Chapter 4 - The Drawer Behind the Mirror
The paper smelled like Brooke’s lavender drawer liners—a synthetic, powdery scent that had settled into the thermal fibers of the register tape.
Grandma June held the receipt up to the harsh white light of the mudroom’s sixty-watt bulb. Her red reading glasses slipped down her nose by half an inch, the braided chain swinging against her chest with every shallow breath she took.
"Mark," she called out.
She didn't shout. She didn't have to. The house had gone dead quiet three minutes ago, right after the kitchen oven timer had finally stopped its frantic electronic beeping. The only sound left in the house was the low, mechanical rattle of the refrigerator compressor and the muffled sound of someone running water into the porcelain sink in the kitchen.
Dad appeared in the doorway of the mudroom. He looked ten years older than he had when he had handed Wyatt the first box at seven-thirty. His flannel shirt was untucked on one side, his thinning hair standing up where his fingers had dragged through it, his face gray and slack.
"Mom," Dad muttered, his voice sounding like gravel grinding in a mixer. "Just... don't take her out in this weather. The roads aren't cleared yet. Let me talk to Brooke. Let me figure out—"
"Mark, whose card ends in 8812?" Grandma June asked.
Dad stopped. He leaned his shoulder against the painted doorframe, his brow furrowing as he processed the question. "What?"
"The credit card ending in 8812," Grandma June repeated. She held out the slip of thermal paper Wyatt had pulled from his hoodie pocket. "It's a Visa. It was used at the Best Buy on Polaris Parkway on December fourth. For eight hundred and sixty-three dollars and forty-two cents."
Dad stared at the receipt, then reached out and took it from her fingers. "I don't have an 8812. Our joint card ends in 3140. My business card is an Amex."
"Wyatt," Grandma June said, turning her head toward the boy who was still standing by the shoe rack, his arms wrapped around his ribs as if he were trying to keep his internal organs from falling out onto the slate floor. "Tell your stepfather what you just told me."
Wyatt swallowed. He didn't look at Dad. He looked down at the heavy black sole of his left boot.
"There's an envelope," Wyatt whispered.
"Wyatt," Dad said, his voice dropping into a low, cautious register, the tone he used when approaching an unstable wall during a teardown. "What envelope, bud?"
"Behind the mirror," Wyatt said. His voice was shaking so badly that the words barely made it past his teeth. "In her bathroom. The medicine cabinet doesn't sit all the way flat against the drywall because the latch is broken. She has three yellow envelopes shoved down into the wall cavity behind the third shelf."
Dad stood completely still for five seconds. A drop of sweat ran down the side of his temple, cutting a clean path through the pale dust that still clung to his hairline from yesterday's job site.
"How do you know that, Wyatt?" Dad asked.
"I was looking for the spare tube of hydrocortisone two weeks ago," Wyatt choked out, the tears finally overflowing his lower lids, tracking down his cheeks and dripping off his jawline onto his faded hoodie. "My eczema was flaring up on my elbows. I pulled the shelf out to see if it fell down behind the baseboard, and... and the envelopes were there. They were open, Mark. They had my dad's name on them."
Dad's mouth opened slightly. "Your dad's name?"
"Mercer," Wyatt sobbed, wiping his sleeve across his nose with a wet, ragged sniff. "The return address said the Department of Job and Family Services. In Cuyahoga County."
A floorboard creaked in the hallway behind Dad.
Brooke was standing there. She had taken off her cream cashmere sweater and put on a long, gray fleece robe that tied tightly around her waist. Her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, but without her sweater, she looked thinner, sharper, like a hunting bird stripped of its decorative plumage.
"Wyatt Mercer," Brooke said, her voice dropping into a cold, venomous hiss that made the boy flinch back against the wall, "you go to your room this instant."
"Don't you touch him," Dad said.
He didn't turn around. He didn't look at her. He took three long strides through the mudroom doorway, brushed past Brooke’s shoulder with enough force that she had to catch herself against the hallway wainscoting, and took the stairs two at a time.
"Mark!" Brooke screamed, her voice cracking into a high, hysterical screech as she scrambled after him, her slippers slapping violently against the treads. "Mark, that is private! That is my personal property! You don't have the legal right to go through my personal effects!"
Grandma June looked at me. Then she looked at Wyatt.
"Put your boots on, Wyatt," Grandma June said.
"Grandma June, I can't—"
"I didn't ask if you could, Wyatt," she said, her voice entirely calm, entirely devoid of pity. "Put your boots on. You are not staying in this house while they tear it down."
Above us, the master bedroom door banged open against its stop with a force that rattled the chandelier in the downstairs foyer. We heard the sound of glass vibrating, followed by the metallic screech of a medicine cabinet door being wrenched beyond its hinges.
