When the Countdown Ended, I Became the Family Curse Chapter 08 (Continue)
“How much?” Dad asked, “Twenty thousand dollars?”
Most of Dad’s settlement had gone to the funerals. There was almost nothing left.
Mom brought in two thousand dollars a month from the market. After bills, there was nothing.
They started asking everyone – family, neighbors, anyone. An aunt gave two thousand, another scraped
together a thousand.
They were still ten thousand short. That night Dad sat at the kitchen table and smoked through half a pack
without saying a word.
Mom sat next to him, crying. “What about the house?” she said. “We already lost Mia. We can’t lose Sean
too.”
“And live where?” Dad asked.
“I don’t care,” Mom said. “Anywhere. As long as Sean can walk.”
Dad was quiet for a long time. He stubbed his cigarette out on the table, leaving a black ring burned into the
wood.
“I’ll go see Mark tomorrow,” Dad said. “He’s got something on a construction crew. It’s brutal work, but it
pays.”
Mark Evans ran a construction crew on the outskirts of town. I watched Dad from behind – his shoulders
hunched, his spine curved like something had been pressing on it for years.
I remembered being small enough to ride on his shoulders. He used to stand so straight. He’d told me once
that he’d carry me anywhere I ever needed to go.
A year later, something happened at the site.
He wasn’t the one who fell. But he watched a man step off the scaffolding and drop six stories. The man
died before he hit the ground. When Dad came home that night, he was someone else.
He’d sit at the table muttering – about Mia, about what he’d done, about how none of it mattered anymore. “I
deserve this,” he’d say. “All of it.”
He and the other man had swapped shifts at the last minute. Dad was supposed to be standing exactly
where the guy fell. Mom held him that night and neither of them slept.
I watched them, and the ache where my heart used to be wouldn’t stop. Six more months dragged by.
They went to a loan shark for the rest. Sean got his surgery. It worked – he walked better afterward than he
ever had.
But the debt was a living thing – it grew with interest, and it didn’t stop. Mom gave up the market stall and
took a factory job, twelve-hour shifts, six days a week.
She’d come home with her feet so swollen she couldn’t pull her shoes off. Dad was barely functioning –
picking up odd jobs here and there, just enough to afford cigarettes.
Two years later, the men came to collect.
They sat in the living room like they already owned it – legs crossed, cigarettes going, filling the house with
smoke. End of the month, they said. Pay up or things were going to get ugly.
Mom was begging – pleading, crying, saying they just needed more time. Dad sat in the corner and didn’t
move, didn’t speak, didn’t blink.
Sean came tearing out of the kitchen with a knife. The biggest one knocked him to the floor before he could
take three steps. “You want to pull a knife on me, kid? Really?”
“I’ll be back next week for the money,” the man said. When they were gone, Mom pulled Sean into her arms
and held on.
I drifted closer to Sean. His leg – the one that was supposed to be healed – was swollen again.
Three years. The grass around Grandmother’s grave and mine had grown thick and wild.
Sean still comes every anniversary. He brings flowers. He still walks with a limp.
“Mia,” he said, kneeling by the headstone. “Mom wanted me to tell you – she dreamed about you. You were wearing that dress. The one you loved.”
I sat on my own headstone, swinging my legs as I listened.
“Yesterday he said he wanted to buy you candy,” Sean went on. “Said you always loved it. Mom told him you didn’t need anything anymore. Not where you are now.”
Dad was the same – some days almost present, most days not.
A gust of wind pulled a petal loose and caught it in his hair. I watched him stand, brush the dirt from his knees, and limp back down the hill.
I held up my hand. The sunlight went right through it – I was barely there, barely anything at all. It was over.
But they still had to live. They’d carry it with them – the guilt, the regret, and Grandmother’s last words ringing in every bad thing that happened for the rest of their lives.
The wind picked up, bending the grass around the graves and making it whisper. I looked up. Grandmother
was there – just a little way off-waving at me.
“Come on, sweet girl,” she said. “It’s time to go home.”