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I’m at the kitchen counter making coffee in sweatpants and yesterday’s T-shirt when the email comes through.
Bea is still asleep. She is, when undisturbed, a championship-grade sleeper, the kind that goes under so completely you sometimes have to put a hand on her ribs to confirm she’s still alive.
The kettle is finishing its slow lift toward boiling and I’m reaching for the grinder when the phone lights up on the counter beside me.
Bayhill Property Management. Special assessment notice. Unit 304.
I pick it up. Read the preview.
Then I open the laptop on the counter and read the full thing, because the preview already has—in its first sentence—the word immediate.
I read it slowly.
Special assessment amounting to $23,400 per unit, payable within thirty (30) days, in respect of structural roof failure confirmed following Board engineering review. Failure to meet the assessment within the prescribed period will result in lien proceedings against the unit pursuant to Section 14 of the Declaration. Please contact the management office to confirm the method of payment.
And blah blah fucking blah. I google what this means. This means that if I don’t pay up, Mabel is out. Fuck.
The question is that I have, in checking, four thousand eight hundred dollars and change, and the unit in question is the one Mabel lives in, and Mabel does not, and is not going to, know about this.
I can fix this.
She is so happy there I can’t let them kick her out. But I also can’t afford for her to stay. These fucking bastards. I’ve since realized investing in a Condo is an unquestionably terrible decision, but I can’t—I just can’t kick her out. I need to fix this.
* * *
I sit at the counter with the laptop, and I open my accounts.
The math takes about ninety seconds and does not improve when I redo it.
Checking and savings: four thousand eight hundred. Amex: six grand available against a fifteen-grand limit, which I could max but which would tank a credit score. The Martin acoustic in the corner that Mabel bought me when I was fourteen I would rather use as firewood before I sold it for cash.
Which leaves the condo itself. It’s paid for, and paid-for property is supposed to be the easiest money in America, so I spend the next hour finding out what America actually thinks of a man with no W-2, a credit score still bleeding from November.
The answer is no. No from two banks and a credit union, no in three different fonts, one no delivered with genuine warmth by a man named Curtis who suggests I “circle back when there’s verifiable income.”
Thanks a bunch. Asshole.
The single yes comes from a dodgy looking loan business quoting an interest rate that solves April’s problem by inventing a worse one for October.
The Trust doesn’t release a cent until first-year results post at the end of May, and only if I’ve passed.
I’m screwed. I’m fucked.
Even if I did sell my guitar and max out my card.
I close the laptop, which does not make any of the numbers go away, but does at least stop me from looking at them.
I think for about thirty seconds.
My parents.
I think about my parents for, I would say, four seconds. Then I think about the conversation in which I would have to tell my mother that the reason I needed twenty-three and a half thousand dollars urgently was that I had been covering, for three years, the housing costs of her estranged sister, whose existence in our family is—has been for a long time—a thing we do not discuss.
That leaves me with only one option. And I really, really don’t fucking like it.
In the bedroom, Bea is making the small ordinary sounds of a woman waking up. The slow stretch and small grumble. The barefoot pad to the bathroom. The shower coming on.
I pick up the phone once I know she’s out of earshot.
