I blinked at him as the sheer audacity of the statement temporarily short circuited my ability to even speak. I looked at my suitcases and then back at the brother who had not paid a single cell phone bill in nearly a decade.
“Shane, what on earth are you talking about?” I stammered with a voice hoarse from travel fatigue. “I pay the mortgage on this house every single month.”
He let out a sharp, ugly laugh that echoed through the small hallway and made my skin crawl. “Yeah, you do, and you do it because you’re a parasite who clings to this house to feel important,” he sneered.
The word hit me like a physical blow to the face, leaving me momentarily breathless. “You stay here so you can pretend you’re needed, holding your little checks over our heads like a dictator,” Shane continued as his voice rose in volume.
“I’m the man of this house now, and I’m telling you to get out because we don’t need you breathing down our necks anymore,” he declared. I stood frozen in the entryway and looked toward the kitchen doorway, hoping for some intervention.
My mother appeared from the shadows while nervously twisting a damp dish towel in her hands. I waited for the woman whose bankruptcy I had prevented to step forward and tell her unemployed son to stop his nonsense.
Instead, my mother took a hesitant step backward and refused to meet my eyes. “Andrea, please don’t fight with him right now,” she whispered in a trembling, fragile plea.
“Shane has been so stressed lately, and you know how he gets when he feels pressured,” she added. “Maybe you should just go stay at a hotel for a few days until things calm down around here.”
I stared at her in total disbelief as she defended the man who had done nothing while I worked sixty hours a week to keep a roof over her head. Shane was stressed because his video games lagged, yet I was the one being asked to leave the home I funded.
