I didn’t laugh. I didn’t cry. I just stared at the freeze-frame of my mother’s face—red, furious, determined—while she stood in a doorway like she belonged there, like she had every right to be inside whatever house she chose. My father was beside her, shoulders hunched with purpose, gripping the bat the way he used to grip my bicycle seat when I was eight and learning to ride. Only now he wasn’t steadying me. He was swinging.
If you’d asked me five years ago whether my parents were capable of breaking into a house with baseball bats, I would’ve told you no. Absolutely not. My dad complained about his lower back when he folded laundry. My mom got anxious if a restaurant had live music. They were the kind of people who didn’t even jaywalk.
But five years ago, I still believed in the version of my family that existed on the surface. The weekly dinners. The jokes. The familiar routine that made it easy to ignore how conditional their love was, how carefully it was rationed out based on what you could provide.