That evening, I mentioned it to Claire. We were sitting together on the couch, and I pulled the folded paper from my pocket and handed it to her. “Look at this,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice calm. “Your mom left me a to-do list and taped it to the garage door like I’m some hired worker.”
Claire barely looked at the paper. She shrugged and quickly turned her attention back to her phone. “You know how they are,” she replied casually. “They do appreciate what you do. They just aren’t very good at saying it.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to explain that appreciation needs to be expressed, that silence and assumption are not the same as gratitude. But instead I swallowed those words, just like I had swallowed so many others through the years, pushing them down into the growing resentment I kept pretending wasn’t there.
The real breaking point happened two weeks ago on what should have been an ordinary Saturday morning. I had just finished changing the oil in Jim’s old pickup truck—a worn-out Chevy that leaked oil everywhere and probably should have been retired years earlier. I was crouched beside the front wheel wiping grease from my hands with an old rag when Jim stepped out onto the porch. Claire and Carol were sitting there too, relaxing in wicker chairs with glasses of iced tea while chatting.
Jim looked down at me from the porch, and our eyes met. His face carried an expression somewhere between amusement and contempt. “You know, Nate,” he said casually, using that confident tone he always had, “if you disappeared tomorrow, we’d just pay someone better to handle this stuff. They’d probably do it faster too.”
