My conduct shall speak for me; absence, distance, time shall speak for me.
—Mansfield Park
I stood in my bra and underwear and stared at my closet. Inside was an uncharted expanse of black with a few gray and chocolate brown patches scattered in the sea of darkness like deserted islands. I grabbed random pieces and pulled them on, shoving fists through armholes and stepping into a skirt, nearly falling over in the process. I was already late and I was in no mood for a meeting.
My grandmother’s lawyer had contacted me a couple of days after the funeral to discuss the will. There was the house that needed to be signed over to Ann and me, but my sister had to work, so the plan was for me to go alone and bring the documents home for her to cosign.
The law office was in a small prewar house that had recently been given a stucco face-lift. It was dove gray with black shutters. The lawyer was a woman named Nelly Lemmon, whom my grandmother had used for years. She must be ancient now.
I stepped out of the car, my heels twisting dangerously on the gravel drive, my delicate velvet shoes no match for the pebbles and small rocks that gave way under each step. Ungracefully, I stumbled to the porch, straightened my skirt, and knocked.
“Come in!” a woman’s voice shouted from inside.
I twisted the doorknob and felt the latch click open. Inside the vestibule were stacks of files mixed in with old newspapers and magazines.
“Is that you, Kate?” the same voice cracked.
“Yes it is,” I yelped and followed the voice down a narrow hallway strewn with files piled high atop battered steel filing cabinets.
“I’m back here!” came the voice again.
I turned a corner and nearly crashed into a goblin of a woman who stood five feet, if that. Her hair was a mass of red corkscrew curls with strands of white poking through like steel wool. She wore mascara and a pale pink lipstick, but otherwise she was deathly pale, as though she hadn’t stepped outdoors in decades. Her face, with chubby cheeks like an overweight cat, was remarkably unlined, no doubt due to a dearth of sunlight. She reached out a hand. “Glad you could come so soon.”
We sat down. Her desk was shockingly clutter-free except for one legal-size gray file lying centered on the smooth glossy wood with her arms folded on top of it. Nelly leaned forward, her soft fleshy arms jiggling as though boneless, her stubby legs tapping the floor beneath her desk in some imagined rhythm.
“The will is simple,” she began calmly enough. “You and your sister get the house. But I need to know how you plan to deal with the bank.”
“Bank?” I repeated blankly. “What bank?”
She sat back, practically disappearing into her armchair so I had to lean forward to maintain eye contact. “The bank that holds the mortgage,” she said, giving me an odd look.
“We don’t have a mortgage,” I answered, puzzled.
She rocked in her chair. We stared at each other; neither of us seemed prepared to speak. She was obviously confused.
“You mean Alice never told you or Ann?” she said at last.
“Told us what?” I demanded, anger nipping at my voice.
“About a year ago Alice and Iris came to me for help,” she explained reluctantly. I sensed she didn’t want to be a rat, but she had no choice. “I take it your mother likes to gamble.”
My stomach lurched.
“She plays bingo,” I answered somewhat defensively.
“A lot,” Nelly said firmly. “She ran up over a hundred thousand dollars in debts. Alice tried to bail her out by getting a mortgage on the house. But your mom never made the payments.”
I was silent.
Still silent.
“The bank is about to foreclose,” she said slowly, as though English were my second language. “You’re to be evicted in thirty days.”
My silence filled the room. Could this be true? I couldn’t imagine Nana agreeing to this and not telling me. But the reality of Iris and all her trips to the bingo hall and the casinos told me that Nelly wasn’t making this up. My mother had become more secretive and anxious in the months before Nana was diagnosed, but her behavior had gotten stranger recently. I’d assumed it was the strain of caring for her dying mother. But there was clearly more to it; there was massive debt and now Ann and I had to deal with it.
“The bank will put the house up for sale, ‘power of sale,’ they call it,” she continued robotically.
“We don’t want to sell,” I snapped.
“Then I’m hoping you have assets of some kind. If you could throw some cash down, say about twenty-five thousand dollars, then that would keep the bank at bay.”
Of course, my savings! All those mutual funds had to be worth something, even in this damn recession. I always forgot about my investments because they weren’t meant to be touched until I retired. Thanks to the recession I was retired. “I have about thirty thousand. I’ll have to ask Ann what she has.”
“Thirty would go a long way.” She smiled encouragingly.
I drove home in a fog, replaying every last word of Nelly’s explanation. She had given me copies of all the foreclosure notices; the evil slips of paper that Iris had been hiding. I had to come up with at least a quarter of the money.
Stuffed under my bed was a box where I kept all my bank statements. I tore off the lid and dumped the contents out. There were statements from March 2008. I ripped into the envelope: $30,000. According to Nelly I needed only $25,000 to stave off the foreclosure for another month, in which time I could maybe find a job. But March was a long time ago. I found more statements and tore them open. June: $27,000; July: $24,000 … I was becoming more alarmed. I opened my September statement: $19,800. Finally, I found November and I unfolded the statement and just stared at it: $14,890.34. I had lost half of my savings in less than a year. I grabbed my BlackBerry. Ann answered and I told her everything. She was as in the dark as I was. And worse, she had even less money than me because she’d been using her savings for night school, ingredients, and a Web site and logo designer for her sauce idea. I stuffed my statements back into the box.
Then I heard my mother come in and I froze.
“Kate?” Iris called out. Her breezy tone irritated me. I didn’t answer her. All I wanted to do was leave the house and figure out what to do. I grabbed my purse and marched downstairs.
“Everything all right?” she asked with an innocent smile.
I swiveled around to face her. The tears came back. God, why couldn’t I stop crying? I had lost my grandmother and now, thanks to my mother, I was losing my home.
“No, Iris,” I said shakily. “Nothing is all right. I just came from seeing Nelly Lemmon.”
My mother’s lower lip began to tremble.
“I know about the mortgage,” I snapped. “And the foreclosure. How could you do it?”
I realized I was shouting. Iris was mouthing something. Probably that she was sorry. But I wasn’t able to hear over my shouts.
“How you tricked Nana into doing this I’ll never know! But we’re going to lose the house. Our home!”
“I told Nana to tell you; she wouldn’t let me,” Iris sputtered. “We thought we’d win the lottery and pay it off.”
“Don’t try and blame Nana for this!” I snapped again.
I needed to calm down. I gulped for air, then turned and walked out the door.
I drove around for more than an hour and somehow all roads led back to that same country house I’d seen with my grandmother the weekend before she found out she was dying. I turned off the engine and watched the house as though I were a prowler staking out a target. Then I realized I did know what to do. There was only one option now. The article was no longer just a writing assignment worth five thousand dollars. Nor was it an escape from my problems or a guide to help other women; it was my only hope of getting any semblance of a life back. Unemployed, single, and homeless, I was a modern Austen character, only instead of having a mother determined to introduce me to the right sort of man, I had to rely on my own smarts. I was desperate. I had to do more than write the story. I had to live it.