character :: Pretti Dane
“When I was little, I imagined how it’d be. I always wanted to be a mother! But when it didn’t happen…when it couldn’t happen…I decided to save other people’s children instead. Now, I finally found the person I want to spend my life with: and guess what? I get to have my sons after all!”
Pretti Dane is what you’d call an unsung hero. While Jeff and Xander were off fooling around, getting drunk and refusing to face their problems, Pretti sat back and took care of them. When Jeff relapsed (yet again) and Xander showed up to her wedding just to wreck it, Pretti held both of their ears as she dragged them to rehab for proper treatment. When she finally got her happily ever after; her son and her husband clean and sober for the first time, it all seemed to rock again as a young boy named Matt required asylum from the same abusive home she plucked her Xander from.
When Matt faces rape charges, when Victor gets signed over to her care, and when Xander drags home his highschool boyfriend battling bulimia – there is Pretti. Always there. Because despite the turmoil and the fear, some place beyond the pain of bills she can’t pay and a stressful job she can’t fix, she finds herself at the head of a family she loves so much. It’s because of her strength and her courage that Matt’s father faces justice for the ill he’d done to her sons.
Now, in the final chapter of her life, surrounded by her kids (and grandkids now!) it seems as if things have finally mellowed. Some say a life of perfect contentedness is boring, even kind of worthless: but for Pretti, it’s all she’s ever wanted.
