I did not change the lock right away, even after that terrible Thanksgiving or the time my mother reorganized my pantry without asking me first. I only ordered the smart lock after the incident where I found my drawers open and Leo’s soccer medal sitting on the kitchen counter.
Now, that tiny blue light on the door was the only thing standing between me and another weekend of being overwhelmed by my sister’s guests. Brandon stepped closer to the camera again and called me dude while trying to make his unreasonable demands sound like a casual favor.
“I pay the rent here every single day of the year,” I told him through the speaker while the viewer count in the family chat continued to rise. My mother kept sending messages telling me to turn off the feed and to stop embarrassing Tiffany in front of her in laws.
She told me to give them the code and suggested that I should even offer to pay for a hotel room for them as the right thing to do. Tiffany saw that the mood was shifting against her, so she switched to her usual performance of acting like a martyr on the sidewalk.
“Fine, keep your precious apartment to yourself,” she shouted toward the camera before telling the in laws that I was kicking my own family out. I told her to go ahead and tell them that, but to make sure she included the part where she tried to move in eight people without permission.
The family chat went silent for a moment before my father told me that I had done enough and that I needed to stop embarrassing the family. I typed back a question asking why my mother still had a key after I had asked for it back, but no one offered an answer.
Tiffany tried the handle one last time as if the door might eventually give up, but the lock stayed blue and silent against her efforts. She looked at the camera and told me that if I did not let them in, I should never ask the family for any help ever again.
I ended the livestream and sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot while the rain started to tap against the glass of the windshield. I watched the other shoppers and felt the strange embarrassment of a grown man who had just been shaken by a family argument.