by Jim Grimsley
“I invited him,” Carmine says, “blame me.”
She is watching her son, her Frankie, with the most complete tenderness. I envy him for a moment, that he can call such moist feelings out of her.
“You’re losing the house,” Frankie says. He laces finger through finger and sits there with his hands smugly arranged, waiting.
My head starts to pound. “We’re what?”
“You’re losing the house. The bank is foreclosing. Here are your notices from the bank’s agent. You haven’t even bothered to open them.”
Carmine is staring at the floor. She flicks something out of one eye and draws a long, ragged breath. Her forehead and dimples no longer move due to Botox. She is making something like one-third to one-half of a facial expression. I feel the first tug of sympathy I’ve had for her in days.
“Dad,” says Frank, in that petite, high-pitched voice of his; the voice of a smaller person, whom I sometimes think Frank swallowed and is holding captive. “Are you with me?”
“Yes.”
“These notices are about the bank calling in your loan. You got them weeks and weeks ago.”
“I thought they were bank statements. I don’t open bank statements.”
“What are you talking about, they don’t even look like bank statements. They don’t even come in the same kind of envelope.” He sets his fake glasses on the table. His wife Ramona says they make his face look smaller. “Mom and I are going to see an attorney this morning.”
My heart is pounding. I feel dry in the mouth, as if I’ve grown a desert on my tongue.
He hands me a letter and I stare at it. It’s from some county court or other, summoning me to come and explain why the bank should not call in the loan and take back the house.
“Can you pay what’s due?” Frank asks. “At this meeting with the court?”
I fold the letter and feel my heart pounding. It’s over now. I’m clammy with sweat, but it’s over, and there’s a certain amount of relief involved. “They’ll want the whole loan, Frank. You know that.”
“But you could offer to pay what we owe,” Carmine says.
I ignore her, my eyes on my son. “You’re a banker, Frankie. You know how this works.”
“No, I don’t,” he says. “I don’t work with home mortgages. I work with a whole different side of the bank.”
“Don’t kid me you don’t know this. They want the whole loan when they call it in. That’s all they’ll take.”
“You can’t even pay the arrears, can you? You don’t have the money.” That’s the question he really wants answered. That’s why he was asking in the first place.
I run my hand along my scalp, searching for the wispy hairs. One of my new annoying habits is to tug these wispy hairs on the top of my head and at the back of my neck, and I bend my head and start to do that. The letter from the court is sitting in my hand.
“You had to have known you weren’t paying the mortgage,” Carmine says.
“Right,” Frank says, touching his own black hair, thinning at the crown, looking at me. “What are you doing?”
“Plucking at my hair.”
“It’s his new habit,” Carmine says. “He does it all day.”
“How much money do you have left, Dad?”
“Your mother doesn’t tell you?”
“My mother doesn’t know.”
“Has she tried to use her ATM card today?”
Frank looks at her. She says, “The card’s not working. I need a new one.”
This is that part of a murder which detective shows leave out, even the best of them. Preceding the murder, there’s a long, messy, savage kind of scene shared among a few people who will participate in the final drama. I can feel it beginning, the wave of rage, when she says this stupid line about the ATM.
“The machine doesn’t give her money so the card’s not working,” I say to Frank.
He tries to bury his head in his hands but it’s too big and his hands are small, almost petite, in comparison. Carmine is looking at the floor. “The card’s supposed to give me money so how am I supposed to know why it doesn’t?”
“Mother, calm down.”
“What does he mean? What does your father mean?” It’s beginning to dawn on her.
“Your card’s working fine, Mom,” Frank says.
“We don’t have any money,” I say. “It’s gone.”
She sips her coffee. A drop spills on her skirt, a single, tiny drop, that nobody sees but me. Her hand is shaking. “That can’t be true.”
“I took out the last cash yesterday,” I said.
“All of it?”
I chuckle. “That’s right. The whole hundred dollars.”
She’s in a sudden spitting rage. “That can’t be true. You must think I’m crazy.” There’s something ridiculous about her fury given that at least thirty percent of her face remains completely motionless no matter what. “There’s got to be some account.”
“Did I ever get a cup of coffee?” I ask.
“Here,” she says, and hands it to me from the counter. I don’t remember getting the cup or pressing the button on the coffee robot. I take the cup and sip. It’s cold. “Did you hear me?”
The coffee disagrees with my stomach right away and I put it down. I’m feeling bloated, like I’ll need to fart in a minute. There’s no way to do that in these stainless steel chairs of Carmine’s without making some kind of sound.
“Charley, did you hear me?”
“Yes. I heard you. There’s no account.”
“Don’t you have any CDs?”
“Mom, nobody has CDs any more,” Frank says. He’s shuffling through the stack of envelopes, bright red to the ears.
“We have to find some money somewhere,” Carmine says, “I can’t just lose my house.”
“The stocks are gone. Our annuities are gone. The cash I got paid for losing my wonderful job is gone.”
“We can sell the cars,” Carmine says.
“You think I’ve been paying off the car loans if I haven’t been paying the mortgage?”
