My mother smiled with the brightness of someone sharing good news. “We deserve one nice thing before we get too old to enjoy it.”
“You told me you couldn’t afford the labor,” I said.
“We couldn’t afford both,” she said, as though that clarified everything that needed clarifying.
Dad leaned back in his chair with the ease of a man who does not expect to be held accountable for the logic of his own arrangements. “You said you wanted to help. Nobody forced you.”
That is the family trick, the one it takes years to recognize clearly because it is built from materials that look exactly like love. They never forced me. They simply constructed every situation so that saying no would make me selfish, cold, ungrateful, difficult. Then they stood back and described my compliance as generosity.
I screwed the cap back on my water bottle. “I need to finish the west side before the weather turns.”
