara off. Go out of the back door of this place...here are my car keys," she said to Brandi holding out the clinking key ring. "Turn the car on and drive it quietly around to the front of the chapel. Then get in the passenger seat and wait."

"But Mom..wh..." Isabelle lifted a finger. "Brandi, no questions. Now go. I will meet you out there. Not a word to me or anyone, okay?" Brandi nodded and got moving. Isabelle heard the shuffling of satin and tulle again, but this time, she smiled.

There was an usher standing by the closed chapel doors. Isabelle gave him a forbidding look and he stood back. Using both hands, she swung open the chapel doors majestically, letting them slam hard and echo back toward the roomful of guests. Everyone turned at once, a few tried to stand, as if expecting the bride. Instead, they saw the bride's mother, who was to walk her down the aisle, since her father was so full of shame over her condition.

Taking wide, purposeful strides, Isabelle walked down the center of the aisle where her daughter would have been walking to her emotional death minutes later. Her dark, blood red dress clung to her curvaceous body and her breasts heaved up and down with her deep breathing. Her dark hair had been done up nicely and she was sight to behold. She seemed taller than usual, more powerful, less the diminutive wife and more the in-charge lioness.

"Everyone," she began, using no softening tone, apologies or femininity in her voice. "My daughter Brandi is the most important being in all the world to me. Her life means the world to me. Her happiness means the world to me. She made a mistake. This boy made a mistake," she pointed right at Jonathan, who looked as miserable in his tuxedo by the altar, as Brandi did in her dress.

"In this room now, let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Isabelle paused, looked around for a reaction, and waited for her words to sink in. An icy silence fell on the room, where murmurs were filling the space just before. "Like a weak and scared animal, I was about to toss my child out like damaged goods...a phrase my own father once used to describe girls who...put out. Now, I know the whole lot of you have spoken unkind words about my child, but not a one of you know the details. But that is neither here, nor there because whatever all of you think, I don't care. What I care about is Brandi Leigh Reese, my only child. And I plan on saving Brandi Leigh from the likes of all of you. I plan on helping her reach the highest goals and the biggest dreams she sets out for herself. And I plan on doing this in a place where my child will not be judged, shunned and looked down upon, but a place where she will be valued and respected."

She looked then at Lionel, her husband of 22 years, who was sitting in the first row, his eyes wide, and his jaw agape. "Lionel, you are a good, God-fearing man, but you have your facts wrong and you picked the wrong wife. I was not born to be subservient and devoted. I had dreams and I had plans and I crushed them all because my father said I was to marry you. And while I did love you once, that love has long been dormant or disappeared. Your only fault is that you tried to instill your beliefs on us with an iron fist and not a kind hand. I implore you - let Brandi and me go. We do not fit your mold of the good wife and daughter and that's fine. We are not here to cause you shame, or disgust. You couldn't even walk your daughter down the aisle on her wedding day, for goodness sake! Well, we don't want to be a burden in your life any longer. Just...don't come looking for us." Lionel was too stunned to move, or talk back. The chaplain officiating the ceremony quickly made his way over to the man, who had now been publicly embarrassed by his wife and child in front of everyone in the town.

As Isabelle looked around the room at the stunned faces of her once friends and neighbors, she smiled. It wasn't an evil smile, but a calm and freeing smile. She looked once more at Lionel and she felt a pang of sadness, for he had never strayed or hit, or hurt her except in that way he controlled everything in their lives. The words he used against them. And the tone with which he spoke to them. All forms of abuse, Isabelle thought.

As she turned and walked out of the chapel, the voices began to rise and the shock and awe began to make its presence known. Isabelle let it be the sound to which she walked out of that life she had lived for too long. She walked the few steps down and out of the chapel, where she spotted her gold Mercedes ready to go and Brandi trembling and crying in the passenger seat. "Such a good girl!" she said to herself.

As she and her daughter drove away from the only town Brandi had ever known, Isabelle's thoughts raced with changes and decisions to make. Unbeknownst to Lionel, Isabelle had horded and hidden the life insurance money from both her parents after they died. Even back then she was lying to Lionel telling him they never took out life insurance policies. By now it had accumulated a sizeable amount of interest - "enough to keep us well, while I take a part-time job and work on my college degree," she told Brandi. I'll speak to the education board of the town we end up in and see what study programs they offer for unwed mothers. You and I will alternate caring for the baby, when he or she arrives. It won't be easy for a while, Brandi, but at least we'll have one thing you can't buy with all the money on the planet: freedom!

When they reached a toll booth in a town many towns from where they had come and hours after they had escaped Brandi's wedding, the young former bride reached over to her mother's hand a squeezed it, while rubbing her swelling tummy.

"Mom, I don't know what made you do this for me, but thank you." Isabelle gave the attendant the cash - she decided to use cash on their trip to avoid being traced through their EZ-Pass activity, in case Lionel decided to take such an approach to finding them. Then she looked lovingly over at Brandi. "What made me do this was the idea that I could somehow blame myself for your eternal unhappiness and that you would never know what you could have been, before you had your wings clipped. Trust me, an unfulfilled life is no life at all, my girl."

The mother and daughter drove away from the tollbooth. They were putting greater distance between themselves and their former life. And with each passing mile Brandi became more relaxed. The anguish diminished, the fear evaporated and the despair disappeared. For once, Brandi Leigh and Isabelle Constance Reese were heading for a place they had never been to before...happy.