The 174 Payments I Canceled

Monday, Six O’Clock in the Morning

I was at the bank at ten to six on Monday. The doors do not open until nine, but Jan let me in the side entrance, and she put a thermos of coffee into my hands and walked me to the second chair in the lobby, the one by the window where you can see the whole floor.

“Sit here,” she said. “I want you to see the first one.”

I had worn the navy dress again. I do not know why. I think I wanted to look like a woman who had not lost anything.

Ted Garrity, the loan officer, was already at his desk with his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow and a screen glowing blue in front of him. Ted held Brent’s mortgage. Ted had sat at the closing table eleven years ago and slid the papers across with a smile and said, “Mrs. Farrow, you are the best mother in the county.”

At 6:04 the payment cycle ran. Ted’s screen flickered, and I watched his shoulders drop an inch.

“Returned,” he said quietly, mostly to himself. “Mortgage on Larkspur.”

His desk phone rang almost immediately. He looked at it and did not pick it up.

“That’ll be Brent,” Jan said.

By 6:30 my own phone was lighting up so steadily it walked itself across the arm of the chair. Brent. Brent. Brent. Becky. Brent. I put it face down on my knee and drank Jan’s coffee and watched the morning light come up over Main Street.

A few minutes after seven, a notice came up on Ted’s screen for something else, and then another. The homeowner’s policy. The water. The phone plan. One by one each little draft failed to leave, each one a small bright door closing in an empty hall.

Ted came over around eight and told me he had to make a courtesy call to the borrower. “Only the truth,” I said. “That the account is closed to him, on my instruction.”

Brent finally got hold of Ted at 8:40. I could hear his voice through the handset all the way from the lobby, high and cracking, the way it used to crack when he was fourteen and I would not let him have the truck. Ted listened, said “yes sir” twice, and then, in a calm voice I will remember on my deathbed, said: “Mr. Farrow, I’d recommend you speak to your mother. But I wouldn’t do it this morning.”