Chapter 3 - The Flying Monkeys
By the morning of December 27th, the silent alarm had evidently sounded across the Evans family network.
When you cut off a matriarch who controls a family through emotional currency, you don't just cut off one person; you trigger an entire ecosystem of panic. In psychological circles, they call them ‘flying monkeys’—the well-meaning siblings, enablers, and neutral bystanders who are dispatched to herd the runaway sheep back into the pen before the shepherd loses her temper.
My sister Rachel was the first to deploy.
I was in Lily’s bedroom, folding tiny socks and sorting out what clothes we would pack for the cross-country move, when my phone rang. Since Mom was blocked, Rachel was the designated scout.
“Emma?” Rachel’s voice came through the speaker, breathless and high-pitched, the way it always sounded when she had just spent forty-five minutes on the phone with our mother. “Oh thank god you picked up. What on earth happened at Christmas dinner? Mom is in absolute shambles.”
I placed a pair of polka-dot leggings into a cardboard donation box. “I’m fine, Rachel. Lily is fine.”
“Well, Mom isn't!” Rachel said, her tone shifting into that scolding, older-sister cadence she had perfected in high school. “She hasn't left her bedroom in thirty-six hours, Emma. She didn't even attend the Boxing Day luncheon at the club yesterday! Do you have any idea how bad that looks? People were asking Mrs. Kensington why the Evans family table was half-empty.”
“I don't care about Mrs. Kensington, Rachel.”
A stunned pause hung on the line. To an Evans daughter, uttering the phrase I don't care about Mrs. Kensington was the equivalent of burning down the village church.
“Emma... what is wrong with you?” Rachel whispered, genuinely baffled. “Mom told me you threw a complete fit because she mentioned Lily’s diet. She said you grabbed all the presents off the floor like a crazy person and dragged Lily out into the snow before anyone could even serve the dessert!”
“Is that what she told you?” I asked, keeping my voice utterly devoid of inflection.
“Yes! She said she was trying to give you some gentle, maternal advice about Lily’s eating habits and you completely lost your mind! She said you threatened that she’d never see Lily again!”
“Rachel,” I said, sitting down on the edge of Lily’s bed. “Did Mom happen to mention that before I stood up, she looked across a table of eleven people and called my six-year-old child an 'absolute burden'?”
The line went completely dead for five seconds.
“Well...” Rachel hesitated, her voice dropping into that familiar, slippery tone people use when they know an atrocity was committed but don't want to lose their inheritance over it. “You know how Mom gets when she’s been drinking that heavy Pinot Noir. Her tongue gets a little loose. She didn't mean burden like... like an actual burden, Emma. She just meant that having little kids around makes the dinner chaotic. You know she gets migraines from high-pitched voices.”
“My daughter was whispering, Rachel. She had been sitting there silently for two hours, trying to get Mom to look at a paper ornament she spent three days making.”
“Okay, fine! So Mom was insensitive! She’s sixty-four years old, Emma, she’s not going to change! You know how she is!”
There it was.
The universal battle cry of the dysfunctional family: You know how she is.
It was the golden hall pass handed to narcissists and bullies for generations. It meant: She is allowed to be abusive, cruel, and destructive, but you are required to be mature, accommodating, and silent.
“I do know how she is,” I said quietly. “Which is why Lily and I won't be around her anymore.”
“You are being completely unreasonable!” Rachel’s voice shrilled, panic finally breaking through her diplomatic veneer. “If you don't show up to New Year’s brunch, it’s going to ruin everything! Dad’s blood pressure is already through the roof. He’s out in the garage right now cleaning his lawnmower in twenty-degree weather just to get away from the house!”
“Then tell Dad he is welcome to come visit us here in Clintonville anytime he wants,” I said. “The door is always open for Dad. But Carol is done.”
“Emma, don't do this! Mom said if you don't call her by tonight, she’s writing you out of the summer house trust!”
I closed my eyes, a small, genuine smile touching my lips.