She stands from the counter, turning her back on me. She’s trembling.
“It wouldn’t do any good anyway, Mom.”
“What do you mean, we haven’t even asked anybody. We haven’t even spoken to anybody at the bank.”
“Like Dad said. They’ve called in the loan.”
“What does that mean, they’ve called it in? Can they do that?”
“It means they want payment for the whole loan amount. They can do that when you’re delinquent, yes.”
“Nobody ever told me that.”
“You signed a contract when you bought the house.”
“I never signed any paper that said they could take my house like this. We’ve paid on this house for years, they can’t just take it.”
“You did sign a paper like that, Ma.”
“I never.”
His face purples; he raises his voice and speaks emphatically. “You did.” He slaps his hand on the table again. He mops with the handkerchief. Rolls of him are unsettled all the way down to his lower ribs.
“Don’t shout at me.”
“I wouldn’t have to shout at you if you’d listen.”
“Don’t talk to me like this, Frankie. It’s bad enough with your father.” She is silent for a moment, watching him. “So what happens now?”
“The court sells the house. Auctions it.” His face is running with sweat. He puts down the coffee, which he has been holding against his immaculate shirt just under his chin, without spilling a single drop on the shirt.
“How can there not be any money?” Carmine turns to me, parts of her face turning pale under her spray tan. She’s fumbling through her Prada purse for gum. Designer gum from a health food store, no sugar, no additives, no flavor at all. It’s called, “Just Gum.” I think they make it out of tofu. “How could we run out of money? You’ve only been out of a job for two years.”
I glare at her. “So
now it’s two years. Yesterday it was three. So when it’s to your advantage, you add on the extra year?”
She refuses to be derailed. “How could we run out of money? How could we spend all that money?”
“You never even had a plan, did you?” Frank speaks into the palms of his hands. He’s leaning on the table, this morning’s USA Today under his arm. “You never so much as did a budget.”
“Yes I did.”
“When?”
“Do I answer to you?”
“Yes, Dad, you answer to me.”
“Since when?”
“Since the county decided to auction your house for you.”
I get up and pull the robe together. I have an image of myself, hair grizzled and tufted out from where I’ve been plucking at it, white T-shirt grimy because I’m not sure what day I put it on or what pile it was in when I found it, boxers clean but so baggy over the sticks of my legs that I look like some kind of bizarre walking water balloon. My calves are shiny and bald. Black socks that I fell asleep in are bunched around my ankles, only one of the socks is actually navy blue, and I’ve slid my feet into my wife’s purple fuzzy half-slipper flip-flop bedroom shoes. My knees knob out like on an old pioneer door.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to use the toilet.”
“Use the one right here,” Carmine says, “Deutze put fresh paper in there yesterday.”
“Deutze always puts fresh paper in there.”
“So rub it in that you love Deutze so much,” she shouts. She’s managed a tear now, and pulls back her hair to make sure we see it. “Rub it in that you want to screw the maid on top of losing the house.”
“You brought her up,” I say.
Frank is coming to a boil. “Look after your son,” I say, “he’s about to pop.”
There’s no peace in the bathroom with the two of them whispering just down the hall. I look through a copy of Architectural Digest where a couple has built a stunning modern house with all white walls and the usual magnificent window forty feet high. They’re standing arm-in-arm in the middle of the vaulted room like two snuggly stuffed animals, looking proudly at all their objects. Carved space. Crap. Looks like the atrium of a mall. I wash my hands and flush the toilet. The smell of my guts must be pretty putrid, I think, if this is any evidence. I wrap the robe around me and amble out to the hall again.
I’m walking like a seventy-year-old man. I’m walking like my father at seventy, with his gouty knees and arthritis, shuffling across the old dining room rug for a glass of milk.
“Yes, I made a budget,” I say, sitting down in the chair with a huff. The stainless steel has lost all the warmth it gathered from my butt and starts leeching more. “But this is your mother, who couldn’t any more live on a budget than walk to the hair parlor.”
“That’s ten miles from here,” she says, “I drive all the way across town. You know that.”
“To the corner store, then. Couldn’t walk to the corner store.”
“I could live on a budget. I did when I was in college.”
I laugh and then feel nauseous and hold my head between my knees.
“Are you all right?” she asks. “Do you need a glass of water?”
“That would be nice.”
“The glasses are next to the refrigerator,” she says.
“For Christ’s sake, mother.” Frank grips the back of the chair and the edge of the table fiercely and heaves himself to his feet. He’s still pretty mobile once he’s up on his feet, and according to his wife he takes her dancing on occasion at a country club they joined. He can get through a polka and a half before he has to sit down. He fills me a glass of water from the chilled tap at the front of the stainless steel refrigerator.
“Thank you, son,” I said. The cold water is soothing and I put the glass against my forehead.
“Smell from the bathroom,” Carmine says, waving her hand. “Pew. There’s spray right in there, Charley. Every time you go in there I tell you to use it and you never do.”
“I can’t sit here all day,” Frankie says. “What are you going to do?”
“Why are you worried?” I ask. “Your mother is divorcing me anyway.”
