That night, I brought it up to Claire. We were sitting on our couch, and I pulled out the folded paper and showed it to her. “Look at this,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. “Your mom left me a to-do list. Taped it to the garage door like I’m hired help.”
Claire barely glanced at it. She shrugged, her eyes already drifting back to her phone. “You know how they are,” she said dismissively. “They appreciate what you do. They’re just not good at expressing it.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that appreciation requires actual expression, that silence and assumption aren’t the same as gratitude. But I swallowed those words like I’d swallowed so many others over the years, forcing them down into that growing pit of resentment I pretended didn’t exist.
The real breaking point came two weeks ago on an ordinary Saturday morning. I had just finished changing the oil in Jim’s pickup truck—a beat-up old Chevy that leaked like a sieve and should have been retired years ago. I was crouched by the front wheel, wiping the grease and oil off my hands with an old rag, when Jim came out onto the porch. Claire and Carol were there too, sitting in the wicker chairs, drinking iced tea and chatting about something.
Jim looked down at me from the porch, and our eyes met. He had this expression on his face, something between amusement and disdain. “You know, Nate,” he said, his voice carrying that casual authority he always used, “if you left tomorrow, we’d just pay someone better to do this stuff. Probably get it done faster too.”
