What They Really Took
The cab turned onto my street and I felt the familiar loosening in my chest that always came with being almost home. Three weeks was too long. Miami had been beautiful and relentless and too loud, and all I had wanted for the last four days was my own bed and my own coffee machine and the particular quiet of a house that belonged entirely to me.
The driver pulled to the curb and I reached for my suitcase before I noticed. My car wasn’t there. I always left my little blue sedan parked beside the porch.
It had been there since I moved in four years ago, had accumulated a small constellation of dents and one cracked side mirror that I kept meaning to replace. The driveway was empty. I looked at the gate post where my brass name plate had been drilled in the year I moved in, the one my father helped me hang on a cold November afternoon with a level and a six-pack of beer.
There were two small holes in the wood where the screws had been. My father had been dead for three years. He was the kind of man who left behind things that lasted.
The plate was gone. I walked up the path. The porch paint was different.
Mine was a soft gray that I had chosen from forty swatches on a Sunday afternoon. This was beige, a bright, aggressive beige that had nothing to do with me. The curtains in the front window were new too, frilly and yellow-flowered, the kind my mother had been trying to put in my house since the week I moved in.
I put my key in the lock. It didn’t turn. I tried again.
I jiggled the handle. Nothing. They had changed the locks.
I knocked, and from inside I heard my mother’s laugh, high and satisfied, and my sister Claire’s underneath it, deeper and a little mean. The particular sound of two people enjoying themselves. The door opened.
My mother, Brenda, stood in the frame wearing a new dress and the smile she reserved for situations where she was about to ask for something and had already decided she deserved it. Behind her, Claire leaned against the hallway wall, dangling keys from one finger. Keys to a new white SUV now parked in the spot where my car had been.
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