Chapter 3 - The Summons at the Door
By Tuesday afternoon, the Henrico County sheriff's department served the formal legal summons.
Paige had rented a trendy two-bedroom loft near Scott’s Addition, furnished with brand-new mid-century modern furniture that she claimed she had bought with "personal savings."
She was sitting on her velvet sofa sipping an espresso when the uniformed deputy knocked on her door.
Within thirty minutes of opening that legal packet, Paige was pounding on the front door of our parents' house in Chesterfield.
I know this because my father called my personal cell phone for the first time in six months.
I stared at the caller ID on my dashboard as I sat in the parking lot of the grocery store, finally pressing the answer button.
"Hello, Dad."
"Jake," Dad's voice was hoarse, shaking with a tremor that terrified me. "Can you come over here? Please. Just you."
"Is Mom there?"
"Your mother is in the kitchen crying," Dad whispered, his voice cracking like dry wood. "Paige is here with a stack of papers from the court. The sheriff served her, Jake. Marcus is suing her for sixty-four thousand dollars and full fraud of marital property."
I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath of the cold car air.
"Did you read the complaint, Dad?"
"I did," Dad choked out. "She gave our savings to another man, Jake. The money I gave her for her car... the money from my retirement bridge loan... she funneled it all to him."
A sharp pain lanced through my chest. "Dad, what retirement bridge loan?"
Silence hung over the line for ten agonizing seconds, broken only by the sound of my father's ragged breathing.
"Two months ago, Paige told us Marcus had frozen her out with zero cash," Dad confessed, weeping openly now. "Your mother insisted we take a forty-thousand-dollar home equity loan against this house to give Paige an emergency cushion. She said we had to save our baby girl."
My blood ran cold.
My parents had fifteen years left on their mortgage. My dad was supposed to retire from the freight yard next spring after four decades of destroying his knees and spine.
Instead, my mother had forced him to gamble the roof over their heads so Paige could fund her lover's wine bar.
"I’m coming over right now, Dad," I said, putting the car into gear. "Don't sign anything, and don't give her another dime."
I sped down Route 288, the gray autumn clouds hanging heavy and suffocating over the Virginia pines.
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The golden child hadn't just demanded ten thousand dollars from her single brother.
She had financially gutted an old working-class man who had given her everything he possessed, and my mother had handed her the knife.