Then came the sound of paper tearing.
Wyatt dropped onto the bench beside me. His hands were shaking so violently that he couldn't thread the laces of his boots through the eyelets. I reached down, took the dirty brown laces from his fingers, and pulled them tight, tying a double knot the way Dad had taught me when I was six.
Wyatt looked at me. His eyes were huge, dark, and swimming with an ancient, adult terror.
"She said he wasn't paying," Wyatt whispered to me, his voice barely audible over the screaming upstairs. "She told me my dad hated us. She told me he bought a boat with his new wife and moved to North Carolina and didn't care if we starved."
I didn't know what to say. I had spent three years hating Wyatt Mercer for having newer clothes, for having a mother who organized his birthday parties at trampoline parks, for having the bigger bedroom that faced the backyard instead of the street. I had thought he was Brooke’s accomplice. I had thought they were a team, a polished, coordinated unit designed to push me and my mother into the margins of Dad's life until we disappeared entirely.
Looking at him now, shivering on a wooden bench in a mudroom that smelled of damp wool and salt, I realized he wasn't an accomplice.
He was just the hostage she used to justify the ransom.
Above us, Dad’s voice broke through the ceiling like thunder: "Nine thousand dollars?"
A heavy object hit the floor in the master bedroom—something ceramic or glass, shattering with a sharp, explosive *crack*.
"Mark, listen to me!" Brooke’s voice was wild now, stripped of all its suburban composure, rising into a breathless, animal wail. "He didn't pay for four years! That money belongs to Wyatt! That is back-support from 2022! If I put it in the joint account, the state would have seized half of it for your back business taxes!"
"You kept it in cash?" Dad roared back. "You hid state warrants behind a mirror while I worked seventy-hour weeks to pay down the interest on your Nordstrom card?"
Grandma June stood up, took Wyatt by the collar of his hoodie with one hand, and took my wrist with the other.
"Out," she said.
She pushed open the heavy fiberglass exterior door. The cold hit us like a bucket of well water, clean and sharp and freezing, instantly clearing the synthetic vanilla smell from my nostrils. The snow on the driveway was untracked except for the faint, tire-chain ruts Dad’s truck had made when he’d come home from the grocery store on Christmas Eve.
Grandma June’s twenty-year-old Buick LeSabre sat at the curb, its blue metal roof buried under three inches of white frost.
"Get in the back, both of you," Grandma June ordered, digging her car keys from the pocket of her wool cardigan with fingers that didn't hesitate for a second.
We scrambled across the unplowed driveway, our boots sinking through the crust into the soft, freezing powder beneath. Wyatt carried nothing. He had left the twelve boxes, the Pro console, the four-hundred-dollar tablet credit, and his brand-new neon sneakers behind in the living room. He didn't even have a coat on—just that gray hoodie and the sweatpants that were already soaking up moisture around his ankles.
Grandma June unlocked the Buick with the mechanical key, the lock cylinders popping up with a heavy, satisfying *thunk*.
We slid onto the broad, blue velour bench seat in the rear. The car smelled like old wool, butterscotch drops, and regular unleaded gasoline—the same way it had smelled when I was four years old and Dad would drop me off at her house in Portsmouth for the weekend while he and Mom tried to figure out how to stop screaming at each other.
Grandma June climbed into the front seat, pulled the door shut with a solid, heavy thud, and slid the key into the ignition. The starter groaned twice, the battery protesting the fifteen-degree cold, before the big V6 engine roared to life with a low, vibrating rumble that shook the whole frame of the car.
Through the rear window, I looked back at 412 Sycamore Ridge Lane.
The front door was wide open.
Dad was standing on the porch. He wasn't wearing a jacket. He was holding three thick, yellow manila envelopes in his left hand, the papers inside flapping wildly in the winter wind. In his right hand, he held Brooke’s leather purse by its strap, swinging it at his side like a dead animal.
Behind him, framed in the warm, yellow light of the foyer, Brooke was screaming. Her hands were tangled in her hair, her mouth a black, jagged circle against the white paint of the doorframe.
Dad looked toward the street. He saw the Buick’s exhaust plume rising white and thick into the gray morning air. He saw Wyatt and me sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the blue velour seat, our breath pluming in the freezing cabin.
He didn't run down the driveway. He didn't wave his arms.
He just stood there in the snow, his shoulders sinking, his head dropping forward until his chin touched his chest, holding the stolen money of two different families in his calloused hands while the fake digital fire flickered on the flat screen behind him.
May you like
Grandma June shifted the Buick into reverse. The transmission clunked into gear, the tires bit into the slush at the curb, and we backed out into the silent, white street.
***
