The Alphas Lifeline

The ringing telephone startled me from my poolside reverie. My wife answered the phone, listened for a moment, and turned toward me.

"Ben, I think it's one of your sisters," she said with a puzzled look on her face. "She sounds upset."

I sincerely doubted any of my sisters would be calling me. I was the black sheep of the family, the youngest child by 10 years. My sisters resented the preferential treatment – real and imagined – given me as the youngest by my mother and as the lone boy by my chauvinistic father. I think they harbored a bigger resentment because I was the only one of the old man's children with enough backbone to forgo the financial benefits and strike out for a life of my own instead of blindly following his wishes.

I hadn't seen my siblings or my nieces or nephews in almost 10 years. When my parents were killed three years earlier, my oldest sister waited until after the funeral to even alert me to their deaths. The old man's last will and testament widened the chasm between me and my sisters. He gave most of his assets to charity and the rest of them to me as his lone son and heir. It seemed my sisters and their husbands had counted on the old man's death to alleviate a multitude of financial sins they'd committed over the years.

They even went as far as contesting the will – conveniently forgetting that their father was the head of the state bar association at the time of his death so finding someone willing to call him incompetent would be a stretch. In the end, after almost two years of legal wrangling, my sisters were left with even less than they'd started out with.

I didn't give a crap about the money. I wanted little to do with the old man or my sisters and I was more than willing to let them be his heirs. But, in the end, their actions managed to piss me off even more than my father's had so many years before, so I stuck it to them as best I could. I didn't need the money, but I took it anyway just to spite them. After all, they'd have done it to me. I know that for a fact because they'd done many things just to spite me over the years – including notifying me of my parents' death a week after the accident that killed them.

My wife and I had been married for almost four years and she'd met not a single member of my family. So I had no reason to believe any sister of mine would be calling me when she was in need.

The fact must have been registered on my face because my wife noticed almost immediately.

"She asked for Trey," was all she said.

Trey.

That's me. Or at least it used to be when I was what everyone expected me to be. For the first 25 years of my life, everyone called me Trey. In reality, my name is Benjamin Charles Wallace III. Anyone who has met me in the last eight years knows me as Ben, a fact not lost on my wife.

I was the dutiful son for the first 22 years of my life. I excelled at sports and academics in high school and dated all the right girls and joined all the right clubs in college. I was being groomed to succeed my father – who had succeeded his father – at the helm at Wallace, Reynolds and Myers, the top law firm in the little corner of the world where I grew up.

It wasn't until my internship after my second year of law school that I looked around and figured out that I wanted no part of the life my family had set aside for me. I saw frazzled men and women in their late 20s and early 30s who'd already lost a marriage or decided against one in the name of their sacred career. I saw people working 100-hour weeks and 30-day months and 52-week years. I remembered the fact that my father had never been to a single game or play in which I'd participated. I recalled that he'd missed my graduation from high school and college, too.

So I decided to hell with it and refused to play their game any longer. I quit my internship and took my history degree and hit the workforce. Not one of my brighter decisions, to be honest. A history degree, to be frank, is as worthless as the proverbial tits on a boar hog.

Another semester in college was enough to earn a criminal justice degree and a job in the police force in an affluent town 50 miles from home. I lasted a couple of years listening to the complaints of snotty rich bitches and their upwardly mobile husbands, but it was long enough to earn the enmity of my parents and sisters forever.

I fell in love – at least in serious lust – with a teacher's aide during my two years in Edgewood. She had a troubled past and a broken marriage but I didn't let that stop me.

She also had a six-year-old daughter who was a joy to be around. Before we started to date, I would watch the little girl during the times when Pam had to be at school in the evenings and before long Lauren would be at my house more often than with her mother.

I guess "dating" is a poor euphemism for what Pam and I did. Pam and I got drunk one weekend when Lauren was at her father's and wound up in bed together. We did the same thing the next couple of weekends Lauren was away, too. Then I started to spend evenings at their house and before too long we lived together. I always managed to keep a separate residence for propriety's sake, but I rarely managed to be there.

Pam's early life was a mess. Her mother had died when Pam was just a little girl and she and her brother were raised by an alcoholic father. The duo was removed by Social Services when Pam's brother almost killed their father the night the man tried to rape her when she was 12. Her brother was 16 and spent the next two years in a juvenile home.

Pam spent the next four years being molested by her father's brother after Social Services stuck her with that family. I guess it must run in the bloodline or something. She ran away from "home" when she was 16 and was pregnant not long after. If the first 16 years of her life were a mess, the next seven were even worse.