UNCLE HAROLD’S ESTATE

My parents gave me exactly one week to “think it over.”

When I held firm, my father carried my suitcase out and set it on the front step, refusing to even look me in the eye, his voice flat and cold, like he was speaking to a stranger.

“If you can’t sacrifice one thing for this family, then you don’t need to live in this house anymore.

Go on.

Don’t make your mother look at your face again.”

I stood on that sidewalk in the early-November Oregon cold, watching my own front door slam shut, while Tiffany stood behind the upstairs curtain, saying nothing, opening nothing.

I called the only person I could think of — Uncle Harold, my father’s older brother, a man the family rarely spoke of, since he’d left Millbrook twenty years earlier to build a life in Seattle, and because of some old rift with my father no one ever fully explained.

I only had his number because, once, at my grandfather’s funeral, he’d pressed a business card into my hand and said, “If you ever need anything, call me.”

He drove five straight hours through the night to come get me.