My father’s face hardened. He told me to lower my voice. My mother said I was turning a difficult night into something bigger than it needed to be. And then Brandon came downstairs.
He came down with the particular air he always carried when he knew the house was aligned behind him regardless of what he had done. He leaned against the bottom banister and looked at me the way he always looked at me when he wanted me to feel he was barely bothering to pay attention.
“You should stop acting like everything is about you,” he said.
I stared at him.
I stared at him because I could not immediately locate the correct language for what it felt like to stand in a house where every decision, every holiday, every evening plan, and every family resource had circled around him for as long as I could form memories, and be told by him, in that house, that I was acting like everything was about me.
I told him I wanted him to answer one question honestly. I asked him if he had any idea what it felt like to watch your own parents erase the one day that was supposed to celebrate you because he could not tolerate the idea of someone else receiving attention while he was unhappy. He rolled his eyes and said life was not fair, the way people say things when they want to sound philosophical but actually just mean that the specific unfairness in question is someone else’s problem.
My mother moved immediately to soothe him. Not me. Him.
My father looked at me like I was the one responsible for the temperature in the room. And right in the middle of all of it, the front doorbell rang.
The sound stopped everyone.
My father frowned at the door. My mother looked uncertain. Brandon straightened up from the banister. There was a brief, strange pause in which every person in that kitchen looked slightly nervous, and I remember noticing that and not yet understanding why.
