My son, Daniel Whitaker, struck the Christmas table so violently that the crystal glasses rattled.
“Pay the rent or disappear!”
Silence swallowed the room.
Twenty-two people surrounded my dining table—my sisters and their husbands, Daniel’s cousins, my daughter-in-law Melissa, three uninterested teenagers, and my two grandsons frozen with mashed potatoes on their forks. The turkey had been carved. Candles glowed. Snow brushed softly against the windows of the home where I had lived for thirty-one years.
My home.
Daniel stood at the head of the table as though it belonged to him.
I stared up at him, my napkin carefully folded across my lap and my hands still, although my chest felt painfully constricted.
“Daniel,” I said quietly, “sit down.”
“No,” he snapped. “You sit there acting like some wounded queen, but this is real life. Melissa and I can’t keep floating you.”
Several guests shifted uneasily.
Floating me.
The phrase nearly made me laugh.
For six years, I had paid the mortgage on Daniel and Melissa’s townhouse after his construction business failed. I covered daycare, vehicle insurance, school supplies, dental treatment, soccer uniforms, and their “temporary” credit card debt, which mysteriously increased each December. I had also allowed them to assume they would eventually inherit the family house because that was easier than admitting I had reconsidered.
Melissa leaned back with a glossy red smile.
“Let’s see how you survive,” she said. “You don’t even understand online banking without Daniel.”
My grandson Ethan murmured, “Mom…”
Melissa paid no attention.
