Gary Sewell sat uncomfortably in front of his finished dinner plate while his wife and in-laws were chatting away in their vacation lake house. His wife was determined to drag him to her parents' anniversary and he ran out of excuse not to go. Being with his in-laws were so suffocating. Each member of the Vick family had something that's irritating to him.
Starting from his father-in-law Neal at age 55. Being a pastor of one of the bigger inner city church in Templeton, he had this image of always being proper and respectable on the outside, but he always had his passive-aggressive way of judging and criticizing people who didn't follow his traditional family value. Even his congratulations of Gary's recent company switch and promotion sounded not totally sincere. There was just something phony about him, Gary felt.
But Gary had nothing against his 52-year-old mother-in-law Ruth. She's like a complete image of a homemaker. Sporting a tidy, light brown hair wrapped in a bun, she was just always on her husband's side, visibly agreeing with everything he said. It's saying something that she's cooking for everybody on the day of her anniversary.
And the rest of their kids and their partners, they're just insufferable in their own different way.
Starting with Paul, their second child and their only son at age 27. The guy was just a younger but somewhat inferior version of his father, also involving in the church by being youth pastor. The guy was just always on his high house, talking lots without saying anything meaningful at all, always going on about family values and some craps he saw on the news or read off the headlines of his church network newsletter. The little shit also liked to constantly competed with Gary. After Gary changed his car after his promotion, Paul also changed his car to be the one exact model better than Gary's and acted like it's completely accidental. No doubt that Mr. Pastor Jr. asked his daddy to pay for it.
Paul also brought his younger-by-two-years black wife, Imani, to the lake house. Her family was long-time parishioners of the church, and she was pretty much got set up to date Paul by their parents. She's working as a designer for a bunch of apps, making a decent money. The local paper recently did a profile on her and a bunch of others promoting modern career path for minority women. This served to make her head even bigger than it is with her thick, long black curly hair. She always went on about some long-suffering and prejudiced minority groups, conveniently leaving out certain groups that didn't follow her father-in-law's family value in front of the family.
The next one was Eve, his wife's middle sister at the age of 23. She was the worst. Just because she had some idiots following her beauty blogging online and make some money since college, her ego was the size of the moon. She was pretty with her long perfect dark amber hair, yes, but in the slightly-too-much-makeup and bitchy kind of way. Now she had this plan of branching out to make a more variety content online and make banks, so she had been looking down on people with traditional jobs like Gary's. Almost every words that came out of her mouth were pretentious and everybody acted like that the most awesome things that has ever been said. It's driving Gary nuts.
Her equally annoying boyfriend was Nate. The dude looked goofy as hell. He's tall but in a gangly awkward way. He wore his hair like a mini afro even though the guy was pasty as a chalk. Maybe because he looked like a clown, he kept making these unfunny jokes all the time and the others had to kept faking the laughs. Dude's family was pretty rich, owning a number of chain restaurant around the cities and state, so he just had this lazy attitude of a trust fund kid who always lived comfortably.
The last couple in the house was Dinah, the recently-turned-19 youngest sister, and her new boyfriend Christian. The girl was just your typical self-centered teenager that had to make some sort of statement by dyeing her hair bright orange and dressing like some sort of new age hippie. Most of the time she acted like Gary didn't exist, but if she did, it was to comment that he's just some lame old guy. Her boyfriend seemed to be a cool guy with long dreadlocks though maybe because he's older, the same age as Eve. From his introduction, they met in her college class. He's her teacher assistant or something like that. Hopefully, he could last longer than Dinah's previous boyfriends. The girl seemed to change them every couple of months.
The last but not least, there was Gary's wife, Anna, three years younger than him at the age of 30. It's been about 7 years they're married and lots of things changed. The pandemic hadn't been kind to her. Anna's previously slim body got chubbier but not too chubby. The red, long hair he used to loved got cut short because she got too tired to take care of it. They were spending less time together because she became much more busier with her online furniture reselling business, making Gary felt like they're further apart. Lastly, she went back on their goal since before marriage that they would not have kids, badgering him all the time with ideas of making an offspring before she became too old. He suspected that Paul announcement that he would start trying for baby with Imani a couple of months ago had something to do with that. In fact, Anna somehow got accidentally pregnant but soon got a miscarriage not long after. She was devastated, and they grew even further apart.
It's not like he's fallen out of love from her, but their love life could use some help.
And, taking vacation time to spend with her family was not helping.
While he silently prayed for the evening to be over, there was a noise from the front door. Neal told Paul to go check it out. Not long after he left there was a loud yell from the front, then Paul was pushed inside the dining room followed by a couple of people in black masks. Everybody became silent and froze in fear before the largest one of the intruders walked up and announced with a booming voice.
"Everybody makes no sudden movement. Slowly take your phone out and hold them up above your head. My buddy Papi here will collect them for you. Do anything more than that and you will get one of the bullets."
The large man pointed and casually waved each member of the family with a pistol in his hand. Gary and everyone slowly followed the order.
"What do you want from us? Money? This is our vacation home. There's not a lot of things to rob," said Neal, trying to negotiate with the intruders.
"Wrong answer, Pastor Vick," said the large man, "we don't want no money. I'll let you know soon enough."
There were noise of stuff being move in the living room while the phones were collected. Soon after the large man hold up several sets of handcuffs.
"My buddies here will put y'all in one of these. These are just to make our job easier. We don't want no dead heroes or heroines here tonight," announced the big man.
Then each cuff was put on the whole family with their arms behind their back, "Here's a tip. Don't struggle or your wrist will really hurt. That advice was from experience. If you behaved well, we might even think the cuff was not necessary anymore," said the big man, "now slowly get up and walk in a row to the living room."