Tainted Pictures Read Online Free PDF Page A

could.  
               Kate’s father had been an alcoholic and died over a decade ago and her mother had abandoned their family when she was still in elementary school.  Kate had grown up taking care of her little sister, Annie, and they had bounced between different friends’ houses and even foster houses for a several years.  All of those struggles were hard enough to admit, but the real reason that she kept those sad memories private is because it was all her fault.  
               She had kept quiet for several months about what her elementary school principal was doing to her in the janitor’s closet between classes.  The sexual abuse was bad enough but the fear he instilled in her was much worse.  He threatened her to never say a word and she was six years old so she believed him.  It took awhile but she finally summoned the courage to tell her parents what had happened.  
               That is when everything fell apart.  
               Her father called her a liar and her mother was more concerned with how it would make her look.  Nobody cared about her or how she was doing.  Her parents fought constantly over what to do with the matter.  Her father wanted to keep it quiet and her mother wanted to complain to everyone they knew, craving the attention that their pity brought her.  
               At first Kate had thought that her mother was defending her against her father, but as she witnessed more interactions between the two, she realized that her mother was more concerned about herself.  Her mother had seen Kate’s abuse as an opportunity for attention from everyone around her, even if the attention was only pity.  Her father immediately attempted to squash the publicity, desperately trying to hide what he considered to be an embarrassment.  Kate’s mother always resented it when her father took the spotlight off her.  
               Her mother lived under the assumption that any attention was like currency, a necessity that she worked hard to stockpile.  Even bad attention still carried it’s weight in gold to her.  Eventually her mother had had enough of her father and the situation and left.  She needed a stage and no longer was interested in playing the role of mother and wife.  The last thing that she said to Kate before she left was that Kate should have kept her mouth shut.  
               So, that left her and her sister without a mother, but since that absence also made their dad start drinking, they were also left without a father.  His drinking left them to fend for themselves and Kate became the main caretaker of her little sister Annie, working odd jobs to try to keep food on the table.  It wasn’t ideal but it became all the girls knew and so they cherished their relationship with one another and the bond that they were able to grow.
               It wasn’t much longer though until their father’s heavy drinking did more damage to his body than it could handle.  His fragile frame caved into the liquor and quit one summer day, leaving his two daughters completely alone in the world.  They were entrusted to the care of a family friend, Uncle Lenny Martin, who was their father’s oldest friend and who they had known all their life.  They were grateful for how much he had cared for them and helped them, but there is no perfect substitute for missing parents.  
               At least Annie had had Kate, who did her best to fill every role her little sister needed.  Somehow it had worked, somehow Kate had managed to shield Annie from a life that could have led to cynicism.  Instead, Annie was a free spirit traveling wherever the wind picked her up and dropped her off.  She loved life and indecision and happily flitted from one job to the next, one home to the next, one man to the next.  Her laugh was always piercing the air with its melodic tone when she came to