She took me everywhere with her, traveling, restaurants, road trips, you name it, we were inseparable
I remember that when my parents used to argue with her, I always asked myself, why are they being so nasty to her? I was always there to defend her from my parents as a kid In my eyes she couldn't do wrong, she always had a boutique wardrobe and shoes, always rocking the latest hairstyles and driving a badass sports car all while living at home with my parents. Every-time my parents would argue with her, she will get this bad asthma that she couldn't breathe and will always end up with her asthma machine attached to her face, which I would get extremely worried thinking she was going to die. She always blamed my parents for her asthma attacks (not the cigarettes, drinking, and endless nights at the nightclub) playing a victim was her specialty. When these arguments happened she will always end up in her room locked up till the next day and leave to work before my parents were even awake, I thought, no wonder she is so successful but it was not because of work, it was because she was avoiding arguing with my parents, especially my mother (BTW she is a saint) the very next day. As I grew older and paid more attention to what people were saying about my sister around the neighborhood especially from my Grandmother (One of the most racists, the nastiest and craziest woman I have ever met) who always was defending my sister and saving her from her 100th bankruptcy, she always said, remember she is a special child and needs to be taken care of. I started thinking, hmmm maybe there is something more to my sister, but since she always kept taking me to fancy restaurants and trips I just kept saying they are all jealous of her success.
I then learned the reason for my Mother screaming at her, is because she was buried in debt, every single thing she owned shoes, dresses, jewelry from Boutiques she either have stolen them or never kept her promise of payment, her car was always being towed away by the banks and the phone would never stop ringing because of collectors. Even when collectors will go to our parents home, she kept saying, that's not true, I don't know what you are talking about, I have paid, I don't owe anything to anyone, she kept repeating that to herself until she believed it in her own fantasy world and I believed her.
I remember picking up the phone many times and it was always for Mary, always collectors, but there was this one day, it was a different phone call, it was from a woman, a very angry woman which Mary would always say, if it's Evelyn, I don't live here anymore. Evelyn was her "BFF" since the beginning of time, she married to the love of her life, little did I know my sister was whoring around with her husband (and every other married man around town), this is when for the first time I heard the world "Puta" out-loud throughout a cordless phone. “Tell that PUTA sister of yours that I will fucking kill her"
As I grew older I understood her struggles and I didn't judge, that was her life and she is free to live it as she thinks is best. We were still very much close, nothing has changed just that I knew more about the real Mary, but in my eyes, she was still my "sister" and nothing was going to come between us.