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CHAPTER TWO
MAYAWASTREMBLINGand struggling to hide it as she watched her little brother being boarded on the bus that took him to his special school every morning. Matt was grinning as a friend with a similar disability shouted something out to him, an eleven-year-old boy, still wonderfully innocent about the world he and his parents lived in. A world of debt and disaster, she acknowledged wretchedly, as if Matt hadn’t already endured enough in life after losing the use of his legs at the age of four following a fall from the ladder of a playground slide.
The bus pulled away and she closed the front door again. In her mind’s eye, every word of the letter that had been delivered and the papers that had been served first thing that morning were still etched inside her pounding head. Official documents containing a court summons and athreateningletter had disclosed alarming facts she had not known about her family’s financial history.
And that her parents should have left her in ignorance was unacceptable.Thatshouldn’t have been possible when she had spent years borrowing from one loan company to pay another, performing mathematical acrobatics to stave off her parents’ bankruptcy and the loss of the home her little brother needed for security! Her twin, Izzy, had made so many sacrifices too, working in low-paid jobs to earn every extra penny she could and bring it home. Maya was so angry she wanted to scream. A legal summons to court had been served on her parents, threatening them with bankruptcy.
‘Don’t look at us like that!’ Her mother, Lucia gasped, an attractive brunette in her forties, her brown eyes crumpling as she broke down into sobs. ‘We c-couldn’tfacetelling you the truth!’
‘All these years you’ve allowed me to believe that youownedthis house and, because I believed you, nowIcould be in trouble for fraudulently helping you to borrow money against an asset that doesn’t belong to you!’ Maya condemned, out of all patience with her parents, watching stony-faced as her father closed a supportive arm round his sobbing wife’s shoulders.
‘Maya...please,’ her father, Rory, begged with tears shining in his own eyes.
Scolding her parents was like kicking newborn puppies. And not for the first time, as she turned away in a mixture of guilt and angry discomfiture she wondered if she was a changeling, because she had nothing whatsoever in common with either her mother or her father. She loved them but she couldn’t comprehend the way their minds worked or the dreadful decisions they made, or the half-lies they would employ to evade any nasty truth. But she had, naturally, worked out certain things. Neither of them was particularly bright, neither of them capable of planning or saving or budgeting, so wherehadher sharp calculating brain come from? One of those gene anomalies, she thought with an inner sigh, knowing such rambling reflections were getting her precisely nowhere in the midst of a crisis.
It was also, by far, the worst crisis they had ever faced as a family and she felt sick and shaky and scared, knowing that no matter what she did she could not possibly drag them out of trouble this time around. There was far too much money owed and, even worse, they had not made a single payment on the private loan that had purchased the house they now stood in.
‘Not one single repayment in over twenty years,’ Maya reminded her parents out loud. ‘That means, you don’townthis house, the person who gave you this loanownsthis house and now they want the money back or you have to move out.’
‘Tommaso wouldn’t do that to me,’ Lucia protested. ‘His family’s too rich and he’s too kind.’
Maya slapped the letter that had arrived in the post down on the table. ‘They’re demanding that the loan be repaid immediately andinfullor they will take the house and sell it. Whoever Tommaso is, he is no longer prepared to wait for his money.’
‘Tommaso is a Manzini,’ Lucia informed her in an awed tone, as if that surname alone belonged to some godlike clan. ‘The man I was supposed to marry, but he didn’t want to marry me either. He helped your dad and I to leave Italy and buy a home here.’
‘He gave you a loan,’ Maya contradicted. ‘The moneywasn’ta gift.’
‘Well,wecertainly thought it was a gift,’ her father, Rory, confided in a long-suffering tone.
‘It doesn’t matter what you thought because you were wrong. You signed a loan agreement.’
‘But that was only a sham to cover the paperwork for his grandfather’s benefit!’ her mother piped up. ‘Tommaso promised that he would never ask for any of it back.’
‘Helied.’ Maya slapped the letter again and pushed it across for her mother to see the Manzini Finance logo at the top. ‘Although I’ve got to give the guy his due. He did wait for over twenty years to raise the subject and, if we could afford it, I would take this to court to see how it played out because I’m pretty sure it’snotlegal to wait this long to demand a repayment.Butwe don’t have a penny to bless ourselves with, so we won’t be going to court on that score.’
‘Never mind, we’ve got an appointment with Manzini Finance,’ Lucia objected with a sudden insanely inappropriate smile, as if she were pulling a rabbit out of the hat that would magically save them all. ‘We’ll just explain and it will all be fixed. This is just a misunderstanding, that’s all. You’re such a worrier. You’re getting all worked up over nothing, Maya.’
‘You’ve been summoned to a bankruptcy court as well,’ Maya delivered with clarity. ‘Nothing is going to protect you from that. Your debts have caught up with you and we don’t have the money to repay them. I hate to say it because I’m not a quitter, but this is the end of the road as far as the debts go. Whoever had the bankruptcy summons served probably assumes they can sell the house to cover the debts.’
‘If it wasn’t for Matt, we could,’ her mother burbled as if the earlier conversation had not taken place.
‘No, you couldn’t, Mum, because you don’t own the house,’ Maya parried wearily. ‘And I’ll be keeping the appointment with Manzini Finance, not you and Dad.’
Rory squeezed his wife’s shoulder comfortingly. ‘Maya understands all this financial stuff better than us,’ he said with confident pride in his daughter’s abilities. ‘She’ll sort this out in a trice.’
Maya studied her parents with quivering lips, which she had to compress to stay in control of her tongue. There would be no sorting it out this time. It was a case of pay up and move out, but she supposed only the actual experience of being homeless would persuade her parents that their mindset of running away from their debts was no longer sustainable. And that was all very well, but what about Matt?
It was her kid brother that her heart bled for the most. The house had been specially adapted for his needs and he had a place in a special school nearby. It was unlikely that her family would be able to stay in the same area. He would lose his schooling and his little circle of mates, lose his home and the few freedoms he still had. Even for an able-bodied child that would be a tough proposition but for a disabled child, it was absolutely tragic.
‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Tommaso again,’ her mother sighed. ‘He was like my big brother. Honestly, he was the nicest, kindest man.’
‘I seriously doubt that someone as important in Manzini Finance as this Tommaso must be will be present at the meeting,’ Maya pointed out, striving not to add the reminder that aniceguy wouldn’t have allowed such a letter to be sent to his pseudo little sister. As usual, her mother’s expectations were far removed from the reality of what was likely to happen.
‘You’re probably right,’ Lucia conceded. ‘As a family member, Tommaso must be very senior now in his grandfather’s business.’
‘I need to dress for the appointment,’ Maya pointed out, escaping the small lounge to flee down the corridor of their semi-detached bungalow home into the bedroom she had grown up in with her twin. It still had bunk beds, there not being the space for any other option.
It was fortunate that she kept her interview suit at her parents’ home, although she doubted if it mattered what she wore in the circumstances. Short of selling her soul to the devil, there was no way anyone was going to extend further understanding to her financially incompetent parents, but it was equally fortunate that she had had the foresight to have her father sign a power of attorney in her name so that she was able to deal with their money problems on their behalf. At least that gave her the scope totryto find a resolution.
