At my stepsister’s wedding dinner, she thought it would be a great joke to introduce me by saying that I was just a nurse before laughing at her own wit. My father burst out laughing along with her while my stepmother just smirked at the table.
Everything stayed that way until the groom’s father stared at me and asked if I was the girl he remembered from a specific night. His next words froze the entire room and changed the atmosphere instantly.
“This is my stepsister, just a nurse,” my sister, Felicity, had said with the kind of tone you would use to describe a smudge on a window. There were one hundred and fifty guests at the Aspen Ridge Club with champagne glasses held high in the air.
My dad, Kenneth, laughed first because it was a real laugh that proved he agreed with her assessment of my life. I stood there in a forty dollar dress among women wearing designer gowns and did what I have done my whole life by swallowing the insult.