"Uncle, Aunt! Don't listen to Lucy, she's talking nonsense! I'm just borrowing Mel's name for a little while! Just one month! The second her brother's wedding is over, we'll go straight to the notary and sign the house back over to Lucy!"
"Notary?" A cold laugh slipped out of me.
"Stewart, do you think I know nothing about the law? Once school-district residency is registered against this house, it can't be changed for six years! You buy the place outright with my parents' money, then turn around and take it to the bank for a business loan against it. And once you and Melinda run off with the cash, who exactly are my parents supposed to chase down for it?"
I stared at him, and it all came back to me: how he'd wrung money out of me time after time, a brother's startup, a sick relative, and then gone straight out to buy Melinda handbags and jewelry.
I'd swallowed it and swallowed it, and this was what it got me. Today he was treating my parents' burial savings like a favor to hand his ex-girlfriend.
I was wide awake now.
But my mother was still clinging to one last thread of hope.
Afraid of making my future marriage harder, she fought back her tears and, in a trembling voice, pleaded with me:
"Lucy... how about... how about we just have him write an IOU... and leave it at that?"
"You hear that!" The moment Stewart caught my mother's words, his arrogance flared right back up.
"Lucy Pruitt! Listen to your elders and pay the rest of the money already!"
His shamelessness was beyond anything I'd imagined.
I looked around me, at my father's hands shaking with fury, at my mother's small, pleading eyes, at the crowd pointing and whispering.
The agent was still pushing beside me: "Miss Pruitt, are you buying this place or not? Give us a straight answer!"
I didn't answer.
I just balled up the torn down-payment receipt in my hand, right in front of everyone, and crushed it tight.
Then I hurled it into the trash can beside me.
Stewart lost it and shrieked, "Lucy Pruitt! Without this school-district house, Mel's brother can't get married!"
I looked at him coldly and couldn't be bothered to give him a single word.
I took my parents by the arm and walked toward the doors of the records office without looking back.
Behind us, Stewart and Melinda's shouting faded further and further away.
We'd barely made it out the front doors of the records office when my phone started buzzing like mad.
I opened it. Stewart had pulled Melinda into the family group chat, and Melinda was there defending herself.
Attached was a photo of her red-rimmed eyes and an ID card streaked with tear stains, dabbed at with a tissue.
"I really never thought it would turn into this. Stewart, I'm sorry, it's all my fault, I made you and Lucy fight."
The group chat shared by both our families exploded in the same instant.
Message after message came flooding in, all tagging me and Stewart, asking what on earth had gone wrong with the transfer of the new house.
My mother sat down on the flower bed at the edge of the road, her thumb typing something and deleting it, deleting it and typing again.
After a long silence, she gave in after all, her voice thick with tears:
"Lucy, how about... how about we just do what Stewart says, go do the notary first... the engagement's already set, all our relatives and friends know..."
"No!"
My father snatched the passbook out of her hands and shoved it into the inner pocket over his chest, quick and unyielding.
"Don't reply! Not one word!" he cut my mother off sharply.
"This is flat-out fraud, and you're still making excuses for him? Is the Pruitt family really so short on people that we have to grind our own daughter into the dirt like this?"
My father's words hit me like a shot straight to the heart.
Just then, in the group chat, my cousin Danielle Coleman got so angry she fired off a long voice message.
Her voice came through shrill and loud, brimming with rage.
"Stewart, are you even human?! You take my aunt and uncle's burial savings and buy your ex-girlfriend a wedding house? What is Lucy supposed to do? Where does that leave our family's face? You ungrateful, backstabbing freeloader!"
