I looked at her.
“A little more? Mom, I transferred ten thousand dollars this month.”
Mary finally glanced up, her tone airy and insolent.
“Big Sis, ten thousand isn’t enough anymore for a family of four.”
For a second I actually thought I had misheard her.
“Excuse me?”
She shrugged one shoulder, blowing lightly on her nails.
“Food’s expensive. Everything’s expensive. You’re acting like that’s some huge amount.”
A laugh almost came out of me, but it wasn’t amusement. It was that sharp, disbelieving edge people get right before anger becomes something colder.
“If ten thousand dollars for groceries and household basics isn’t enough,” I said, “then maybe someone else in this house should get a job and help.”
Mary’s face changed instantly.
“I am trying to get a job.”
“No,” I said. “You’re trying to look like someone trying to get a job. Those aren’t the same thing.”
My mother slammed the grocery circular onto the counter.
“Don’t start on your sister. You know how hard the market is right now.”
“Then let her work part-time,” I snapped. “Half the people in this country work part-time while they’re job hunting full-time. She’s twenty-five, not twelve.”
My mother folded her arms.
“Mary helps around the house. She doesn’t have time to juggle everything.”
I stared at her.
“What exactly does Mary do around this house?”
My father answered before my mother could.
“She carries dishes to the sink after dinner. She does her own laundry. Sometimes she gives me shoulder rubs when my back acts up.”
I looked at him so long he finally shifted in his chair.
I wanted to say that none of those things counted as running a household. I wanted to list out everything I did before eight in the morning while Mary was still asleep. Making breakfast. Packing Dad’s lunch. Answering the property tax letter. Fixing the internet bill when the autopay failed. Refilling the dog food bin before the dog died last winter and I was the one who paid the vet bill too. I wanted to ask whether anyone in that room had ever once, even once, considered how much invisible labor sat under the life they took for granted.
Instead I said, very quietly, “This isn’t sustainable.”
No one answered.
So I said the thing I had been thinking for months.
“Sell the house. Move to Miami. Grandma would put all of us to work in the restaurant, and at least we’d stop pretending this setup makes sense.”
That got my mother’s attention fast.
“Absolutely not. I’m not going back there.”
The response came so quickly it was almost reflex.
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