When I was in Jr High I had a classmate, Stephanie, that I had a crush on. She had long dark hair, she was so pretty I couldn't stop looking at her, she was embarrassed that I stared at her. She told me she wasn't going to marry me, so stop looking at her.
Her father was a banker in the town bank and she lived in a big house on a corner. Her friends made fun of her because I rode my bike around her house pretending to be going somewhere. One day she wore a sweater, and the sweater really showed off her chest to everyone. One boy in the hall yelled out at her, NICE TITS. One boy came up behind her and snapped her bra strap. She was so embarrassed, and she let me walk beside her to keep the boys from bothering her. I walked her to her bus, and she turned and said 'I'm still not marrying you'.
I dreamt of her in her sweater. At school behind her back she was nicknamed Big Tits. I ran into her one afternoon at the Dairy Queen, she was there with a school friend. She ignored me but when her friend went to the bathroom I went over and told her that I had decided to marry her, just so she knew. Her answer was simple, 'I'm not old enough'.
Away from school and unknown to any of us, her father was being investigated. He was arrested. He was found guilty and sent to federal prison in Colorado. One day she was living in an apartment, and no longer in our school because she wasn't zoned for it. I told my father he had to do something, he couldn't let that happen. I suppose that sometimes things are meant to happen. My father went to her mother and told her mother to come live with us. She didn't need to pay rent, just take care of the house. It was her mother, Vera, her little sister Astrid, and Stephanie. I moved in with my brother and she and her sister and mother moved into the other room. Now she could go back to our school, and she rode the bus with me.
Now she told me she couldn't marry me because she lived with me. It was like being brother and sister. Not much later than moving in with us, Vera, her mother, came down pregnant. By my father. She was just like a wife, she ran the house and he felt she needed a new baby to distract her of what had happened with her husband. Vera got divorced, because she was pregnant. My father married her. Now Stephanie was my step sister. Now she really couldn't marry me.
But, she hung onto me. As her brother it was my duty to protect her. At the house her mother gave her duties to look after me. We turned 16 and her mother told her that she was getting married. No excuses, no fighting, she had no choice in this. She was getting married. She was practically already married, so she should just accept it. She had no choice. Her mother got frustrated with her, why didn't she understand how life worked.
If it wasn't for my father they would really be in a bad situation, and they wouldn't have a new baby. Her mother had married my father because that is what you had to do when you were unsupported. Now it was her turn to get married because that's what young poor girls did. They married money. It was a simple ceremony in our living room. Vera had moved in with my father, and Stephanie moved in with me, her little sister kept 'her' room, and my brother was kicked upstairs into the den.
That was fifty years ago. Stephanie and I went to college and she started her family after graduation. We built a house on the side lot beside my father's and our kids went to the same school we attended. Vera took care of my father, she was devoted to him. Stephany's father disappeared after he was released from prison. From time to time, every now and then, Stephany says we aren't really married, because we are brother and sister and we have lived in sin and committed incest. But then, she throws up her hands and blames her mother.
