The Bank That Held My Parents Mortgage
Whitney and I had never been close in the way sisters in movies are close, matching, inseparable, finishing each other’s sentences. She was two years younger, she had chosen nursing the way our father wanted, and for a long time I think she quietly resented that my rebellion had cost her the easier path of simply being the daughter who did everything right without comparison. We talked on birthdays. We showed up for the same holidays, careful and polite with each other, two people who loved one another out of obligation and old habit more than any current intimacy. It embarrassed me a little, listening to her unravel on the phone that night, how long it had been since either of us had called the other for anything beyond logistics.
“I didn’t know who else to ask,” she said again, like she needed to justify reaching out to the sister she barely spoke to anymore. “Mom would never ask you herself, you know how she is, she’d rather lose the house quietly than admit she needed help from the daughter Dad pushed away. And Dad, God, Dad would rather lose the house loudly and blame the bank, the economy, anybody but himself, before he’d ever call you and ask for anything.”
“I know exactly how they are,” I said, and meant it more completely than Whitney understood.
“Are you, are you doing okay? Money wise? I don’t actually even know what you do anymore, Sarah, isn’t that awful. I know you work at a bank and that’s basically it.”
“I’m okay,” I said, which was true in the most understated way a sentence has ever been true. “Just get them to that meeting Thursday. Let me handle the rest.”
“Can you come with them,”I asked. “This Thursday. There’s a mortgage assistance meeting at the Heartland Trust branch in Daleford, two o’clock. Tell them it’s a standard review, every borrower in hardship gets one. Just get them there.”
“You work for Heartland Trust? Since when?”
“A while,” I said. “Just get them there, Whitney. I promise you it’s going to be all right.”
I did not tell her how.
Thursday came, and I drove to the Daleford branch myself instead of handling it from my regional office, which raised exactly one eyebrow from my assistant, Monica, who had learned not to ask too many questions about the files I personally walked into small branches to review. I sat in the branch manager’s office, a man named Curtis Boyle who had run that location for eleven years and had absolutely no idea the borrowers coming in at two o’clock were any relation to me, and I asked him if I could sit in on the hardship consultation personally, as the division head overseeing the account, which was true, and which he had no reason to question.