Chapter 8 - The Emergency Family Meeting
By 11:30 AM, the dining room on Canterbury Lane was no longer serving Christmas brunch; it was serving as the staging ground for a domestic coup.
Frank hadn't gone into the dining room when Ryan walked through the front door. Instead, he had waited in the garage until Judith finished her little speech about Hannah’s “ungrateful temperament” to Paige and Mark, and then he had walked through the double french doors with a three-ring binder tucked under his arm like a district attorney walking into a grand jury room.
“Everyone sit down,” Frank had said.
Not shouted. Just spoken with the flat, dead certainty of a man who had signed his name to structural blueprints for forty years and knew exactly where the load-bearing columns were located.
Judith, who was currently holding a crystal serving bowl of leftover quiche, stopped midway across the Persian rug.
“Frank? What are you doing? Brunch is over. Paige and Mark have to leave for Columbus by one.”
“Brunch isn’t over, Judith,” Frank said, pulling out the head-of-the-table chair—the one Judith usually reserved for herself when she wanted to lecture everyone on table etiquette—and sitting down. “We have some family business to discuss. Sit down, Ryan. Stop hovering by the door like a whipped dog.”
Ryan, who had spent the last twenty minutes trying to explain to his mother why Hannah hadn't come back, slowly pulled out a chair near the sideboard, his face pale and sweating under the recessed lighting.
“What is the meaning of this?” Judith demanded, setting the crystal bowl down so hard the glass rim chipped against the mahogany. “We are having a family morning! Where is Hannah? Why isn’t she answering her phone?”
“Hannah isn’t answering her phone because you slapped her across the face yesterday evening and called her trash in front of your entire family,” Frank said. His voice didn't shake. It didn't rise. It just filled the room like mercury pouring into a crack.
The silence that followed was so deep you could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the hallway.
Paige gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. Mark looked down at his shoes with a sudden, intense fascination. Scott stared at his father as if Frank had suddenly grown a second head.
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“She was out of line!” Judith shrieked, her face instantly turning that familiar, mottled purple. “That child of hers destroyed an heirloom damask runner and the mother stood there smiling! I am the head of this household, Frank! I set the standard! If people cannot respect my house, they can leave!”
“They did leave,” Frank said quietly. He opened the three-ring binder, flipped past three pages of property deeds, and laid a single sheet of paper flat on the mahogany table right where the cranberry sauce had spilled twenty-four hours earlier. “And now, you’re going to leave.”