“Throw that in my face,” she says. Adding another stick of “Just Gum” to the one in her mouth.
“You should have a lot of equity in the house,” Frankie says.
“There’s a line of credit.”
“What’s that?” Carmine’s voice is slightly blurred by the gum. Twenty years ago she would have been smoking cigarette after cigarette. Now it’s the gum.
“We borrowed money against our equity in the house.”
“That’s a good thing, right? You told me it was good when we did it.”
“It was cheap money. That’s what I told you.”
“You told me it was a good thing. And now what? They want us to pay that back, too?”
“Yes, Mother,” Frank snapped. “It’s a pretty basic principle. When you borrow money they want you to pay it back.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“You’re acting so fucking stupid, Mother.”
“Charley, tell your son not to use that kind of language. Why do we have to pay it back now? That’s all I mean.”
He takes a moment and literally hisses, at a low level, like a hum. Rubbing his forehead in both small hands, he swirls the last of his coffee in the cup.
“I’ll make you another,” Carmine says, and takes the cup.
“The equity loan is secured against the house,” Frankie says. “If the court sells the house you have to pay the equity loan back, too.”
“She knows that. She’s not stupid.”
“I did not know that.” The coffee robot is grinding the beans and heating the water and spits out another cup. “That’s lousy planning. That’s terrible planning.”
“That’s not something you can plan, mother. That’s the way equity loans work.”
“This is what I mean about a budget,” I say. “This woman could not live on a budget for the length of time it takes to piss on one.”
“You never made any such budget, Charley, and yes, I could live on one. I could live on a budget a lot faster than you could, you house-losing bastard.”
“You think I showed it to you? Why would I show a budget to you? It has numbers on it. You don’t deal with numbers. How many times have you told me that?”
“I’ve heard you say that at least a thousand times, Ma,” Frankie says.
“Anything with numbers was your father’s responsibility.”
I laugh quietly. Frankie heaps six spoons of sugar into his coffee and stirs it. He puts the cup in the microwave to get it hotter. This requires his getting up again, a ponderous process. He stands back from the microwave by the five or six feet that his mother has always required, in order to save his brain from turning into radioactive goo. He takes the heated coffee and pours cream into it and sits down again.
I sit there and stare at my son’s knees, dimpled and wide, in the fabric of the tailored suit.
In daylight the kitchen is a bright room, facing the back yard, where we can look out through the sun room to the pool and the privacy fence. Now there’s a gray, early morning quality to the light.
“Should I make breakfast?” Carmine asks. “Is anybody hungry?”
Frankie is watching me. For a moment he has no hostility in his eyes, and he actually sees me, looks at me. In that face right now is a person I used to know, a boy who used to let me play with him in his He-Man Castle, who occasionally shared his favorite Transformers with me. Most of the time I was too busy screwing up another hospital billing system to play but sometimes I said yes. I would pretend I didn’t know how to transform the Transformer and he would show me with the cutest seriousness. That child is still here, still wishing for something. “You know you’ve gotten yourself into a mess that I can’t get you out of.”
The finality of it comes down on me. It’s all the relief
in the world to know.
“What do you mean?” Carmine asks. “Where will we go?”
“Where were you going to go when you were divorcing me?”
“I’m still divorcing you, you bastard.”
“Well,” I say, spreading my hands generously, “now you know what you’re going to get out of it.”
Tears are streaming down Carmine’s face. Most of the face is trembling. “I don’t understand how you could let this happen.”
“You must have known you were in trouble, Dad. You let all this mail pile up. You must have known.”
I blow out a breath as much like a fart as I can make it.
Frank starts to shove himself up from the chair and decides against it. The TV alarm goes off on the kitchen counter and Katie Couric says, “Back to you, Matt.” Carmine reaches for the off-button automatically. “I wish I could figure out who the hell set this alarm. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.”
“I’ll get my son to reset it when he comes over,” Frank said. “He figured out our vcr.”
“Every living morning I come in here for coffee and there’s fucking Katie Couric on the fucking Today show.”
“Watch your mouth,” I say.
“You’ll probably have to sell that TV anyway. It’s a plasma screen, you can get some money for it.”
That freezes Carmine, and disturbs me. The losses won’t stop with the house, of course, Frank’s right. He’s usually right when he’s blunt like that and the subject concerns money. Carmine is rubbing the corner of the TV like she wants to convince a genie to come out of it.
“We never should have spent that kind of money on a TV,” she says, she who saw a flat screen plasma TV about this size in her friend Rhonda Blakeley’s kitchen and had to have one, yes, that very weekend. because she heard there was a sale at Best Buy.
“I told your father we didn’t need a TV in the kitchen but he had to have it. These flat screen things cost so much money.”
“You were the one who wanted it. Miss I-Might-Want-To-Make-A-Soufflé-Someday.”
“You’re such a liar, Charley.” She tosses her head exactly as if she’s putting a cigarette to her lips.
“The same way you wanted the fifteen-hundred-dollar coffee robot, and the nine-hundred-dollar juicer. When was there ever a piece of fruit in this kitchen? When did I ever eat a piece of fruit?”