My own daughter stood in my kitchen and told me I could either wait on her husband hand and foot or pack a bag and leave. I was sixty-six years old. It was my kitchen.

My name was on every brick of that house. And she said it to me like she was letting go of the hired help.

I didn’t yell. I want to be honest about that, because later on people will tell me I should have. I just looked at her, then I looked past her at Brad in the chair, and I made a choice I’m still not all the way proud of.

Let me back up a second. Diane and I bought that house in 1991. We raised Megan in it. Diane picked out this ugly floral armchair the year before she got sick, and she’d sit in it every single night with her tea and her crossword. After she passed, I never let anybody else sit there. It just felt like hers. Stupid maybe. But that chair was the one thing I had left that still smelled a little like her perfume.

Megan and Brad moved in two years ago. To save money, they said. Get on their feet. I said yes before they even finished asking, because that’s what you do for your kid. I paid the mortgage like always. I paid the power, the water, the groceries. I never made a thing about whose name was on the papers in the drawer. I figured family doesn’t keep score like that.

The first year was fine, I guess. The cracks started small. Brad stopped saying thank you. Then he started telling me where I could and couldn’t be in my own home. “Can you eat in your room?

The game’s on.” Little stuff. I let it go because I didn’t want to make Megan choose.

Then one night I came downstairs and there he was. Sitting in Diane’s chair. Beer in his hand, feet up, watching my TV. I asked him real quiet if he’d mind moving. He didn’t even look at me. “It’s just a chair, man.” Just a chair. I went back upstairs and I’m not embarrassed to say I sat on the edge of my bed for a while.

It kept getting worse from there. He’d leave dishes piled up and look at me like I was supposed to handle them. Megan started talking to me the same way he did, short and annoyed, like I was a problem they were managing. The day it broke, I’d asked her to ask Brad to keep the music down because I had a doctor thing in the morning. That’s all.