Freshly unemployed house husband Dave suffers through a tempestuous relationship with his bullying mother-in-law. Long repressed impulses will force their way to the surface with shocking consequences.
Dave sits on the porch with his head in his hands. He knew he had to make the call. Now they are on their way.
He has already decided he will tell the responding officers everything. Yes, he will come clean and tell them not only what he has done but why he did it.
Dave looks down the street. There is a car driving down the road, but he realizes at the last minute that it’s not a squad car. It keeps on going past the house.
What’s that noise? Is that a siren? No, perhaps just a car alarm. He feels like he can hardly see or hear. His senses are scrambled from the lack of sleep, as well as the shock from the deed he has just committed.
He is slumped in the rocking chair on the porch. It’s Bertha’s chair, of course. The chair from which she ruled their lives. Now, just the other side of the screen door, in the squalid little living room, Bertha is lying lifeless. She is covered in marks. Marks that Dave is responsible for.
He looks down at his bruised and bloodied fists. What kind of man batters his mother-in-law in her own home? Dave knows that is what they’ll say when his crime becomes public.
But they won’t know what he has gone through. They won’t know about the night after night without sleep as Bertha bawled and berated them. They won’t know the intense anger Dave felt as the old woman belittled and undermined her own daughter, his wife Haley. They won’t understand how he could have kept it bottled up inside for so long.
The irony is that, for nearly all his life, Dave considered himself a model of self-control. At school, he had never been in so much as a fistfight; never argued with a stranger over a parking spot or had a cross word with friends or family.
At work, at the online retailer’s giant warehouse, he was a diligent servant. He completed each back-breaking task with his trademark cheery smile. Then, after years of service, he had been fired for no reason.
“Efficiencies” his sadistic manager told him, almost with glee. “Sorry buddy.”
Dave took that too, with little more than a suppressed grunt of disappointment. He walked out of the warehouse for the last time with his tail between his legs. His financial and domestic life in tatters.
Bertha exploded when he gave her and Haley the news that evening.
“You useless piece of shit,” the old woman said. “How are you going to pay the bills around here now!”
“Mom, stop it, please,” Haley tried to intervene.
But that had just turned Bertha’s ire onto her.
“You don’t get to have a say in this,” Bertha responded. “Look at yourself! Pushing forty. No kids, married to this loser and you have never had a proper job.”
After Dave was let go, Haley was forced to get the only job she could find: a waitressing gig at a Red Lobster two towns away.
The restaurant demanded 10-hour shifts, six days a week. That left Dave as Bertha’s full-time carer. He also became her primary target, a role from which there was no respite.
With his wife out of the house for so long, he began to worry about how long he could hold out. His mind turned to possibilities of escape from their situation. But what could they do?
A home of their own had been out of reach even before interest rates had gone through the roof. Dave’s income at the warehouse had not been enough to be able to secure a rental apartment, let alone somehow save for a down payment.
And, even if they could have afforded a place, there was the question of what to do about Bertha. The old woman needed round the clock care.
So, they stayed in the shabby little suburban row house. It was the house in which Haley had grown up. Now it became her and Dave’s living hell.
That morning, as Haley left for work, Dave felt deep down that he wouldn’t make it through the end of the day.
“Do you think you could skip your shift today?” he asked his wife as she prepared to head out.
The question, however, was posed half-heartedly. The look between them said everything. It was almost as if the couple agreed what needed to happen. The inevitable could be postponed no longer.
As it turned out, Dave made it all the way to the early afternoon. Bertha enjoyed her typical morning on the porch, calling out requests to Dave every few minutes.
“Bring me my oatmeal!”
“I need another glass of water”
“Come and bring me back inside to the living room.”
“Hurry up! I am going to miss my show.”
“God you are useless and clueless.”
As it turned out, “useless and clueless” were the last words of abuse Bertha ever directed at Dave or anyone else. They were the words that finally nudged him past breaking point. He felt something inside snap.
He raised his hands and swung the first blow. Then a second. Then another. He had no recollection of how he stopped.
Dave is back in the present now. On the porch. In Bertha’s chair.
He hears the noise. It’s faint at first but then he is sure. It really is a siren this time. He sees the squad car enter their road, lights flashing wildly.
Suddenly, he remembers the little pen knife that Bertha kept in a pouch under the rocking chair. Years ago, she threatened Dave with it for the sin of overcooking her breakfast bacon.
Dave feels for it and yes, there it is, hard to the touch and warm and sticky from the summer heat.
The squad car screeches to a halt outside the house. Two officers, a man and a woman, get out of the vehicle, guns drawn. Both sets of eyes and both weapons fixed firmly on Dave.
“Put your hands up and come down slowly onto the street,” the man barks.
At that moment, Dave knows exactly what he must do. His freedom is his for the taking.
He grabs the hard steel from under the chair, rises to his feet and charges down the porch steps.
There are flashes of heat and terrifying noise. Then, there is nothing but darkness.