Colleen stepped back into the kitchen with her face pale from shock and slammed the front door shut behind her, and Paige followed close with her hands shaking.
“What the hell did you just do, Walt? You just threw Wes out of the house!” Colleen screamed, marching straight at her husband.
Walt picked up his half-made sandwich and didn’t even look at her.
“I didn’t throw anybody out. That ungrateful little shit decided to walk away on his own two feet,” said Walt, and he took a bite.
“Dad, you were screaming at him and calling him a parasite! We heard everything from the porch!” Paige shouted, tears already welling up.
“How could you say those horrible things to him when he has nowhere else to go?”
Walt slammed his fist onto the counter, rattling the iced tea glass.
“Don’t you start raising your voice at me in my own house, Paige! I don’t have to explain what I do under my own roof to anybody!” he roared, pointing a greasy finger at her.
“I am the one who pays the bills here, and I am the one who has been feeding that useless leech for eight years, so if I want him gone, he goes!”
“He is my NEPHEW, Walt! His mother was my sister, so this is his home too!” Colleen exploded, her voice cracking from pure fury as she stepped right into his space.
“You have always hated him because he wanted to study theater instead of working at your stupid plant with you, and you have been looking for an excuse to kick him out since the day of the funeral!”
“Oh, give me a break, Colleen! His mother was a complete disaster who left him with nothing but debts and trouble!” Walt sneered, spit flying.
“He contributes absolutely nothing to this family, he treats this place like a hotel, disappearing for days without answering his phone, so I am SICK of it!”
“He was trapped and hurting, because you never gave him one single word of support in eight years!” Colleen yelled, and the tears finally spilled over and ran down her cheeks.
“You broke him, Walt. Do you hear me? You finally did it, you broke him, and if anything happens to that boy out there in the dark tonight, it will be completely your fault!”
“I don’t give a damn what you think!” Walt shouted back, face going that dark purple again.
“I’m done being careful around that sensitive little bastard! He shoved me, right here, in my own kitchen, so he crossed the line, and I am GLAD he’s gone!”
“Mom, we have to go find him. He left without a jacket, or his things, and his hands were BLEEDING, did you see his hands?” Paige cried out, pulling her mother toward the hallway.
“Yes. Yes, we’re going right now, he couldn’t have gone far,” said Colleen, wiping her face and grabbing her car keys off the hook.
Walt stepped out of the kitchen and blocked the hallway with a cold, furious stare.
“If you walk out that door to go look for that piece of shit, don’t you dare come back tonight!” Walt screamed, his voice bouncing off the walls.
“I mean it, Colleen! If you choose him over me, you can stay out there in the street with him!”
Colleen didn’t even blink.
She looked at him for one long second, eight years passing through her face like weather, and then she pushed past his shoulder with pure disgust.
“Step aside, Walt. I don’t care about your threats anymore,” she said, and she yanked the front door open and rushed out onto the porch with Paige running right behind her into the cold night air.
“DON’T COME BACK! I swear to God, if you leave this house, you are BOTH dead to me!”
Walt bellowed from the threshold, and then he slammed the heavy wooden door so hard the glass panes rattled in their frames.
The porch light was still on.
Colleen and Paige ran down the driveway into the quiet street, scanning the dark sidewalks under the dim streetlamps.
“Wes! Wes, where are you!” Colleen called out into the empty neighborhood, and her voice bounced off the houses and came back to her sounding small.
“Wes, please answer us!” Paige shouted, her voice cracking in the wind as they walked fast toward the main avenue.
They walked for blocks.
They checked the dark corners and the park with the cold metal benches and the bus stop where he’d waited for shifts his whole life, calling his name into the empty streets, and the streets stayed empty, because Wes had already vanished into the shadows of the city, and after an hour of it Colleen stopped under a flickering streetlight and buried her face in her hands and let out a broken sob, because she knew.
Somewhere under the crying and the fear, in a place she’d never let herself look before tonight, she knew they had lost him, and the family was completely shattered.
She was looking at her with wide, panicked eyes.
“Mom, should we go to the police station right now? They could help us look for him,” said Paige, clutching her jacket tight.
Colleen shook her head and wiped a fresh tear off her cheek.
“We have to wait seventy-two hours. They won’t do anything for a missing adult before that, especially one who walked out on his own,” said Colleen, and her voice trembled in the dark.
They stood under the dim streetlight while the cold wind blew past them, and then Paige looked back down their own street toward the house with the porch light burning, and something in her young face went hard and final.
“What do we do now? We can’t go back there after what he said,” said Paige.
“Mom, for me? My dad is dead.”
“He died the day his business went bankrupt, and what’s been walking around that kitchen ever since is just what was left over. That thing in there is not my father.”
“Paige, stop it right now, you cannot talk about him that way! No matter what he does, he is still your father!” Colleen snapped, but it came out sharp and tired and broken, because there was no iron left in it to back the words up.
Paige looked down at the pavement and sighed deep.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I don’t want to start another fight, we have enough problems. But what do we do then? We’re literally locked out on the street,” said Paige, shaking her head.
Colleen wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and started walking them back toward where they’d left the car, and her eyes were empty and exhausted in the streetlight.
“There’s only one place left for us to go tonight. We can’t stay here,” said Colleen.
“We’re going to your grandmother’s house.”
They got in the car, and Colleen pulled away from the curb, and in the rearview mirror the house shrank and shrank until it was just a porch light burning in the dark over an empty street, and the household that had opened this whole story with a rant about a line in a budget was officially destroyed, brick by brick, by the man still standing in it.
And twelve miles away, on the ninth floor of the Marlowe Grand, the keys to suite 714 sat on the nightstand next to a ledger that glowed soft in the dark, in a suite with no other family in it at all, waiting for a man with no home left to come back to the only one that would have him.