“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.”
