My mother stood beside him, dabbing her eyes.
“She has always been our rock.”
Serena smiled modestly and touched one hand to her heart.
I stood in the kitchen, gripping the granite counter until my thumb hurt.
A cousin’s husband drifted over, looked at my faded Navy T-shirt, and smirked.
“So what do you do for the family, Clara?”
I could have told him.
I could have said I paid the mortgage on the house he was standing in. I could have said every bottle of imported beer, every shrimp skewer, every candle burning in that yard existed because I had gutted my own life for people who erased me.
Instead, I said, “Apparently nothing.”
He laughed because he thought I was joking.
I wasn’t.
Three months later came Thanksgiving.
By then, my resentment had become colder than anger. Anger burns wild. This was different. It was a locked room inside me, full of carefully stacked evidence.
