“You’ll regret cutting me off,” Lidia told me during our final phone call, her voice carrying the same familiar contempt she’d directed toward me for years. “Family doesn’t abandon family.”
I remember standing in my temporary hotel room, phone pressed to my ear, feeling something close to disbelief that she still, even after everything, seemed to genuinely believe she held the moral high ground in that particular conversation.
Her voice hadn’t wavered once throughout that entire call, carrying the same commanding, entitled certainty I’d endured for nearly a decade, apparently entirely unaware, or unwilling to acknowledge, exactly how thoroughly her own choices had contributed to the destruction of everything she now seemed determined to blame me for losing. I felt, listening to her, a strange sense of finality settle over me, understanding this would likely be the very last conversation we ever had. “You’ve never once treated me like family, Lidia,” I said. “Not for a single day of the nine years I’ve known you.”
“I’m not your family, Lidia,” I told her. “I never actually was. I was simply a bank account you all treated with contempt while cashing my checks.”
