“I need you to tell me one thing that you did to protect my property or my interests in the past 7 months. One thing.”
More silence.
“Then I need you to understand why you’re not the person I can take guidance from on this right now.”
He said we were family. He said I was making this harder than it needed to be. He said my brother was struggling and sometimes struggling people made bad decisions.
I listened to all of it. Then I said goodbye, and I ended the call, and I sat with the knowledge that my father had chosen, as he always chose, the path of not choosing.
And that path had a cost too, even if he had spent his whole life convincing himself otherwise.
The eviction order gave my brother three weeks to leave.
On the second to last day, his attorney contacted Francis with an offer. They would cooperate fully with the move out, he said, if I agreed to wave the damages claim.
Francis’s response was brief. Her client declined.
When the 3 weeks were up, my brother moved out.
Petra told me she watched two men she didn’t recognize load furniture into a rented truck in the early afternoon. My brother and his wife did not say anything to the neighbors. They left without cleaning the bathroom.
I drove to the house that evening.
I stood in the entryway for a moment before I turned the lights on, just standing there in the dark, feeling the particular quality of the silence. Then I turned the lights on and walked through each room.
It was bad, but it was mine again, which meant the work I had ahead of me was work I had chosen, which is a different thing entirely from having someone else’s choices handed to you.
Francis filed the damages claim the following week.
We had itemized everything, the shelving units that had been thrown away, verifiable through the manufacturer’s records and my original purchase receipts, which I had kept. The sofa, the brass fixtures, the cost of repainting the entire interior, the bathroom ceiling repair, the inspection fees, the legal costs.