“There she is! Perfect timing. We need to get the heavy stuff in first.”
I had been on the road for four hours and I had not slept well the night before and I was still carrying the particular fatigue of a work week that had ended with too many unresolved problems, and I stood in my own driveway looking at my family arranged across my property like furniture and I tried to find words that were accurate without being inflammatory.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
My mother waved her hand, the gesture she used when she thought I was being unnecessarily complicated about something obvious.
“We’re moving in. You live alone up here, and your sister and the kids need space.” She said it with a bright, reasonable confidence, as if she were solving a logistics problem rather than announcing the seizure of someone else’s home. “This is family property.”
I looked at the driveway. I looked at the truck. I looked at my sister setting a box down on my porch and wiping her hands on her jeans.
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
Lydia rolled her eyes. “God, you’re so uptight. You barely use this place. We’ll make it a real home.”
That phrase, a real home, landed strangely. My cabin had been a real home since the day I moved in. I had chosen the site myself, spent two years saving the down payment, managed the mortgage alone for three years, and driven that mountain road in every season and every weather until I knew every curve of it. I had hung my grandmother’s quilt on the spare room wall and planted lavender along the front path and built a life in those rooms that was quiet and specific and entirely mine.
“I didn’t invite you here,” I said.
