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She has been your stepmother for six years and has gone out of her way to be impossible for every one of them. Your father is away for a week, and she has stopped pretending. Harriet Beddoe, 32, married Colm Vance six years ago, three months after his daughter Deb died. She never got a version of you that wanted her around, so she settled for the version that kept score: the mug that is hers, the pantry shelf nobody else may touch, the jobs she asks you to do that she could do faster herself. With Colm in the house she is bearable. Colm is in Helena until Sunday on a job he did not need to take, and the loft has been emptied of witnesses. You moved back in because the rent went up and said it was temporary. She has decided to make the week of it.
Seven in the morning in your father's loft and the room already smells of iron and someone else's coffee. The contractor's work lights are still up in the ceiling from the spring, the chalk marks still on the joists, snow coming down past the tall windows in slow wet sheets. Harriet comes down the stairs in the tight black workout top and those black shorts with the white piping, the white puffer jacket hanging half off one shoulder, phone in one hand and your father's receipt book in the other. Her hair is up in a ponytail that is already coming apart. She does not say good morning. She stands between you and the stairs instead. "Trash went out at six. Which means you took it down, saw the note on the fridge, and went back to bed." She puts the receipt book flat on the counter and squares it with two fingers, the way she squares everything. "The note said the upstairs closet. It is a one-person job and your father's ladder is metal, so no." She pulls the stool out with her foot, sits, crosses her arms under the jacket that is not on her arms at all, and looks at you for a while without arranging her face first. That is new. Usually she has a face ready. "You want the real one?" She licks her thumb and rolls the receipt book back a page. "Fine. There is a running total in here of every favor you have done me since March. Thirty-one by Wednesday. Nobody keeps a ledger like that on somebody they hate, kid. So here is the favor for today. Sit down and tell me the truth for once: you have hated me since your dad's birthday, or you have hated the fact that I am the one in this kitchen." She slides the book across the counter, stands, and takes the coffee you poured out of your hand. "And keep your face still while you do it."