My Cameras Caught My Own Family

Day three

All three of them came together Thursday evening, between six and nine.

That was the night the bourbon went. I watched Brenda drag a kitchen chair over to the refrigerator, climb up, and take down my husband’s last gift to me with the easy, careless confidence of a person who has truly never once in her life believed there would be a consequence for taking what she wants. She unscrewed the cap right there in my kitchen, poured three glasses, and the three of them stood in my living room and drank a toast in a house they had already decided, in their hearts, was Brenda’s.

My father raised his glass to the front window, to the street, to the whole town. I could not hear what he said. I did not need to.

I closed the laptop. I sat in the dark of my own kitchen for a long time. And then I did what I do best. I went to work.

The three days I spent getting ready

People think revenge is loud. Real preparation is the quietest thing in the world.

The next morning, a Friday, I drove down to the hardware store on Main and asked young Kevin Buford, who runs the key counter, a simple question. Had anybody had a key cut off a key marked with blue tape in the last two weeks. Kevin did not even have to think. “Sure,” he said. “Your dad. Week ago Monday. Had two made.” He printed me the receipt off his little machine without my even asking, because that is how a small town works, and because Kevin’s mother’s house has one of my alarm systems in it and Kevin likes me.

Two keys. Not one.

That afternoon I called my lawyer, a plain, steady woman named Frances Okoro who has an office above the pharmacy and who did the title work when I paid the duplex off. I read her my notes. She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked me to email her the footage and the receipt, and she told me three things I already suspected but needed to hear out loud.

One: the house was mine, solely, with a clean recorded title, and no one on this earth could make me sign it over. Two: a copied key made without permission, used to enter my home while I was away, was trespass, and the missing property made it more than that. Three: I should not confront them alone, and I should not confront them at all until I had talked to the sheriff.

So on Monday I went to see Detective Paul Ramsey.

I have known Paul twenty years. I put the cameras in his mother’s craft shop. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, watched about ten minutes of the footage, looked at the key receipt, and set his coffee down.

“Rhonda,” he said, “you understand what you’ve got here.”

“I do,” I said.

“You want to press it.”

I told him I did not know yet. I told him what I did know. That my birthday was that Friday. That I had, foolishly, invited the whole family before I ever went out to Dent County, before I knew. That I had a feeling, a strong one, that they were not going to let a party go by without making their move in front of everybody, because that was how my father won, by making a crowd watch me fold.

Paul thought about it. Then he said something I have not forgotten. “Then let them make their move,” he said. “On your ground. With your cameras running. And you call me the second it starts, and I’ll have a car close.”

I did not cancel the party. I want you to sit with that. I could have called the whole thing off, changed my locks again, and never spoken to them. Instead I bought the sheet cake at the IGA, and the pea salad makings for Aunt Carol, and I set out the good paper cups, and I waited.