I couldn’t have used it even if I wanted to. There was no doorknob.
I could hear someone making their way across the living room. The curtain on the small window at the top half of the front door moved, and I saw my mother peek outside. She stared for a few seconds, unmoving.
She eventually opened the door a few inches. Far enough that I could see that, at two o’clock in the afternoon, she was still in her pajamas, which were an oversized Weezer T-shirt one of her exes had left behind. I hated that shirt because I liked that band. Every time she wore it, she ruined them a little more for me.
She asked what I was doing there, and I didn’t immediately want to give her my reasons. Instead, I asked her if Tim was home.
She opened the door a bit more and folded her arms so tightly together, it made one of the band members on her shirt look decapitated. She told me Tim was at work and asked what I wanted.
I asked her if I could come inside. She contemplated my question and then looked over my shoulder, her eyes scanning the street. I don’t know what she was checking for. Maybe she was afraid a neighbor would witness her allowing her own son to visit.
She left the door open for me while she went to her bedroom to change. The house was eerily dark, I remember. All the curtains were drawn, creating a sense of confusion on what time of day it was. It didn’t help that the clock on the stove was blinking, and the time was off by over eight hours. If I still lived there, that’s something else I would have fixed.
If I still lived there, the curtains would have been open. The kitchen counters wouldn’t have been covered with dirty dishes. There wouldn’t have been a missing doorknob, or an unkempt yard, or days’ worth of soggy newspapers pil ing up. I realized in that moment that I was the one who had been keeping that house together all the years I was growing up.
It gave me hope. Hope that maybe they realized I was an asset rather than an inconvenience, and they would allow me to return home until I finished high school.
I saw a doorknob kit on the kitchen table, so I picked it up and inspected it. The receipt was beneath it. I looked at the date on the receipt, and it was purchased over two weeks prior.
The doorknob was the right fit for the front door. I didn’t know why Tim hadn’t installed it if he’d had it for two weeks, so I found the tools in a kitchen drawer and opened the package. It was several minutes before my mother came out of her room, but by the time she did, I already had the new doorknob in place on the front door.
She asked what I was doing, so I twisted the knob and opened the door a little to show her it worked.
I’ll never forget her reaction. She sighed and said, “Why do you do shit like this? It’s like you want him to hate you.” She snatched the screwdriver out of my hand and said, “Maybe you should go before he realizes you were here.”
Part of the reason I could never get along with anyone in that house was because their reactions always seemed misplaced. When I would help out around the house without being asked, Tim would say it was because I was antagonizing him. When I wouldn’t help with something, he’d say it was because I was lazy and ungrateful.
“I’m not trying to upset Tim,” I said. “I fixed your doorknob. I was just trying to help.”
“He was going to do it as soon as he had the time.”
Part of Tim’s problem was that he always had the time. He never kept a job more than six months and spent more time gambling than he did with my mother.
“Did he get a job?” I remember asking her.
“He’s looking.”
“Is that where he is right now?”
I could see in her expression that Tim wasn’t out job hunting. Wherever he was, I was sure it was putting my mother even more in debt than she already was. Her debt was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back and got me kicked out in the first place. When I found a stash of maxed-out, past-due credit card bills in her name, I confronted Tim about them.
He didn’t like being confronted. He preferred the preteen version of me he met to the near adult I grew into. He liked the version of me he could push around without being pushed back. The version of me he could manipulate without me calling him out.
That version of me left between the ages of fifteen and sixteen. Once Tim realized he couldn’t threaten me physically anymore, he tried ruining my life in other ways. One of those ways was leaving me without a place to live.
I eventually swallowed my pride and came right out with it. I told my mother I had nowhere to go.
My mother’s expression wasn’t just void of empathy, it was full of annoyance. “I hope you aren’t asking to move back in after everything you did.”