Chapter 9
Even though I grew up in Hope Crest, I don’t have much experience exploring all its shops, tourist destinations, and local watering holes.
Aside from school and waitressing at the pizzeria, my mother didn’t allow me to go too many places. She needed to constantly be tended to, and most times, it felt like I was put on this earth to be her personal servant.
Case in point, the night of the first softball practice during my eighth-grade year. After years of whining about the entry fees and uniform costs, she finally agreed to let me sign up for a team sport. Silly little me, I should have known that her consent was a shield for ulterior motives.
I naively had gotten my hopes up. The night before, I braided my hair extra tight so it would wave just right for my ponytail as I stood at home plate. I set out my uniform, learned the other girls’ names, studied the league rules, and even did a set of pushups in my naivete.
But the next morning, at five a.m., approximately four hours before my first practice, my mother woke me from a deep sleep with an ear-piercing shriek. She claimed that someone had stolen a family heirloom brooch and that we had to find it right away.
Mind you, I never heard of the existence of this brooch until that very moment. Plus, she woke her sleeping child up for no good reason. But that didn’t matter. Into the car we went, searching pawn shops up and down the Pennsylvania highways until the sky was no longer black and shining with stars.
I tried not to cry as I glimpsed the clock turn nine a.m., and then ten, and then hours later, and I knew the practice had come and gone. I knew, in my heart of hearts, that she would never let me go to another one and never intended for me to go in the first place. Instead, I was dragged to shop after shop, where she expected compliments on every useless purchase she made.
If my mother loved anything, it was shopping for and being congratulated on unnecessary things she didn’t need in the slightest. If her ego was boosted, and she thought you were labeling her a genius for her finds, she was on top of the world.
I held my tears at bay in the back seat until the inside of the car was so dark she could no longer see me. Showing weakness only made her scathing side come out to play, and I learned from an early age that it only got worse the more I showed vulnerability.
That’s how my entire childhood had gone, manipulated by a mad woman who pulled the rug out from under me whenever I thought I was finally standing up straight.
For as long as I can remember, it was just my mother and me. She had no more family, and my father was long gone before I ever became conscious of the fact that I should have a father or at least another parent. Mom loved to scream and cry about him sometimes, on very off days, and blame me for some mumbo jumbo of hysterics that I could barely understand. From what I could gather, he took off when she was four months pregnant and never came back.
With no grandparents or aunts and uncles to step in and save me, I was stuck with her. Trapped in a house where her delusional rules went, and that was as good as law. Like having me clean the baseboards of the basement stairs at midnight in December, two days before the state tests to determine whether I could move up to high school. Another time, she pinched the skin on my upper arm so hard I had a bruise for three weeks. Why did she do that? Because I complimented a different mother at school pickup. Apparently, that was an affront to her.
Over and over, she’d manipulate, emotionally abuse, and occasionally pinch or push me because I wasn’t living up to the expectations in her head. What I didn’t understand for the longest time, since I was just a kid, was that those expectations were ever-changing and completely absurd.
To this day, I have no idea what was clinically wrong with my mother. She never bothered to visit a doctor or therapist to find out because, in her mind, she was perfect. Admitting there was any flaw or defect would have destroyed her entire model of thinking, so it went unchecked. I couldn’t even guess at this point, but there was something wrong with her because mothers didn’t just act like she did toward her child.
The only reason she allowed me to work at Hope Pizza was because it brought in a little extra money for our household, which she said I owed because of how much I cost her. Hiding my wages from her was never really an option, even though I’d had a twenty here or there in my shoe or bra to squirrel away.
So, to say that I haven’t branched out into the Hope Crest community would be an understatement. If anyone in town remembers me, it’s because I worked at the pizzeria. I never had many friends and lost any contact with the few I had when I went to college.
Which is why I have to pull up directions on my phone to get to the office of the lawyer my mother hired to draw up her last will and testament. God knows when that was, and she surely never spoke to me about her wishes.
By the time I close my car door and walk up to the entrance, my hands are sweating and my heart is a lump in my throat. This is the last time I’ll ever have to deal with anything concerning my mother, and I’m thankful for that.
