Chapter 7: The Speakerphone Trap
He awkwardly fumbled the device out of his pocket and squinted down at the glowing caller ID. I watched the blood instantly drain from his ruddy cheeks, leaving behind a sickly, ashen gray. He let it ring loudly once. He let it ring twice, his thumb hovering over the red reject button, perhaps desperately hoping the caller would just give up. And when the ringing persisted, tearing through the tense silence of my kitchen, his nervous thumb accidentally swiped the wrong icon.
Somehow, in his panic, he activated the external speakerphone. My father has never once in his life successfully figured out how to operate the speaker function on purpose—except now, when the universe demanded it.
The very first noise that violently flooded my kitchen was the chaotic, ear-piercing sound of two four-year-old boys screaming bloody murder in the confined backseat of a minivan.
Then came my sister Lindsay’s voice, pitching wildly, wet and violently shaking with hysterics.
“Daddy! Daddy, the key won’t turn! The gold key you gave me doesn’t work in the door!”
My mother whipped her head toward the device, her maternal instincts finally activating. “Lindsay? Honey, take a breath. Where are you right now?”
“I’m standing at the cabin! Up at the lake!” Lindsay wailed over the speaker, the sound of her pounding a fist against a steering wheel echoing through the line. “Daddy explicitly told me we could have the whole place for the long weekend! Dwayne is driving up right after he finishes his shift tomorrow. I spent all morning packing the entire damn van! The boys have been excitedly asking about jumping off the dock for a solid week! And the deadbolt is entirely different! And there’s a dirty cardboard box shoved on the porch with your disgusting fishing hat inside it! And… and there’s a strange man standing here!”
She took a massive, gulping, panicked breath, the kind a child takes before a tantrum.
“He… he was actually really polite, but he keeps telling me the property doesn’t belong to you! He says it legally belongs to Shelby! He says it has always, legally belonged to Shelby! Daddy, what is he talking about? Is that true?”
My father stood frozen like a statue. He said absolutely nothing. He simply stared down at the small rectangular device trembling in his massive hand as if it had suddenly transformed into a venomous snake that had just bitten him.
“You promised me it was yours!” Lindsay continued, her crying escalating into a furious shriek. “You swore to me that Grandma left it to you in the will! You sat in my living room and told me that the minute the twins started kindergarten, you were going to officially transfer the deed into my name so our family would always possess a legacy lake house! I told Dwayne’s mother! I bragged to my entire friend group! We already officially invited his entire extended family up here for the Fourth of July barbecue!”
My mother turned her head with agonizing slowness, her eyes locking onto my father’s terrified face. It was a specific, horrifying look. It was the exact expression a devastated wife gives an oncologist after he mutters, “I’m so sorry,” before he has even finished scanning the pathology report.
“Abe,” she whispered, her voice stripped of all its armor. “You… you told her that?”
He didn’t offer her an answer, either.
And as I stood anchored at the head of my own kitchen table, watching the chaos unfold, a profound realization washed over me. My sister was currently hyperventilating in a dirt driveway because a physical lock had been changed and a grand, generational promise had just been exposed as a hollow lie. My mother was standing in horrified shock because she had just discovered her husband of forty years had maliciously spun a massive, fictional web regarding the legal ownership of a piece of real estate, pitting his own daughters against each other.
They both genuinely believed that this current revelation was the absolute rock bottom. They thought this was the worst of the fallout.
They still had no earthly idea what was waiting on my laptop.
My father’s trembling thumb finally moved to swipe at the red icon on the screen. “Lindsay, stop crying. I’ll… I’ll call you right back.”
“Don’t,” I commanded, my voice slicing through the noise like a whip. “Do not dare hang up that phone. She needs to hear the rest of this, too.”
He slowly raised his eyes, looking at me with the exact same expression of bewildered terror he used to reserve for a massive, hidden pothole that suddenly proved to be infinitely deeper than he had initially calculated.
I leaned forward, projecting my voice clearly toward the phone in his hand. “Lindsay? It’s Shelby. Are the twins safely buckled inside the van?”
A loud, wet sniffle echoed over the speaker, followed by a much smaller, broken voice. “Yeah. The man… Cody… he gave them both cherry popsicles from a cooler in his truck to make them stop screaming.”
“Good. I want you to stay right there in the driver’s seat and just listen to me for one minute. Is that alright?”
“Okay,” my sister whispered. I honestly don’t believe she had spoken the word ‘okay’ to me with that level of submissive vulnerability since the years we shared a bunk bed.
I shifted my gaze back to my father. The trap was ready.
“Dad,” I prompted, my voice eerily pleasant. “Why don’t you go ahead and explain to Mom precisely why your online host listing was permanently suspended by the platform yesterday afternoon?”
My mother’s head snapped back toward me, her brow furrowing in deep confusion. “Listing? What on earth are you talking about? What listing?”
“Shelby… please. Don’t,” my father pleaded. It was barely a whisper. It was the very first quiet, subdued sound that had escaped his throat since he barged through my front door.
“You have five seconds to tell her the truth, Dad. Or I will gladly do it for you.”
He remained paralyzed in silence.
So, I calmly walked to the far end of the wooden table. I flipped open the silver lid of my laptop. I entered my password, and I physically swiveled the glowing screen so that it directly faced my mother.
Then, I began to read the text out loud. I did this partially because my mother’s required reading glasses were buried deep inside her leather purse, but primarily because this was a reckoning that every single soul occupying that room desperately needed to hear.
Let the burning begin.
