My name is Abigail Turner, and the last time I saw my father up close my cheek had already started to swell, my shoulder was screaming out of its socket, and my sister was looking down at me like I was an inconvenience lying on the floor of our parents’ garage.
“You should have signed the mortgage,” she whispered.
You would be amazed how clearly you can hear spite when your ears are ringing. The concrete felt icy under my palms and my knees burned as if someone had rubbed them raw with sandpaper, while the taste of iron spread across my tongue and warm blood slid from my nose and split lip, and my vision narrowed and widened in waves as if the world was fading in and out.
I stared at the oil stain near the floor drain because that dark mark was familiar to me from childhood when I used to ride my bike through the garage while my father worked on old engines, back when the air smelled like cut grass and cheap cologne instead of whiskey and anger.
“Get up,” my father snapped.
His name was Harold Turner, a retired construction foreman who liked to think of himself as the unquestioned authority of the family, and he stood over me breathing heavily as if he had just finished lifting lumber rather than shoving his own daughter into a metal shelf. I tried to push myself upright but my left arm refused to cooperate and pain shot through my shoulder like a live wire.
“I can’t,” I gasped.
“You can’t?” he mocked harshly while spreading his arms. “You can’t sign a simple piece of paper and help your own family?”
Behind him my sister Brittany leaned in the doorway that connected the garage to the kitchen with her arms crossed and her expression annoyed rather than concerned. “Dad, she is being dramatic,” she said with a shrug that made my stomach twist.
“All this over a mortgage,” my father growled while pointing toward me.
Two weeks earlier the whole disaster had started with a cheerful phone call from Brittany who sounded unusually friendly. “Hey Abby, we are having dinner at Mom and Dad’s on Friday,” she said in a bright voice that immediately made me suspicious.
I worked long hours as a financial analyst at an investment firm in Denver, Colorado, and my relationship with my father had been tense for years, yet part of me still wanted to believe family dinners meant something good.