This will be a smidget shorter than a one-shot....possibly. Sorry.

This me taking a short, non-permanent break from Because of you (please check it out!)_i feel bad for neglecting my hairspray fics for my Wicked fics. Please forgive me- i'm swamped with revision. Don't you just love it when teaches assume their subject is your only subject?

Disclaimer: it is not a good idea to mix pepper, salt, icecream, frozen yoghurt and chilli sauce. It does not taste good, and anyone who dares you to drink it is pure evil... Incidently, nandos charges you for pepper if you use too much :o

I wrote this cos i'm so SICK of people idolising Pennys father in fanfiction. He's definitly at least as bad as Trudy.

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3) She can remember every detail of the day her father left. Mostly she can remember feeling relieved he was gone.

People have often insinuated that everything would've been better if her father had stayed in Baltimore, instead of driving to Atlantic City in the family car with the faded green paintwork, the backseat filled with clothes.

Sometimes Penny hears them whispering that his leaving is what did it, the gradual disintergration of the Pingletons: first, the mother retreating into religion, so far that her friends and even daughter couldn't reach her.
Then, the daughter listening to that race music, and then becoming associated with those kids- the chunky girl who was almost constantly in detention, and, of course, all those negroes.

And finally, even dating one of them, something that had proved the last straw for Trudy before her daughter moved out (to live with them, some people rumored).

There was always the concrete belief that none of this would've happend had Mr Pingleton still been around.

But gossip is always innacurate. Like the belief that her divorce had driven Trudy to the church.

No, Penny could remember long before this her mother had already begun to withdraw.
The older she got, the rarer her mothers smiles were becoming, and the less time her father spent at home.

Conversations became brusquer, voices became louder. Money became shorter, somehow spent during her fathers numerous "business trips", and Trudy began to spend the time at church that she used to spend with her husband.

On the rare nights Mr Pingleton was home, little was said. Penny rememberd one night when she was eight, tiptoing barefoot to the kitchen for a glass of water, and happening to glance through the half-open door of her parents bedroom.

It was the middle of summer, and the room was warm, but somehow the tense silence made her shiver. Trudy was reading her bible, Mr Pinglton was reading a newspaper. Neither one spoke from their separate beds.

It was only later that she realised normal couples shared a bed, but by that time her father had already left.

She remembers the day her father left- in the middle of a warm June day, leaving just a note, to be read by his wife who was grocery shoping, and his daughter who was skipping on the street with the other children.

Her nine year old self enterd the living room, hot and out of breath, to find her mother standing in the middle of the floor, right in the middle of the blue and green rug. Her face was streaked with tears, but her back was turned to the door.

A piece of notebook paper, with blue lines, was crumpled in her mothers fist, and her rosary beads clicked softly.

The sound of rosary beads would soon become a normal background noise in the Pingleton house.