My Name Was Missing From the Floor Plan, Luckily on the Deed

I gave a bitter little laugh. All I did was hand back to them the very words they'd used on me, and just like that I was the one being unreasonable, impossible, always fighting over things? Before I could say anything more, Alison clicked her tongue. "It's not that I favor my parents." "But you know it yourself. Your pension runs a few thousand a month. Even living alone you'd be comfortable. My parents don't have any retirement insurance. If they had to live on their own, think how miserable that would be." "And don't say this has nothing to do with you. If you'd taken my hint back then and made the lump-sum back payment for them, they wouldn't be stuck with two hundred a month. Would I be doing any of this otherwise?" "Besides, you've seen the floor plan. It's not that I won't let you stay. There's just nowhere to put you." I looked at Alison's floor plan again. Six rooms. Even the future dog had a room set aside, and I didn't, which meant that in their eyes I ranked below a dog they didn't even own yet. Alison saw me staring at the pet room and said, a little impatiently, "I can't just cut off my own parents because I married into your family, can I?" "Honestly, it's not like I absolutely refuse to let you stay." "Tell you what. You work a little harder and upgrade to a house, or buy my parents another place, and then we'll let you move in." "I really can't just abandon my parents!" I rolled my eyes and told her, in my head, to keep dreaming. Before I could turn it down, Jordan and Margot suddenly started dabbing at their eyes. "How about your father and I share one room. I don't sleep well anyway, I'm used to it. A few less hours won't kill me, not in the short run." "After all, she's the one who paid for this place. We're living under someone else's roof. We ought to know where we stand." "Please, don't be angry. When you're angry, Alison gets caught in the middle, and when Alison's caught in the middle, it breaks my heart." Three: The truth is, I don't blame Alison at all, and I don't hold Jordan and Margot's behavior against them either. The three of them are a family. She's a good daughter who knows to look after her own parents and give them a comfortable old age, and they're parents who want to be with their daughter and have three generations under one roof. Whatever they did, you couldn't really fault them for it. What I cared about was Sid's attitude. "Sid, Alison knows how to take care of her parents. She's set aside two suites for them. And you?" "Have you spared a single thought for your mother?" Sid looked awkward. Of course he hadn't. Ever since he married Alison, from the moment the two of them coaxed me into selling my house, he'd stopped thinking of me as his mother at all. But with the question put to him that plainly, he still didn't know how to answer. "Alison, we're planning to have a baby anyway. How about we skip the pet and give the pet room to my mom?" "That way we can save her pension too, put it toward the household." Alison's brow furrowed. Jordan and Margot only cried harder. "There's no need to trouble yourselves!" "We've decided. We won't stay here." "We're country folk, we're not used to a nice place like this anyway. Let your mother have our suite." "We'll go back to the village, or sleep in the carport downstairs, or under the overpass beside the building. We can take hardship. Anywhere's the same to us!" "Besides, this is just our lot in life." Listening to them, Alison's eyes welled up, aching for them. "Sid, how did I never notice you were such a mama's boy?" "You said you'd give me anything I wanted, and now you can't even make room for my parents." "Since your mother's all you have room for in your heart, let's get divorced!" "You can spend the rest of your days looking after your mother!"

With that, Alison burst into tears and ran out. Jordan and Margot didn't even look at Sid. They just said they were very disappointed in him, then followed her out. Sid stamped his feet in frustration. Part of him wanted to lay into me, but he was more afraid of not catching up to Alison, so he only shot me a glare, said I'd better be ready to apologize, and chased after them. Over the next few days, my apology never came, so they came back to find me. Alison pulled out a new floor plan. The dog's name had been crossed off, and under it, grudgingly, my name had been written in. "There, happy now? You can move in too." I let out a couple of dry laughs. "Well, then, I should thank you." Alison didn't catch the sarcasm in my voice. Or maybe she caught it and simply didn't care. Either way, she took it as a yes, took it that I'd agreed. So she immediately produced the renovation plan. "Sid and I don't have jobs right now, but we're planning to enjoy our life as a couple, so you'll have to oversee the renovation." "Every material you use has to be the best, the most eco-friendly." Sid nodded along. "Renovation's a lot of work, so you have to be here twenty-four hours a day watching it. You don't have a place anyway, so just give up your rental, buy a tent, and camp in the stairwell." "Otherwise the workers will do a sloppy job, maybe even piss all over the place, and then how gross would it be to live in?" "After all, this is being set up for you to live in, so you can't just phone it in." I almost laughed out loud. I'd wondered why they were suddenly so generous, so willing to let me move in. Turned out they wanted me to pay for the renovation and be their free supervisor, and when it was all finished, whether I'd actually get to live there at all was anyone's guess. But I really couldn't be bothered to argue with them. So I just nodded, looking disappointed. "I understand." "It's the place I'll be living in, of course I'll put my heart into it, do it right." Five: The four of them left, all pleased with themselves. Maybe they were afraid I'd start finding them a nuisance, or afraid I'd push my luck and refuse to live in that smallest pet room. So they didn't stick around. They gave the excuse of going back to Alison's hometown to throw a delayed wedding banquet, gave up their rental, and cleared out. The only reason I knew all this was because Sid came looking for money over text. "I know we didn't invite you to the makeup wedding, but you're my mother. You can't just pretend you don't know and refuse to chip in, can you?" "This wedding's going to be a big rolling banquet. We're planning to run it for two weeks, so people can see that having a daughter comes with real prestige too. It'll cost a lot, so hurry up and wire me the money." I was busy with the renovation and had no interest in dealing with him. But I also knew that if I ignored him, he might just show up and cause a scene, and then the renovation would get interrupted again. So I thought about it and sent over the renovation contract and the itemized list. "You said to use the best of everything, so I've bumped the renovation budget up again. I've got no money left now." "Either you skip the rolling banquet and keep the wedding low-key, or I downgrade the materials I haven't bought yet by a few grades and give you the difference!" Sid stayed in the typing state for a long time. But I wasn't worried. Sid wasn't stupid. He knew the difference between one good meal and eating well every single day. If I gave him the money now and downgraded the renovation, then living there afterward would be miserable, so he agonized over it for a long time and finally sent back a "never mind." "The renovation's the most important thing." "We'll pay for the wedding ourselves." "But you know this is your responsibility. I'm paying now, so once the renovation's done, you hand over your pension card to me, pay me back what the wedding cost, and then I'll return it to you."

