“You’ll be homeless,” Opal said.
Bea would have liked to keep that ugly word out of things. But there it was. Sooner or later it was going to be said. By someone. It was inevitable.
“I didn’t say it was a great plan. I said it was a plan.”
“You’ve got till the end of the month, right? Everything’s paid up for now?”
“Yes. For now.”
“Then we have time to think of something better.”
“Sure,” Bea said. “We’ll think of something better.”
But she knew it wasn’t true. If there were a nice, easy solution to homelessness, she thought, a million homeless people would have found it by now.
Chapter Four
The World May Not Owe Me a Living, but It Owes Me $741.12
Three days later, in what should have been a quiet month of transition, Bea was startled out of sleep by a knock on the trailer door.
This almost never happened.
No one came to Bea’s door except Opal once in a blue moon. It was embarrassing to have Opal over, as she lived in such opulence—even though none of the opulence was technically hers. So Bea’s sole friend visited seldom. And no one else visited at all.
Bea couldn’t help feeling, as she struggled into her robe and combed her hair with her fingers, that this was unlikely to be good news. She glanced at the little clock on the stove as she hurried by the nook of the trailer’s kitchen. It was barely seven a.m.
“Who is it at this hour?” she called through the door. “Awfully early to come knocking.”
“It’s Arthur,” Arthur said.
That might not be so bad. Maybe Mrs. Betteson had told him about Lettie Pace’s rudeness and he had come around to hear her side of the thing.
Bea swung the door wide, wincing into the morning light.
“We’ve got a problem,” Arthur said.
“What problem is that?” she asked, trying to sound casual. But her heart took to pounding and her stomach turned to concrete.
“It’s your rent check.”
“What about it?”
“It bounced.”
Bea opened her mouth to say that was silly. There was no reason it should have. Then it all came pouring down on her at once.
She closed her mouth.
She took two steps backward to her easy chair and lowered herself down.
That was the something else she’d been forgetting. Another aspect of the situation her brain could not be trusted to grasp. The day she’d gotten that awful call from the scammer pretending to be the IRS, she had just written all her checks for the month. As she’d deducted them from her checkbook, she had considered them paid. In her mind they were paid. But they were not paid. The utility checks had been sitting in the mailbox when her account was raided, and the rent check had been lying on the floor of the mobile home park office, having only recently been slipped through the mail slot.
So the scammer did not get $740 and change. He got the nice, reassuring total she’d seen in her checkbook when she added in that month’s Social Security. He’d made off with over $1,600. And all of her monthly checks would now bounce.
“Mrs. Kraczinsky? You okay?”
She looked up at Arthur, backlit by morning in her doorway.
It was an additional problem that she hadn’t seen all this coming—that her brain had not made the jump. She knew that now. Anyone with a reasonable mind would know that checks written are not checks cashed. Why, when she’d gone to the bank to close that compromised account and open a new one, they’d even asked her if she had checks outstanding. And she’d said no.
She’d spent the better part of three days fixing her banking problems. Talking the bank into waiving its rules by establishing an account with no opening balance. Changing the direct deposit arrangement with the Social Security Administration to the new account. Getting a new debit card to take on the road. She’d felt such a sense of satisfaction, knowing she’d handled things so well.
Meanwhile all her checks were bouncing.
And the account on which she’d written them had been voluntarily closed.
And she hadn’t told anyone about the scammer, because she was ashamed. And because there was no way to catch him anyway, and everybody knew it. And because she didn’t want their pity. And now it would appear that she had written checks on a zero balance and then closed the account before they could come in.
“Mrs. Kraczinsky?”
“Yes, Arthur. I’m fine. It’s just a mistake. I know what went wrong and I can fix it. I just need a few days. Give me three days, okay?”
Because that’s how long she figured it would take to load up the van and clear out.
“Well . . . ,” Arthur said. He scratched his very bald head. “I’m not too happy about that, but . . . if you’re sure it’s only three days.”
“Why, you sanctimonious little rodent,” Bea spat.
Arthur stumbled back a few steps from the force of her words.
“Here I’ve lived in this ratty little park for almost two decades, and have I ever once paid my rent even one day late? No. Not once. And when Herbert and I had to borrow money using the trailer for collateral, and we got behind, you were more than happy to take it off our hands and rent it back to us. Like you were doing us a big favor, keeping the bank from foreclosing. But it was a favor to yourself and no one else, because you rented it back for more than it was worth, and even that didn’t stop you from raising the rent twice more in the following years. And then you have the gall to stand here while my life is falling apart and act like three days is a major imposition? How dare you? How dare you stand in my doorway at seven o’clock in the morning and make yourself too important to try to make me feel small? Just who do you think you are?”
“Mrs. Kraczinsky?”
“Yes, Arthur. Three days. I promise. I won’t let you down.”
Bea rose, walked to the door, and closed it, blotting out Arthur’s face.
To her surprise, she didn’t feel guilty about her lie. At least, not as guilty as she’d expected. Of course she would let him down, and she would live with that. After all, other people let her down all the time.
Let somebody else cope with it for a change.
She turned on the air-conditioning. Yes, at seven in the morning. She would bathe herself in cool comfort until it was time to go. The check to the electric company would bounce, and they would never be paid for last month, or the power she used in the first few days of this month while getting ready to leave. And she was doing it anyway. They had plenty of money, and they got it by taking it from people like her. They could simply deduct the loss from their taxes, which they didn’t pay nearly enough of anyway. She and Herbert had spent their lives making up the tax shortfall caused by these big, heartless corporations.
Now she would short them and see how they liked it.
She didn’t believe herself one hundred percent. She wasn’t comfortable with these ideas so much as she was forcing herself to make her peace with them, and fast.
One thing she could not deny. The world owed her $741.12, and it was high time the world paid up. For a change.
Chapter Five
Van Sweet Van
Bea’s new home was twelve years old and boasted 145,216 miles on the odometer. It had decent tires, and air-conditioning in the dash that still worked.