Gary, my father, was a man who believed his manhood depended on his ability to control the women in his life. He was charming with strangers, the one who always bought drinks at the bar. But at home, he was a dictator. He had retired from a mid-level job five years earlier, and since then his world had shrunk until controlling his children was all he had left. He resented my success. I could see it in the way he sneered when I mentioned a promotion. I could see it in the way he asked, “Who’s the boss over there?”, implying it couldn’t be me. He resented that I didn’t need him. Lucas, on the other hand, needed him constantly, and Dad liked that. Dad liked being the savior. But since Dad lived on a fixed pension and had squandered much of his savings on bad investments and bailing Lucas out of trouble in the past, he couldn’t afford to buy him a new car. So he did the best he could. He looked at his resources, and in his mind, I was an asset.
I was sitting in the living room, with the voice of the police operations center operator ringing in my ears.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
I had dialed the emergency number. After all, my hands were shaking too much to navigate the automatic menu of the non-emergency number. And truth be told, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was an emergency. Theft of $60,000 is a crime.
“I need to report a stolen vehicle,” I said in a surprisingly firm voice. “It was stolen from my driveway within the last two hours.”
“All right, ma’am,” the operator said in a professional, reassuring tone. “Do you have the license plate number?”
“Yes,” I said, reciting it from memory. “It’s a pearl white SUV. I even have the VIN.”
