Free What Mother Never Told Me by Donna Hill Page A

She wasn’t. Celeste opted for silence, her strongest weapon.
    “I’m calling to remind you about tomorrow night.”
    Celeste fought and failed to contain her sigh.
    “It’s important for both you and Clinton to meet these people.”
    “Important to who, you and Dad? Not me.”
    “You have no idea what’s important.”
    Here it comes.
    “That’s apparent by this…this job.” Her mother sputtered the word as if she’d eaten dirt. “It’s beneath you. Beneath us. What will my friends say? Of course you don’t care,” she continued, stealing Celeste’s retort. “But I do. Your father does. We have a reputation. This family has a legacy to uphold.”
    Begun by your grandfather , Celeste recited in her mind, rolling her eyes. She’d stopped listening to her mother’s rant. It never changed. The legacy, the reputation, popular opinion, her disrespect, worthlessness, on and on.
    “Celeste!”
    Celeste flinched. “Yes?”
    “Eight tomorrow. And please be on time.”
    “Goodbye, Mother. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She hung up before Corrine could launch into another monologue. The five-minute conversation had successfully drained her of whatever strength she had left.
    She took off her shoes and went down the long corridor that featured a Rembrandt, a Picasso and a John Biggers just to piss off her mother.
    Maybe a glass of wine and a mindless evening of surfing the cable stations would lift her from her growing malaise.
    She should be ecstatic. She’d landed her first deal. The papers were all but signed. Money would change hands soon. She’d finally accomplished something on her own, without the prerequisite of her family name.
    Suddenly weary she turned toward her bed and noticed the flashing red light. She pressed the message button and Clinton’s voice reached out through the phone lines.
    “I’ll be working late tonight, sweetheart, but I thought I’d stop by, stay over. Call me.”
    Next to her mother, her fiancé Clinton was the last person she was in the mood to see. The heavy sigh took what little she had left and dumped her on the bed. She stretched out and stared at the off-white ceiling. She tried to pinpoint when she’d begun to feel so utterly disconnected, her usual fire reduced to soot. She knew Corrine was partly to blame. She had a knack for bringing out the worst in her, which didn’t take much. Corrine also knew how to make her feel like an incompetent child again, one constantly in the throes of a temper tantrum.
    But it was more than that. She’d lived within the vise of her mother’s grasp for nearly three decades. She was only able to break free during her college years by getting to know other cultures, different ethnicities, people from all walks of life, something that her grandfather had quietly encouraged, much to her mother’s dismay. She’d often question the credo that her parents and their circle lived by—those that didn’t have, weren’tworthy of attention. In the minds of the Shaws, wealth was privilege without responsibility. She’d learned how to protect herself from being punctured too deeply by her mother’s caustic tongue. So it wasn’t that. What she’d begun to realize during the past few days was that this engulfing sensation of doubt about the validity of her life and her own happiness had come into question again after meeting Parris McKay and Nick Hunter. What she saw in them was a possibility that she’d never imagined, a realness that for her entire existence had eluded her.
    Over the years, she’d thrown stones at the glass window of her wealth and status, from her choice of friends to working a real job. She hadn’t walked away from the shards of glass but pretended to walk over them, like some mystic traversing a bed of nails and not getting hurt. But she had been hurt, little by little, and as she was diminished her resentment at herself grew. Resentment over her weakness to leave behind the things she professed to deplore. She was