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「故事·听力」My Brothers Threw Me And My Mom Out Of Our Home

LearnAndRecord 2022-07-26

My Brothers Threw Me And My Mom Out Of Our Home

Hi, everyone! My name’s Anna and I am 14. Recently I’ve been betrayed. Oh, I don’t mean that my boyfriend dumped me or anything. I mean, that’d probably be hard too, but this story is going to be about how my brothers just kicked me out of my house without even a twinge of guilt on their conscience.


I guess l should start telling my story from the fact that my mother was my dad’s second wife and he had two sons from his first marriage, so basically, I had two big step-brothers – Derek and John. I always had an amazingly friendly relationship with them. They used to visit our dad at our house and would stay here for weeks, and my mom was very kind to them and always treated them like her closest relatives. Dad took all of us on a vacation at least once a year and everything was just great.


Things didn’t change much, even when my parents got divorced more than a year ago. I mean, for me, it was a little bit strange not having my dad living with us any longer, but we still saw each other pretty often and, even more, dad would still gather all of us together during the summer holidays. During the rest of the year, my mom and I would talk to Derek and John over Skype. We would always share the latest news and stuff going on in our lives so, as you might have noticed, I've always had a big and friendly family, even though we had kind of an unusual way we were related to each other.


But then the most awful day in my life happened. Our family doctor called in the morning and said that my dad was gone. It turns out that he had had a brain aneurysm that he wasn’t even aware of, and it suddenly ruptured and… Well, mom and I were his closest relatives and we had to arrange the funeral and the dinner and…Well, it's really hard to remember everything right now. I loved my dad, and it was just so unfair that I’d lost him.


Of course, we immediately called Derek and John, who lived in Chicago and they arrived on the first flight and helped us with everything. Even though mom had me to help her, there was plenty of stuff to be done by two strong men, right? For example, we still had dad’s stuff in our garage and my brothers could help us do something with it. So she invited them to spend a couple of days at our house. If only we knew what horrible people the two of them would show themselves to eventually be.


You see, even though these two guys didn’t bother us much, it was strange that neither of them was in a hurry to get back to their life in Chicago. And one evening, during dinner, Derek asked the most unpredictable question I could ever think of. He wondered if they had the right to any of dad’s property. Can you believe it? It was only the fifth or sixth day since dad was gone and they were already thinking about inheritance!


Even though mom seemed to be far from happy with this conversation, she promised them that she would figure out the answer to that question. She said they would have had to discuss it anyway, she just wasn’t quite ready to do it so soon, but the next day mom contacted dad’s lawyer. It turned out that since dad had no living parents, and wasn’t legally bound to any of his wives anymore, all his property was to be divided between his children, which meant the three of us – Derek, John, and I.


There was nothing surprising about this and everything was pretty fair, you might say, and you’d be right, except for the fact that the house we were living in also belonged to dad. Apparently, he hadn’t had enough time to re-issue it in mom's name somehow after the divorce, even though, according to mom’s words, he promised to do so in my favor. And now, after his death, I only had the right to have one-third of it – the bigger part of my house, where I was born and grew up, now belonged to my step-brothers.

Since then, the atmosphere in the house and relationship between all of us completely changed, so to speak. Mom and I were definitely in shock, ‘cause the guys at any time could ask us to pay them money for their share and we would have to sell the house. I knew that mom was making a few attempts to consult various specialists about our case, but everything still was pretty unclear.

Meanwhile, Derek and John seemed to be in a great mood and were too friendly whenever they would talk to me or my mom. At some point I began suspecting that they were creating some sort of a plan or something. You see, a couple of times I caught them mysteriously whispering to each other, but when they noticed me, they would rapidly change the topic of their conversation to something totally neutral. This seemed strange to me but, as they say, innocent until proven guilty.

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