The day Amanda filed for Divorce, my father, being the caring man he was, decided to leave the house to my mother so that Brenden and I would have a roof over our heads, but this was, in a sense, his first of many poor decisions.
Not the leaving part, no, it was the fact that instead of directly paying the mortgage himself, he instead chose to cut a check to Amanda, giving her a sum of 1800 dollars a month to cover the mortgage, utilities, and daily expenses of raising two children.
The act of receiving almost 2000 dollars a month, which in the late 1990s was quite a bit of money, triggered the woman’s greed. Instead of using the money as it was meant to, she began a pattern of spending, effectively wasting every cent on useless trinkets and such.
Unfortunately, the money wouldn’t last long, and soon enough, she needed a new source of income beyond working a full-time job; thus, she did two things.
First, she moved my grandmother down from Chicago to live with us, and second, sigh, the second was something that would shift our entire family dynamic for years to come.
Seth Evola.
How do I describe Seth without sounding snobbish or unrealistic? Well, for starters, he was jacked; I kid you not, the man works out twice a day every day.
Being a massive narcissist beyond the likes of my father, Seth was an overall overbearing person, which was impressive considering the fact that he stood at all of 5 foot 6 inches, relatively short for an American man.
He was the embodiment of the worst traits of my father, wrapped in a 5 foot 6 muscular body with an Elvis complex; yeah, you heard me right, the man SWORE he looked like a cross between Sly Stalone and Elvis.
Now I know what you’re thinking, ’Taylor, how does any of this matter?’ Well, that’s simple: apart from the money drying up, he was the reason Amanda divorced my father.
You see, at some point in 1997, we took a trip to Chicago to visit my mother’s family, without my father, of course, and during that trip, one of her childhood friends introduced Amanda to Seth, and they began having an affair together.
Seth, like my father before him, had money, more than he had use for, and Amanda, being a gold-digging conniving hoe, latched her hooks into the man and started plotting.
In the end, Seth’s money was the real reason she destroyed our happy family.
So, in the year my father was gone from the house due to the separation, Seth would come down once a month and stay with us, and so began a year from hell, where we would barely have enough to eat, the power was constantly going off and on in the house, there was no cable, and a six-year-old me, plus the four-year-old Brenden were forced to take cold baths since we were practically tossed to the side.
It was also the beginning of my protecting my little brother from everything, and it was when I first started maturing beyond my years. Someone had to raise Brenden, and although I, too, was young, if I didn’t do it, who would?
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That brings us to June 21st, 1999, the day the judge finalized the Divorce, and a day I will never forget.
To me, the day started off pretty well; we got to spend the entire day at the Ice Skating Rink that Aunt Penelope owned, which was cool because it was just Brenden and I skating around and playing. We had the whole place to ourselves, and Aunt Penelope even unlocked the video games so that we could play for free.
But that all changed when Amanda showed up wearing a business suit and having bloodshot puffy eyes. You know, when I was growing up, I really thought she cared about us, and this was an instance I would replay over and over until I was a teenager as a sign she truly did love Brenden and me.
But I was wrong; she didn’t care; no, all she cared about was the fact that she lost and would be forced into shelling out Child Support every month until my brother and I turned 18.
Picking up Brenden and me from the Rink, she drove us around to our favorite places and even took us to Mac Dons before buying us both action figures and a couple of Peck-E-Mon card packs from W-Mart.
However, instead of taking us back home, as we believed, we ended up in the driveway of Aunt Penelope’s house, where she gave a long-winded speech about how much she loved us and would miss us, and …then…she left.
Brenden and I were too young, too ignorant of things to understand the gravity of what happened at the time, but luckily, we had our father.
As expected, Dad had absolutely annihilated Amanda in court, winning custody of both of us and a nice chunk of child support to the sum of 2400 dollars a month, which would increase by 50 dollars a year.
However, the victory was bittersweet, not because he, at 46 years of age, was now a single father of two young children; no, the reason was known to us the day after Amanda left Florida and moved back to Chicago to be with Seth.
According to the judge’s ruling, the house in Oviedo was to be sold, with the money being split between Amanda and Dad, and the items inside were to be divided evenly between them. However, the day after she left, when Dad took us to Oviedo…the house…was completely empty apart from two things: our multicolored toy chest and a single hallway ornamental drawer stand with a mirror.
To make matters worse, on the front door was an envelope with the words foreclosure written across it. In the night, Amanda and Seth had rented a moving truck, packed the entire house, and booked it out of town, leaving us with nothing but debt.