My son is screaming on the front porch, his fist pounding the door so hard the frame shakes. Belle stands behind him, her face the color of old milk, mascara already streaking down her cheeks in dark rivers. The note trembles in Quinton’s other hand—I can see it fluttering like a trapped bird. Through the window, I watch his mouth forming words. Ugly words. The kind a mother shouldn’t hear from her child. He tries his key again, jams it into the lock with such force I think it might snap. Nothing happens. The cylinder doesn’t turn, doesn’t give, doesn’t yield.
I changed the locks yesterday. Every single one. Deadbolts, doorknobs, the side entrance he probably forgot even existed. The locksmith finished at four-thirty in the afternoon, and I paid him in cash from the metal box I keep hidden in the basement—the box Quinton doesn’t know exists and never will.
Belle tugs at his arm now, her manicured fingers clutching his sleeve. Her mouth moves, probably telling him to calm down, to think, to get back in their car with the expensive luggage and new clothes they bought with my furniture money. But Quinton shakes her off violently. She stumbles backward, catching herself on the porch railing. He kicks the door once, twice, three times. The sound echoes through my empty house like gunshots.
My empty house. That’s what I came home to six days ago. Bare floors where my grandmother’s Persian rug used to lay, the one she brought from Iran in 1952. Naked walls where four generations of family photos hung in frames I’d collected over forty years. A kitchen with cabinets gaping open like mouths with missing teeth. They took the dishes—the everyday ones and my mother’s good china. They took the glasses, the silverware, the cast-iron skillet that belonged to my mother and her mother before her. They took the couch where I nursed Quinton through chickenpox thirty-seven years ago, where I held him when he cried about his first heartbreak, where his father and I sat every evening watching the news. They took the rocking chair Teao built with his own hands during my pregnancy, sanding it smooth so there would be no splinters for baby skin. They took everything except my bed and dresser, like leaving me a place to sleep made the theft less complete, like it was a mercy instead of an insult.
The story doesn’t end here –
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