Say Hello to Your New Life, Ishkibbles [detective books to read .txt] 📗

Prologue
My mother is a former beauty queen. She was the kind of girl who danced on tables all night but still managed to wake up the next morning and ace whatever test came her way. She was the girl every boy secretly (or not so secretly) wanted and every girl envied. Ellen Devereaux was a hot commodity. The thing is, she never wanted any of it. She wasn’t the mean girl; the girl who puts down everyone to give her own ego a boost. She wasn’t a particularly bad girl; she didn’t drop out of school or get caught making out with some pubescent boy under the bleachers. The truth is, she was friendly to mostly everyone. She didn’t tease other girls because she hadn’t always been one. She had grown from a gawky kid with glasses who always had the answers in class to a pretty girl who still had all the answers. My mom wasn’t caught with any boys because she just wasn’t interest in any of them. Sure, she had her many suitors, but she never wanted any of them. Her lifelong friends from highschool have given me much more detail into her life then than she has. I think her reasons are equal parts modesty, embarrassment, and denial. They say that she would get frustrated because she would really try to talk with boys who were interested, but she could never get herself to return their affections and she never felt like they truly understood her.
After she graduated she spent a year traveling. She came back home to her small southern town life. That was when she met Devon Weston, a highschool teacher in his first year of teaching. He was twenty-three and she nineteen. She was intrigued by his quiet charm and way with words, so different from the overconfident boys she was used to. They were married a year later.
As you’ve probably already guessed, Devon Weston is my father. My parents raised us in a small town that was very similar to the one they met in. They wanted surroundings that were familiar but a fresh start at the same time .They were living a dream. They bought a rundown house and fixed it up. They made it their own. It was two stories with a front porch and was painted a sunny yellow. There was a big backyard with a tire swing. They got a dog. They had three kids, two girls and a boy. Everything was perfect. Until about two months ago.
My dad was in a car accident. He was hit by a drunk driver and injured pretty badly. We were all affected. There was a time when we thought he might not make it. The doctors assured us that it would take time, but he would recover. Our worrying wasn’t over yet. Mom had fallen apart. He was her whole world and when his life was threatened her whole life came to a stand still. She had always been sort of frail, always worrying over a scraped knee or a cold. But this was different. She was apprehensive of everything. She worried that if our lives ever ended, she hadn’t given us enough. Enough love, enough family, enough life. We hadn’t seen my mother’s family in years because there wasn’t a lot left. Her parents had both passed away by the time I was ten and her sister was in Japan with her military husband. My father simply didn’t have any. He was adopted and had moved from foster home to foster home. My parents had had dreams of saving up money and traveling with us. Raising us in different countries and in foreign cultures, but it had never happened. When we were young because of lack of funds and when we got older because we had settled. Dad’s near death experience had resurrected those dreams. She wanted to give him what he had always wanted but forgotten. She wanted to give us a new experience and to get to know our family. And so plan was drawn up. The solution, in her mind, was simple. We would move closer to her sister’s family. That’s right. The one in Japan.

Publication Date: 06-10-2011

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