“They are just updating their files, Mabel, nothing to worry over.”
“Because if you need help, you know people around here care,” she said, her voice dropping as she leaned closer.
“Is Connor still refusing to help out with the household?”
“Connor is doing what he can,” I lied, looking past her toward the road.
“Well, I hope so,” Mabel said.
“With the mortgage what it is, a young man ought to be contributing more than just his appetite.”
She lingered for another five minutes, asking about my late husband’s sister and then about the tomato plants, before she finally went back down the path.
I watched her go, knowing the pantry was nearly empty.
At noon, I sat in my old sedan in the local bank parking lot, the air conditioning blowing nothing but lukewarm dust into my face.
The paper in my lap was a printed statement from the teller window, showing my checking account sat at negative forty-two dollars.
I stared at the heat waves shimmering off the black asphalt of the lot.
A blue sedan pulled into the space next to mine, the driver talking on her phone and laughing.
I folded the bank statement twice and shoved it deep into my purse.
The foreclosure warning on the kitchen table gave me exactly thirty days to clear the back payments.
If I did not find five hundred dollars for the emergency payment by the end of the month, the bank would take the house.
I looked at the glass double doors of the bank lobby, then down at my own hands.
I was sixty-one, and I had never asked my stepson for a single dime, but my pride was the only thing I had left to lose.
At six in the evening, the kitchen was hot and smelled of warmed-over beef stew.
