“Jason, how much longer am I supposed to put up with this?”
“Emily, calm down. She’s family too.”
“Family?” Emily’s voice cracked on the word. “Then what am I? I work two jobs, I save every spare dollar I can, and your sister gets to sit around without a real job and live off our money?”
“Megan does work!” Jason said, trying to defend her.
“Where? Doing what? A few shifts at some little store? Jason, Megan is healthy. She has two hands and two feet. She can go earn her own money.”
Jason’s face darkened.
“You don’t understand. Megan has children.”
“Half the country has children,” Emily snapped. “Does that mean everyone should survive by reaching into somebody else’s wallet?”
Right then, last month flashed through Emily’s mind. Jason had “loaned” his sister about $165 then. Before that, he had handed his mother $110. Emily began adding it up in her head, and the total made her stomach twist. Over the past year, her husband’s relatives had “borrowed” more than $2,200 from them. Not one dollar had ever come back.
The next day, just as Jason had promised, Linda arrived. For a woman who had supposedly been suffering from blood pressure problems, his mother looked surprisingly fresh. Her cheeks were rosy, she wore a new dress, and her hair had clearly been done by a professional.
“Emily, you’ve gotten so thin,” Linda said before anything else. “You really don’t take care of yourself.”
Emily said nothing. She simply set the table. Linda made herself comfortable and, as usual, began her familiar performance.
“Oh, life has become so difficult,” she sighed. “Prices keep going up, and my pension is tiny. I’ve even been thinking about finding some small job.”
Jason answered instantly.
“Mom, come on. What kind of job at your age? We’ll help you.”
Emily set the teapot down so hard that the table rattled. Both Jason and Linda turned to stare at her.
“With what, Jason?” Emily asked, her voice icy. “We barely have enough for ourselves.”
“Emily!” her husband said, scandalized.
“What, ‘Emily’?” She turned to her mother-in-law. “Linda, forgive me, but we are hardly making it to the end of the month ourselves. I work two jobs just so we can save at least something.”
Linda pressed her lips into a thin line.
“In our day, women respected their husbands,” she said. “Family came first.”
“In your day, men supported their families,” Emily shot back. “They didn’t sit on their wives’ necks.”
Jason went red.
“Emily, who do you think you are talking like that?”
“I’m saying the truth. Jason, in the past year you changed jobs three times. And each time, you left because you wanted to.”
“That is not true!” he began.
“Oh, I’m sorry. The last time you were fired because you stopped showing up.”
Linda clapped a hand to her chest.
“Jason, what is she saying about you?”
“Mom, Emily is exaggerating…”
“Exaggerating?” Emily went to the cabinet and pulled out the folder where she kept the bills. “Here are the receipts from the last six months. All paid from my card. And here’s the statement from our joint account. In an entire year, Jason put in $440. Four hundred and forty dollars. For the whole year.”
Linda stared silently at the papers. Then she looked back at her daughter-in-law.
“But Jason helps around the house…”
Emily let out a sharp, bitter laugh.
“Helps? Linda, when was the last time your son cooked dinner? When did he do laundry? When did he clean anything?”
That evening, after Linda had gone, a heavy silence settled over the apartment.