A Story Of Three

I had an audition yesterday, and on the bus I saw something interesting (as I always seem to). It was all ordinary and fine until this little girl and what I presumed to be her older sister boarded. Even then it was unremarkable until the third member of their contingent- the one I took to be the mother- arrived. That's when things got good, although I could have stood for them to not be good considering what I had on my mind.

The mother was, I perceived, not a good mother. I admittedly came to that conclusion quickly, but that's a determination I'm always going to make quickly when a parent seems to do battle with their four year old offspring on equal terms. The little girl was rather precocious, and not entirely in the wrong. She declared early on that she'd lost her bag, and it developed that it had perhaps been lost in the area of a fruit vendor's stand.

A brief debate over whether to exit the bus in hopes of retrieving the bag ended with the decision to abandon it. The little girl was upset, the mother was rather belligerent and the elder sister seemed not to be much of a presence. Perhaps that is the wisdom granted her by having lived with their mother longer. In any case, the drama did not end with the affair of the lost bag, as I was soon to find out, and as you will find out.

The driver abruptly halted the bus and ordered the mother (and by extension the two girls) off the bus. It came out that the mother through all of this was suppose to have been locating the funds to cover one or more of the fares for their party. A dispute over whether the little girl had to pay ended in the mother's favor, and they remained aboard the bus, but of course things did not end there, much as I would like them to have.

The little girl at some point got into the mother's things, obtaining a wig whose purpose I prefer not to speculate on. The mother, aggrieved, chastised the girl for this crime and declared the wig's value to be in the amount of forty dollars. It is assumed that any item of such value is prohibitively expensive for the girl. The importance placed on the wig is curious, because when the group of them moved towards the front of the bus (for no known reason), the wig was left behind with an empty juice bottle.

Indeed, the wig remained aboard the bus even as the three of them exited the bus entirely, and I must confess that I was not moved to act on their behalf in any sense. Something kept me from calling out to them a warning, even though it occurred to me that the mother would likely be upset at the wig's loss, perhaps lashing out at her brood. I didn't take the wig for myself, which is to my credit, but neither did I  try to mend their oversight. I guess I really didn't like the mother.