"You didn't honestly expect them to build the 'sweet suite' while you were still living there, did you?"
Hhmmpphhh. Mom and Dad were dead wrong about how going to a therapist would be bad for Mike. Before he did, he talked nothing but self-serving nonsense but afterwards, he kinda turned into a cool adult like Uncle Phil or the late Grandpa Jim. And he was right about how Mom and Dad never seemed to do anything that would make her own life easier. Not that they put any thought into their acts of malice. Thinking, you see, is something neither of her parents seemed to ever do.
Case in point: they never quite seemed to understand why she didn't want to spend too much time back in Milborough when classes were over for the year after Grandpa Jim passed away and they started treating poor old Iris like she planned to kill him. It was somehow fine for them to not return to their hometowns when they were her age but they expected her to rush right home to a place where she always seemed to be in the way somehow, always treated as an intrusion. Well, if being a 'nomad' was wrong, she didn't wanna be right.
I mean, look what wanting to please people who didn't have it in them to be pleased and didn't seem to be worth pleasing in the first place did to Liz. If she'd have lived her life for herself instead of doing the same dumb thing Therese Arsenault did and making an ass of herself to make her own greedy jerk parents happy, she wouldn't be pissed at herself for letting Paul slip through her fingers or complaining about Mike's ex Rhetta the sadistic brute of divorce lawyer. Y'see, Anthony's dad convinced the poor dim twit that he needed to be 'firm' with the women he'd driven away because they couldn't stand his blubber-skulled entitlement. What that meant in Therese's case was that some nasty young woman would stand herself up in court and plead with the jury to save an innocent from (as Liz put it) from the horrors of attentive relatives, riding lessons, a highly-recommended private school and giddy nutbar au-pair girls and in Liz's case, having her son grow up in Cyprus while Mommy waited for New Daddy to come home from flying his helicopter.
Things looked kinda rocky for both of them when Mom did something very stupid and testified on Anthony's behalf. That was the single stupidest thing she ever did. It was like watching one of those episodes of 'Law and Order' where the bad guy self-destructed right on the stand. The judge hated the "they owe us because we suffered sooooo much" nonsense both her and Dad were spouting and told the pair of them what horrible people they were.
They didn't stay horrible for long, though. That's because about three or so years later, she stroked out and his heart exploded after years of eating garbage. Ah, well. People only get final confrontations with their lousy parents in bad fanfiction. They also hold grudges forever in rocks-fall-everyone-die stuff too. It took her a while to work up the courage to admit to Becky that she'd been an idiot but Becky said she'd been kinda dumb too so it balanced out. Heck, she was even matron of honor at her wedding to Jeff Leong.
Good ol'Jeff. April guessed her parents would have called him a country boy because he was a small animal vet (like her) who grew up in a 'country' town like Calgary but, well, they never were very smart. Every so often, she, Mike and Liz got together and traded horror stories about some of the craziest stuff the 'rents had pulled. It wasn't the most spectacular life but at least they weren't walking around with their heads wedged anywhere.
