Claire sat up, opened the security application, and watched the live camera feed before answering the forty-first call.
Twenty adults crowded around her front porch and along the gravel driveway.
Several SUVs were parked at awkward angles, paper grocery bags covered the porch boards, and her parents stood directly in front of the locked door.
“What did you do to the house?” her father screamed when she answered.
His voice carried over the wind, and Claire could hear her mother in the background demanding that he tell Claire to stop acting crazy.
Claire glanced at the time and said, “Good morning.”
“Don’t you good morning me,” he shouted. “The front door code doesn’t work. The garage is locked. There are cameras everywhere. Your mother is standing outside with groceries melting, and everyone is staring at us.”
Claire enlarged the porch image on her phone.
Her mother held two overloaded paper bags against her chest while more groceries sat near her feet, and the guests behind them shifted with the discomfort of people beginning to suspect that their hosts had not told them the whole story.
“Then everyone should leave,” Claire said.
“This is a family weekend.”
“No,” Claire replied. “It is an attempted entry onto property you were told you could not use.”
The people behind her parents could not hear Claire clearly, but they could hear her father, whose volume made the disagreement impossible to hide.
He moved away from the group and lowered his voice into the controlled tone he used when anger alone had failed.