To keep Sid off my back, I didn't refuse. But I didn't agree either, so after chewing on it for a bit I just typed back a single "1." It meant I'd seen the message. That "1" made Sid furious. After he and Alison flooded my messages with thousands of words each, he unilaterally launched into a cold war with me. Still, I knew every last detail of what he did back at Alison's hometown. Not because I went digging. They set up a group chat specifically to "punish" me, posting videos in it, broadcasting the whole thing to me in real time. The first video was their rolling country feast. Sid on his knees, kowtowing to Jordan and Margot. "From now on you're my real parents. People laugh at you for having only a daughter, for dying out with no line to carry on, but after today that's over." "I'm your son now. Alison and I are going to have three kids, and they'll take all three of our surnames. Let's see who dares say the Hansens have no one to carry the name!" The second video was Alison explaining to the camera. "So having a son means you have to put up with a daughter-in-law's abuse, but having a daughter means you get to claim someone else's son!" "From now on Sid is the Hansen family's live-in son-in-law!" Some of the others looked envious, but one still asked, "And Sid's parents are okay with this?" Alison smiled. "I don't have in-laws. My in-laws died a long time ago. Right, Sid?" Sid gave a stiff little laugh. He knew the video was being sent for me to watch, so he didn't dare look at the camera, but his voice was firm enough. "Right, right, right." "I don't have birth parents anymore. From now on Alison's parents are my parents!" The third video was Jordan and Margot. "Our daughter and son-in-law are so devoted. They've set us up with a place in the city, still being renovated." "No need to keep an eye on it, there's a maid watching over it. Once I move in, I'll have a maid to order around!" .... Seven: There were a lot of videos like that, and I watched every single one, because I had to watch them to be sure of exactly what kind of thing I'd raised. When Sid saw I still hadn't replied after a long while, he got scared I'd drop dead from the anger, so he added a few soft words telling me not to be upset. Of course I wasn't upset. I just saved all of the videos, to keep for later. In the days that followed. They stayed back in the hometown. Not that they didn't want to come back, but not long after the feast, Alison found out she was pregnant. They figured coming back just meant renting again, and I'd probably dump the renovation-watching on them, plus they decided the country air back home was better, more natural, so they'd wait until I finished the renovation to talk about it. "We've decided this first child will take the Hansen name, but by blood he's still your grandson." "You're about to have a grandson, so put your heart into that renovation, and then some!" "When it's done, you move right in and breathe out the formaldehyde, but you can't sleep in a bedroom. You can only sleep in the maid's quarters." "Because that's mine and Alison's home. We're the owners and we haven't even moved in yet. If you sleep there it'd bring bad luck." "We already promised you a bedroom anyway, so there's no need for you to rush." I wasn't upset. I just answered them. "I'll let you know when the renovation's finished." In the days after that, we had a quiet mutual understanding and didn't contact each other. I couldn't be bothered to reach out to them, and they were afraid I'd guilt-trip them, complaining about how hard and exhausting the renovation was. It wasn't until a year later, when the renovation was fully done and the formaldehyde readings had dropped to a safe level, that they came home carrying the newborn, "Brad Hansen." But the moment she stepped through the door. Alison let out a scream. "How could this happen?" "What did you do to my house?"