A few months? Probably. Definitely less than a year.
The phone rang.
For a moment, Bea only stared at it. Because it never rang. She used it to make outgoing calls from time to time, but that was all.
Still, the phone was ringing, and it was unlike Bea to ignore such a blatant demand.
She rose—gently moving Phyllis down to the carpet—walked to it, and picked up the receiver.
“Yes?” she asked in place of hello. Already a bit defensive. “What is it?”
“My name is John Porter,” a young male voice said. “I’m with the IRS.”
His second sentence hit Bea as if she had been stabbed in the gut by a knife fresh out of the freezer. She reached one hand out to the back of a chair to steady herself. Then she sank down, and sat.
“I have no business with the IRS,” she said. “I pay my taxes.”
“Well, you didn’t pay enough for the calendar year 2014.”
Her stomach sank under the weight of several more layers of ice, but it was almost hard to notice.
“Twenty fourteen? Well, why did it take you so long to figure that out?”
“Ma’am, we have a right to keep auditing the returns for six years.”
Twenty fourteen. The first year she’d had to do taxes on her own, after Herbert died. She’d looked into using H&R Block, but she and her husband had no taxes withheld. Herbert had owned a small, struggling business. A bakery. No withholding meant no return. Which meant she would have had to pay a tax preparer out of pocket. So she’d struggled through the instructions herself. But it had been confusing. Overwhelmingly so. And she hadn’t really known much about the bakery’s last year of earnings—or any other year for that matter—so she’d had to rely only on what Herbert had left behind. Bank deposit records, boxes of loose receipts.
When she stopped to think about it, what were the chances she would have gotten that exactly right?
At least it will never happen again, she thought, and the revelation eased her mind some. All she had now was her Social Security, which was not taxable. She would never have to file a tax return again. But she had filed that one, for 2014. And she still owed.
How much of the $741.12 was that mistake about to claim?
“Ma’am?” the voice on the line asked. “Are you still there?”
“Um. Yes.”
“There’s a balance due of three hundred dollars. And it has to be paid today. If it’s not paid today, a whole series of collection procedures will be put into place. You don’t want that. You really don’t want that. And once the process has started, there’s nothing we can do to stop it again.”
Bea straightened, and dropped her voice into a more authoritative range.
“Well, that’s just plain unfair,” she said, pleased with the strong sound of it. “If it’s due today you should have told me weeks ago. There must be some kind of requirement for that. I could have mailed you a check. I’m going to complain to my congressperson and my senator. Why, I’ll call the newspapers and the TV news if I have to. This is no way to treat the taxpayers who pay your salary.”
“Ma’am?” the voice asked again. “Are you there?”
“Um. Yes. So I have to drive a check to the office?”
“We’re in Sacramento.”
“Sacramento?” It came out as more of a screech than a word. “That’s hours from me! More than seven or eight hours! There’s no way I could even get it to you before your office closes!”
Bea felt the panic close in all around her, cutting off her oxygen supply. As if the room had filled up with water from the walls in.
“Ma’am, relax. There’s an easy solution.”
“Oh. Good.” She pulled in a breath, and it was indeed oxygen. “What is it?”
“You just give us a little banking information over the phone. A routing number and your account number, and then the PIN or code you’ve established with your bank. We can do a direct withdrawal. The whole thing will be cleared up in no time.”
“Oh. Good. Thank goodness. Yes. I’ll just go get my checkbook.”
As she crossed the room to fetch it, the new balance popped into her head. $441.12. She pushed it away again. At least she would have no more trouble with the IRS, and nothing could be more frightening than that.
“Okay,” she said, grabbing up the receiver again. “I’ve got it.”
“First,” he said, “your name.”
“Beatrice Ann Kraczinsky.”
Later she would run the moment through her mind dozens of times. Hundreds of times, to be more honest. Each time she would see so clearly what she had not seen at the time: that if the IRS calls you to tell you there’s a balance due, they must already know your name. Otherwise how would they know whose balance is owing? How would they even have known which taxpayer to call?
And there would be other things that would occur to her later. That $300 was an awfully neat, round figure, for example. That the IRS was more likely to determine that you owed them $317.26 or some such raggedy number. Nothing quite so convenient as rounding off in whole hundreds.
And that the only other time there had been communication from the IRS to Herbert it had come in the form of a registered letter.
And that they may well have the right to audit returns for a number of years, but they tend to conduct the audits with the taxpayer present.
All these things Bea would see very clearly. Later.
But this was not later. This was not a moment enhanced by the wisdom of hindsight. This was the moment in which Bea gave the man her routing number, her account number, her PIN.
No amount of hindsight would change that.
After finishing up the dreadful call, Bea gathered up her bill envelopes. She took a brown paper sack out of the cupboard. Then she grabbed a plastic sandwich bag to cover her hand.
She let herself out the trailer’s front door, carefully locking up behind her.
Bea picked up the nasty pile from her grass and dropped it into the paper sack.
Then she placed the bill payments—all except the rent check—in the mailbox and raised the red flag so the postman would know to collect them before stuffing in more bills.
She drove her van down the rows of brightly colored trailers, occasionally waving to a neighbor in a garden, or on a porch, or through their windows. She drove not because she literally could not walk the equivalent of a block or two—though a walk that long would have been a struggle—but because it was already 108 degrees. She kept driving, blasting the air conditioner, until she had reached the mobile home park office. Arthur was not there. She could tell. Because that little “We Will Return in . . .” sign was hanging on the door, its “clock” manually set to 2:00 p.m. She dropped her rent check through the mail slot in the door instead.
On the way back, she purposely took the long way to go by Lettie Pace’s trailer. There she left the paper sack and its contents on Lettie’s stoop.
Really. In the real world. When she looked back over her shoulder, she was pleased to see it was something she had actually done.
Chapter Two
After The End of Everything
Bea woke with a start, effectively dead. And yet, at the same time, not dead at all.