The House I Bought In Secret
What I learned about my own people
To understand why I did what I did, you have to understand the pattern, and the pattern goes back a long way.
My mother, Diane, has a particular voice she uses right before she asks you for something. It goes soft and a little wounded, like she is already forgiving you for the way you are about to disappoint her. My father, Gary, does not ask for things directly. He waits until my mother has softened the ground, and then he shrugs and says it “just makes sense,” as if the thing were already decided by physics and he is only the messenger. And my younger sister, Tara, does not ask at all. Tara assumes. Tara has assumed her way through her entire adult life, and every time the bill came due, it somehow landed on me.
When I was twenty-four, Tara wanted a truck. She had no credit and no down payment, and the dealer over in Vinton would not touch her loan without a co-signer. My mother did the soft voice. My father did the shrug. It “just made sense” that I would sign, because I was the responsible one and family helps family. So I signed. Eleven months later Tara stopped making payments, and I found out the way you always find out, from a letter, and I paid four thousand dollars I had been saving to keep the repossession and the default off my own credit. Tara never paid me back. When I brought it up, my mother told me I was keeping score, and that keeping score was not what family did.
Two years after that, my mother called me at the scale house in tears. The roof on their place was failing, she said, and water was coming into the back bedroom, and they did not have it. I had a little put by, six thousand dollars, and I gave it to her that same week because I could picture the water stain spreading across the ceiling of the room I grew up in. Three months later my parents drove to Branson for eight days and came back with a laminated photo of the two of them in front of a theater marquee. The roof, I later learned from my aunt, had been patched by my uncle for the cost of a box of shingles. The six thousand dollars had gone to Branson and a new television. When I asked, my mother used the soft voice and said I would understand someday how much they had sacrificed for me, and that a daughter who loved her parents would not make them feel small over a little vacation they had earned.
I could give you five more stories like that. The pattern never changed. Anything I had was a resource the family had not gotten around to using yet. My time, my money, my truck, my back on moving day, my Saturdays. And the worst part, the part I am not proud of, is that for most of my twenties I let it happen, because saying no in my family was treated like an act of violence. Say no, and you were selfish. Say no, and you had “changed” since you got that job. Say no, and for a week the phone would ring with relatives explaining to you how much your mother had cried.