He stared at you with that lazy disbelief people wear when they have confused patience for weakness.
“You’re insane,” he said. “You’re really doing all this over a drink?” That was when you looked him dead in the eye and spoke with a steadiness so cold even your wife stepped back. You told him that in your house, adults ate from the sweat of their own labor. You told him his mother was not a maid, and you were not an ATM, and if he wanted to keep living like a child with a full-grown man’s appetite, he could do it somewhere else.
He tried to grin through it.
That grin lasted until you carried out the third bag, opened the front door wide, and told him he had ten minutes to get off your property before you changed the locks and canceled the debit card attached to the family account. Your wife broke then. She clung to your arm, sobbing that he was still your baby, still not ready, still figuring things out, and all you could think was that the world had already been chewing through your wife’s kindness for years because she kept wrapping it around a boy who no longer deserved it.
Your son finally stopped acting amused.
He cursed you, loudly and creatively, in the driveway while two houses down a curtain twitched. He said you were a pathetic old man who wanted control because nobody respected you anywhere else. He said if this was about money, you should have just admitted you were bitter that your life had been all work and no freedom. Then he grabbed two bags, kicked the third across the grass, and shouted that he hoped you enjoyed dying alone in your precious little house.
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