My Cameras Caught My Own Family

I live in the north unit. The south unit I rent to Miss Eloise Tanner, who is eighty-one, widowed, and pays me two hundred dollars a month, which is about a third of what I could get, because she taught my Sunday school class in 1979 and I would sooner sell my van than raise her rent. She keeps an eye on my place when I am out on a job. I keep an eye on hers. That is how it has worked for eleven years.

My family had been inside my half of that duplex maybe five times in all those years. Every time, they found a way to let me know, in that polite, sideways manner families use when they want to wound you without leaving a mark, that they thought it was wasted on me.

My father called it “a lot of house for one woman.” My mother said the second bedroom was “such a shame, sitting empty.” Brenda said very little, but she walked slow through every room, running her hand along my grandmother’s sideboard, studying the layout like she was measuring for furniture.

I noticed. I always notice. I filed it away in the quiet drawer in the back of my mind, the one marked things to watch.

My family, explained

To understand what happened at my party, you have to understand who was standing in that living room.

My father, Gary Dale, is seventy-nine years old and has been the center of gravity in this family for as long as I can remember. He drove a propane truck for the co-op for thirty-five years, made a decent living, and turned it into an ego that needed feeding every single day. For decades he made decisions about other people’s lives and called it love. His decisions about me always ran the same track. Rhonda is strong. Rhonda is independent. Rhonda can handle it. Rhonda doesn’t need help. So Rhonda should be the one to give something up.

My sister, Brenda, is forty-nine, pretty, funny at a party, and allergic to responsibility the way some people are allergic to bee stings. In the last six years she has lived rent-free in three different places, my parents’ house twice and a boyfriend’s trailer once, and left each one the minute the arrangement got too real or too inconvenient. She had just been asked to leave the boyfriend’s place in Rolla. She was, once again, between houses. She currently believed she deserved better, not because she had earned better, but because our parents raised her to believe that wanting a thing was almost the same as having earned it.

My mother, Judy, is softer, which somehow makes her the most dangerous one of all. She sands the sharp edges off my father’s decisions while agreeing with every single one of them in her heart. In our family, my father handed down the verdict, my mother made it sound reasonable, and Brenda collected the reward.

Those three people were standing in my living room on my fifty-fourth birthday because I had told them, four days earlier, that no, I would not be signing my duplex over to Brenda so she would “have some security.”

That was how my father had put it at the diner that Sunday. “You’ve got the business, Rhonda. You don’t need the house too. Your sister has nothing. Sign it to her, let her live in your half, she can collect the old woman’s rent, and everybody’s taken care of.” He said it the way he might tell me to pass the ketchup. Like it was already decided and I was slow to catch up.

I said no. I said it quietly, and I said it once, and I did not raise my voice. And I watched my father’s face do the thing it does when the world fails to agree with him.

I expected them to try something. I did not expect them to try it in front of twenty-six witnesses and a security system that had been recording without a break for ninety-six hours.