Chapter 1: The Weight of Luck

Grandma always said Mom had the fate of a "hard-luck woman"—someone born to take the hits, whose pain always seemed to pay off for everyone but her.

That was just the way folks talked out here, in our tiny Ohio town where luck and curses got whispered about like the weather. Sometimes, on muggy nights, I’d hear her say it again, voice tight: "She was born to carry the weight so the rest of us could eat pie."

When my drunken father smashed a beer bottle over Mom’s head, he won $1,500 at poker the very next day.

The cops never came around, not in our part of town. That night, I watched him stumble out with a busted lip and come back before sunrise, pockets fatter than I’d ever seen. He tossed me a quarter and grinned like he’d struck gold.

After Grandma pinched Mom so hard her arms were black and blue, she suddenly found herself being courted—enthusiastically—by the old man next door.

Old Mr. Wilson was usually as sour as his morning coffee, but suddenly he was bringing over fresh-baked cornbread and grinning at Grandma from his porch. She acted surprised, but everyone in town could see her strutting a little taller on her way to the grocery store, like she’d just won the lottery.

On the eve of the SATs, my older sister hesitated, but temptation won out: she spent the whole night pricking Mom with sewing needles. Mom’s screams became the price for my sister—whose grades had only ever been community-college level—to miraculously get into an Ivy League school.

I heard the cries echo down the hall, pressed my face into my pillow, and prayed she’d stop. In the morning, my sister left for her exam looking sharp as a tack, a tired but fierce light in her eyes. It was like the pain she’d dealt out had given her something, a piece of stolen luck wrapped around her shoulders.

Every time someone hurt Mom, they got rewarded.

It didn’t matter if it was big or small—a slap, a curse, a cruel word. There was always something: an unexpected check in the mail, a crop that finally took off, a bully that suddenly left you alone. I saw it. I kept the tally in my head.

No one in my family treated Mom like a person. They justified it by calling her a "hard-luck woman"—someone born to be beaten down.

They’d say it to each other at the kitchen table, like it was an old family joke. But nobody was laughing. Not really. Not even when the money came.

Only I cleaned Mom’s wounds, dabbed on Neosporin, and wished she could heal and be free of this.

I’d sneak into her room after everyone else was asleep, the house quiet except for the buzz of the fridge and the distant bark of dogs. My hands shook as I pressed the ointment on her cuts. Sometimes, I’d tuck an old flannel shirt around her shoulders, whispering, "You don’t deserve this, Mom."

Only I knew: Mom wasn’t a "hard-luck woman." She wasn’t even human.

I’d see it sometimes, in the way her eyes glinted in the dark, how she never bled quite right, how her bruises healed too quickly—or didn’t heal at all. I used to think it was just the light, but now I knew better. Sometimes I wondered if I should be scared of her, too.

Every time they hurt her, a piece of their own life was chipped away.

It was like she took something from them—youth, hope, whatever luck they thought they’d won. I could feel it in the air, thick as humidity before a storm.

All that so-called good luck? Just bait—Mom’s way of reeling them in.

She was patient. She watched. She waited. Like something old and hungry, hiding behind the shape of a woman.

I just didn’t know who she was waiting for.