Free Unscripted by Christy Pastore Page A

three people who didn’t possess the same DNA.
    My mother, she’s equally as beautiful with shoulder length, raven hair that never seems to lose its luster, become frizzy or turn grey. She has perfect pink lips, long legs, and big brown eyes that warmed any man’s heart, causing them to trip over themselves to be in her company. And you’d never ever catch Helen Elizabeth Prescott Chambers dead in anything other than a designer label. Even if my mother had the flu she’d still put on a pair of YSL pumps.
    Helen never seemed to age either. Well, maybe that’s because she has had a few surgeries to keep her body in top form. She was born dirt poor in a trailer park outside Tucson, and her only mission in life was to be an adored trophy wife. She was just that for a while until she found herself bored and Perry bought her a restaurant in Malibu to manage. Now she’s an adored entrepreneur, but still a trophy wife nonetheless, because Helen really only makes appearances. She lets her right hand, Andrea, do most of work. My mother’s posh five-star restaurant, Tradewinds, is always filled with celebrities, the extremely wealthy and tourists. The modern gourmet eatery has been featured in several TV shows and movies, which is always good for business. I suppose deep down my mother truly does have a strong will to work hard in her blood. It was her looks, attention to detail, determined attitude and charm that landed her the job at a financial firm as my dad’s secretary where they fell deeply in love and were married a year later.
    My parent’s marriage survived eleven years after my adoption. Charlotte and I came home from school one day to find our father’s lifeless body slumped over the dining room table. Jay Christopher Prescott, Executive at Windsor Bradbury Trust, dead at forty-four years of age of a heart attack. My dad couldn’t handle being a father for two young girls, a doting husband and a successful financial business executive all at once.
    Charlotte and I went to the best private school in Southern California. My sister took dance and piano while I went to swim camp and took tennis lessons at the club with a private instructor. To keep up with the Joneses, dad made several financial investments during their marriage. Unfortunately most of those were bad decisions. He never told my mom that he had lost nearly all their money. She found that out after the funeral— we were devastated, nearly broke and my dad was gone. Dad never told her that she couldn’t have anything, and my mother never thought to ask about the status of their bank accounts or credit.
    My mother was pretty demanding as a wife. Dad did everything humanly possible to keep her suited in Chanel and drenched in Cartier. Hosting various charity events, attending glamorous dinner parties that entertained clients, she kept up her duties as the prominent executive’s wife, including spending money faster than my dad could replenish it. Spontaneous shopping sprees, days spent at the spa and lavish trips to Europe and the Caribbean where no expense was spared were often taken, keeping my mother overjoyed. Happy wife, seemingly happy life was the motto my father lived by.
    No one realized how much my father was suffering from carrying the stress of providing for his family and keeping secrets, yet never having an outlet for to release his bottled up emotions and frustrations. He turned to drugs and the bottle for the release, but that ultimately took its toll on his mind and body. We never knew he had a problem until his toxicology report proved otherwise. Then there was the stash of pills, booze and cocaine we found in the garage and the unannounced visit we received from his dealer one afternoon trying to collect payment. My dad owed this guy nearly $3,000. That was an interesting afternoon— my mother interviewing my dead father’s drug dealer while they sat sipping black coffee one Saturday in March. I guess she charmed him well enough