Her voice cracked slightly on the word “wrong,” and for just a moment, I saw past the woman who’d tracked mud through my house for a decade into someone who’d apparently spent her whole life braced for abandonment. Protecting herself the only way she knew how, however wrong the method turned out to be. It didn’t excuse what she’d done. It did, unexpectedly, help me understand it a little better.
“Things going wrong between us didn’t have to mean stealing equity in our house,” I said.
“I didn’t steal anything,” Deloris snapped. “I earned that share. I helped raise the down payment. I’ve helped in a hundred ways since. Ways neither of you ever bothered to notice.”
She listed a few of them then, rapid-fire, almost defensive. Babysitting during Milo’s first year. Casseroles during a rough stretch when Caleb was between jobs. A loan, repaid promptly, that had covered a car repair one particularly hard winter.
“Helping doesn’t include treating this house like your personal property whenever you feel like walking through it,” I said. “Helping doesn’t include leaving messes for someone else to clean while reminding her. Over and over, that a woman exists here specifically to do it.”
