My Cameras Caught My Own Family

After

Here is the part these stories usually skip, so I will not skip it.

The keys came back the next day, both of them, left in my mailbox with no note. I had my locks changed anyway, by a company two towns over, because I did not want it to be me.

I did not send anyone to jail. Frances, my lawyer, walked me through it, and I sat with it for a week, and I decided that what I wanted was not to see my father in a courtroom. What I wanted was to be left alone in the house I earned. So we did it the boring, permanent way. Frances filed for a civil no-contact order that covered my property. My father and Brenda were served at the diner, which I did not plan but did not lose sleep over. It is a matter of record now. If any of them sets foot on Poplar Street again, it is not a family argument. It is a violation with a case number.

The bourbon, I never got back. Brenda claimed it “got finished.” I do not think that is true. I think it is on a shelf in whatever place she landed in next, and I have made my peace with the fact that the last thing my husband gave me is sitting in my sister’s cabinet. Some things you do not get back. You just stop paying rent on the anger.

My father called once, about a month later, from my mother’s phone so I would pick up. He did not apologize. He is not built to. He said, “I don’t understand how it got to police, Rhonda. Over family.” As if the police had wandered in off the street. As if he had not stood in my living room and threatened me with his own lawyer. I told him I loved him, because I do, in the complicated way you love a man who made you, and I told him I was not going to talk about the house or Brenda, ever, and then I told him goodbye and I hung up, and my hand was not even shaking. That surprised me.

My mother sends cards on the holidays. I read them and I do not answer them. My sister, last I heard, moved in with a new boyfriend out toward Salem. I wish her no harm. I wish her no rent-free bedroom in my house either. Both of those things can be true.

What I kept

I am fifty-four years old. I still run Dale Security and Alarm out of a real office now, on the square, with three trucks and two employees and a phone that rings. I still live in the north unit of the brick duplex on Poplar Street. Miss Eloise still pays me two hundred dollars a month and watches my place when I am on a job, and I still watch hers.

Sometimes a customer will sit in my office, some worn-out man or woman who has just been robbed by somebody they trusted, and they will ask me, half joking, if the cameras are really worth the money. If it really matters, having a record.

And I think about my own living room, and the fifty-five inch television, and my whole family turning from the screen to my father and watching thirty years fall down in ninety seconds. I think about how I did not have to raise my voice one single time. I think about how the quietest thing I own, a little camera in the corner of a ceiling, was the thing that finally let me be believed.

“It matters,” I tell them. “Get the footage. The truth is easier to carry when you’re not carrying it alone.”

Then I write up their estimate, and I shake their hand, and I go home to the house that is mine. Free and clear. Paid for. In my name and no one else’s.

The party was over at 7:43. My life, the real one, the one that belongs to me, started at 7:44, the second I sent one word to a man on his way with his lights turning quiet at the curb.

The word was now. I would send it again tomorrow.