The summer house trust. The three-bedroom lake cottage on Lake Erie that my grandfather had built in 1962. For fifteen years, Carol had dangled that cottage over our heads like a carrot. ‘If you don't come to the Fourth of July gala, Emma, I might have to rethink how the cottage shares are divided.’ ‘If you spend Thanksgiving with Daniel’s family, Rachel, don't expect July at the lake.’
She truly believed that three acres of damp cedar on a windy lakefront was enough to purchase my daughter’s dignity.
“Rachel?” I said.
“What? Are you going to call her?”
“Keep the cottage,” I said. “Have Jason take my third of the shares. Put a jet ski in my slip. I don't care.”
“Emma—!”
“I have to go pack, Rachel. Have a happy New Year.”
I hung up the phone and dropped it onto the comforter.
Before I could pick up the next stack of clothes, my phone screen flashed again.
Incoming call: Jason Evans.
My brother didn't even bother with diplomatic overtures. The second I clicked accept, his voice was booming through the receiver, background noise suggesting he was driving his high-end pickup truck through town.
“Emma, what the hell are you doing to Mom?”
“Hello to you too, Jase.”
“Don't 'hello Jase' me! I just spent forty-five minutes at their house listening to Mom hyperventilate into a silk handkerchief! She’s talking about canceling the entire family ski trip to Vail in February because she says the family is 'fracturing'! Do you have any idea how much deposit money I have down on those condo rentals?”
I sat back against the headboard, marveling at the sheer, unadulterated selfishness of the machine I had spent my life trying to appease.
Carol was devastated because her public image was slipping.
Rachel was panicking because the holiday schedule was disrupted.
Jason was furious because his ski vacation deposit was at risk.
Not one of them—not a single soul in that bloodline—had called to ask: “Is Lily okay? Did Mom really call a six-year-old a burden?”
Their only concern was restoring the equilibrium of the hive so the queen bee would stop stinging everyone in sight.
“Jason,” I said, my voice ice cold.
“What?”
“Were you sitting at that table on Christmas night?”
“Yeah, I was sitting right there!”
“Did you hear what she said to Lily?”
Jason let out a frustrated, dismissive grunt. “Emma, she was criticizing the kid’s posture and her appetite! Big deal! Mom told me I was fat every single day from age ten to sixteen! It builds character! You don't blow up a thirty-year family dynamic just because Mom made a clumsy comment about a six-year-old!”
“She called her an absolute burden, Jason. She told me that nobody wants her around because of her 'flaws'.”
“So what? Lily is six! She won't even remember it in three weeks!”
“I remember,” I said.
The silence that followed was sharp.
“What?” Jason snapped.
“I was eight years old when Mom told me that my laugh sounded like a dying crow and that nobody would ever marry a girl who was so clumsy,” I whispered into the phone. “I was eight, Jason. I am thirty-two, and every time I laugh in a crowded room, my hand still flies up to cover my mouth. She remembers. She will always remember.”
Jason sighed, his tone shifting from anger to that familiar, patronizing fraternal irritation. “Emma, you’re being overly emotional, as usual. Just call her. Tell her you were hormonal or tired or whatever. Let her buy Lily some expensive American Girl doll to make up for it, and let’s just get through New Year’s brunch so we can go to Colorado.”
“I’m not calling her, Jason.”
“Emma, if you burn this bridge, you’re out. You know how she is. She will cut you off financially, socially, completely. Dad won't be able to help you. You’ll be on your own.”
I looked around my daughter’s warm, sunlit bedroom. At the hand-painted bookshelves Daniel had built from reclaimed pine. At the watercolor paintings Lily had framed on the walls. At the moving boxes sitting neatly by the closet door.
“Jason,” I said gently. “I’ve been on my own my entire life. You guys were just standing in the room.”
May you like
I hung up.
I didn't block Jason, and I didn't block Rachel. I didn't need to. I simply placed the phone in the top drawer of the nightstand, closed the wood firmly, and walked downstairs to make lunch for my daughter.
