The silver deadbolt wasn’t there when I left for work this morning. I’d locked the brass Schlage behind me at 6:00 a.m., the same lock I’d installed in June 2015 when I bought this house. Now, standing in my driveway at 4:00 p.m.
with my keys dangling uselessly in my hand, I stared at the new electronic silver lock gleaming in the afternoon sun.
My key wouldn’t even slide into the mechanism—wrong lock entirely. Before I could pull out my phone, the front door swung open.
My mother stood in the doorway holding a new keyring, dangling it between her fingers like she’d just won first prize at the state fair. “Oh, good.
You’re finally here,” she said.
Not hello. Not an explanation for why she was inside my house on a Tuesday afternoon when she lived forty minutes away. Just that tone—that declarative, final tone that said she’d made a decision about my life and I was expected to accept it.
“What’s happening?” I asked, still standing on my own porch.
Behind her, through the open door, I could see cardboard boxes stacked against the hallway wall. My boxes.
I recognized my handwriting on the sides from when I’d moved in a decade ago and never bothered to unpack certain items. They were sealed with fresh packing tape now, my name written across them in thick black marker like I was being shipped somewhere.
Through the living room doorway beyond, I saw my leather couch was gone—the one I’d saved six months of paychecks to buy.
My oak bookshelves, custom-built by a craftsman in year three, were missing, replaced with my sister’s sagging floral sectional and her children’s plastic toys scattered across the hardwood floors I’d paid eight thousand dollars to have professionally installed. Mom stepped onto the porch, pulling the door partially closed behind her like I was a door-to-door salesperson, like this wasn’t the house I’d been paying a mortgage on for ten years. “Your father and I have been discussing this for a few weeks now,” she began, her voice taking on that practiced reasonableness that had always preceded unreasonable demands.
“We’ve decided the house should go to your sister.
She needs it more than you do. She has three children now, and that two-bedroom apartment of theirs isn’t suitable anymore.
You’re young, you’re single, you work eighty hours a week at the hospital. You barely use this space.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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