Bold and Simful

Elizabeth Mendenhall made it a point, an almost daily point, to remind Shelly Placer that there was no way either she or her daughter were ever going to see a penny more of the Mendenhall fortune. She had gotten Francis, but that was all she was going to get.

Not that getting Francis turned out to be the boon Shelly had envisioned. He was old now and without his fortune, he was just a wrinkly guy in pajamas, always in pajamas or underwear with his nose stuck in the paper reading the obituaries.

He didn’t even seem to care that the pension from his own company barely covered the weekly bills or that he had left everything with his lush of an ex-wife. No, technically Catherine was still his wife, another source of frustration for Shelly.

Francis wasn’t all bad, he did get up every morning to make Shelly breakfast before she was off to work and he was a great replacement for the irresponsible nanny, but you can’t pay bills with omlettes and bottles which meant that Shelly had to keep working while Catherine sat on her ass stuffing flowers into a vase set for life.

When the arguement finally blew up, it really exploded. Francis, who had been living on love for the first time in his life was stunned to find out that Shelly was in it (and had always been in it) only for the money and the social position.

Without either of those, Shelly was done.

Francis said goodbye to his daughter that very night. Tomorrow would be her birthday and he would not be there to see the workmen come to install her new swing set, according to Shelly he wouldn’t get to see a lot of Delilah’s childhood, but he would make sure that she was always taken care of. A trust fund, he had decided, was better than giving money directly to Shelly now that he had seen her true nature.

Elizabeth and Zee had been dating again for a while now, yet he still refused to move in with her. He preferred the city, he said and specifically the Starlight Apartments which had an extra bonus room for all the residents to hang out and watch movies.

Truth be told, he also liked that Elizabeth was miles away in Orion Bay. Starlight had some hot residents and he couldn’t have her cramping his style. He hadn’t actually intended to rekindle any romance with her, he had been dating Veronica when he bumped into her thanks to being dragged to some Winter Fete thing, but as long as Elizabeth only came over when she was invited he could live with it, besides they did have a daughter together even if Zee had yet to meet her.

Elizabeth stopped short outside Starlight, there were her father and mother talking and laughing.

After being unceremoniously thrown out, Francis had taken an apartment right next door to Zee. He wasn’t keeping an eye on his daughter’s boyfriend, he was keeping an eye on Mendenhall Enterprises which was just down the street, close enough to walk to.

He had allowed Shelly to make him soft and look what it had gotten him, a piddly pension, a wife who refused to allow him back into his own home and a suspicious daughter in law looking to replace her imprisoned father with him.

Catherine actually found her husband’s circumstances karmically correct but Francis just laughed at her idea of cosmic retribution.

It had been no surprise when Shelly befriended Kitty, they had started talking when both of them were pregnant and Kitty’s fast rise up the corporate ladder had not gone unnoticed by her new friend.

Seeking to ingratiate herself and perhaps get back at Francis just a little, Shelly had given Kitty the papers and the second set of books months ago when she realized that she was never going to be the lady of Mendenhall Place.

But stupid girl that Kitty was, she had taken everything straight to her father-in-law in a pathetic attempt to blackmail him. Now Shelly would have to wait even longer to get her hands on Delilah’s trust fund. Dead or in jail, it didn’t matter to Shelly, either way she would become Delilah’s sole guardian and thereby the trustee.

Posted on September 19th, 2008 under Rigel Heights. Tags: catherine, delilah, elizabeth, francis, shelly, zee. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.