But it’s still another moment of my life dedicated to her when I thought I’d finally be free. Doing this, settling her will, is like ripping the final bandage off a healed wound; I just have to get through the momentary sting of pain to get to the other side.
As I walk into the small-town law office, I’m reminded that these people will have a certain opinion of my mother and, therefore, of me.
“I’m here to see Mr. Malloy,” I say to the mid-fifties receptionist, tapping away at a computer that looks to be from the nineties.
She blinks up at me, a genuine smile on her face. “August Percy?”
“That’s me,” I confirm.
“I’ll let him know you’re here.”
Not two minutes later, she’s leading me back to a wood-paneled office that smells of tobacco and some kind of meat. Marty Malloy sits behind a large oak desk, his round glasses illuminating cloudy blue eyes, and the man can’t be more than a hundred pounds soaking wet.
“August, come on in.” He waves me over, gesturing to a leather chair in front of his desk.
“Hello, Mr. Malloy.” I sit, my heart beginning to pound in a steady rhythm.
“It’s taken a bit longer than we thought for you to come in. Are you sure you’re ready?” he asks as his receptionist closes the door. “Some people have a very tough time with this conversation, understandably.”
Sure, I’m having a tough time, but not for the reason he thinks. “I’m ready, I assure you. I need to close this chapter.”
His small smile turns into a frown, the creases in his skin growing deeper. Immediately, a sinking feeling fills my stomach.
“Well, unfortunately, I’m not sure how quickly we’ll be able to close it for you.”
“What does that mean?” Panic blares in my head like an alarm as he slides a bunch of documents across the top of the desk toward me.
“Your mother came in here about two years ago, I’m not sure exactly why. I’m not sure if she knew something was going to happen, or if she really was trying to protect herself, or what.” He frowns again, and I can only imagine the act my mother put on when coming in here.
She often loved to prophesize to me about her death and funeral as if she were a saint that people would come hundreds of miles to see laid to rest.
“Anyway, she didn’t have much in terms of assets. What was in her savings and retirement was already allocated to cover the cost of the medical bills when she passed, and her burial expenses. She didn’t have any stock holdings, no inheritance to be passed to you, or anything else that would be given to you. The only thing available is her life insurance, and since you’re her only next of kin, it would fall to you.”
That doesn’t sound very complicated, but with my mother, there is always a catch.
“Now, that life insurance is about a hundred thousand, which should be paid out to you in time. However …”
Here comes that bandage rip; I can feel it.
“Your mother still owed about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on the mortgage. Now, you could try to sell it, but with the way she refinanced, and then did so again, you might actually end up owing money. Basically, the property is upside down.”
I know jack shit about owning property, mortgages, or the housing market, so he could be speaking a different language to me right now. Maybe this isn’t cause for concern, and maybe I don’t need to panic.
“I’m sorry, what is being upside down?”
Marty is being patient with me, but I can tell he doesn’t like delivering such bad news. “Sometimes it’s called an underwater mortgage. It means the loan is higher than the value of the home at its current market price, or what you could get for it. Basically, if you tried to sell right now, you’d still owe on the original balance of the loan.”
Fuck, okay, so it’s definitely cause for concern. “So, you’re saying that even if I sold the house, I’d still owe a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”
“Precisely. I’m sorry to give you that news.” He frowns once more, and I know he really means that.
What the fuck was my mother doing with her money and life? I can only imagine what she got up to, with shopping trips or gambling or trying to land some man by flashing a bunch of cash. And for her final act, she left me in a lurch, holding the smoking gun, trying to figure out what to do with it.
“What if the bank forecloses or I sell it to them or?” Again, I know jack shit about anything to do with real estate.
“That wouldn’t be an option, unless you could stop making payments on the mortgage. Which I wouldn’t advise, and they’d see the hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy,” he explains.
Meaning I have the funds to keep paying the mortgage until I dig myself out of the hole, so someone seizing the property isn’t feasible. Fuck my life, truly. This chapter is not going to close, not in the slightest.
“So, then, I just … keep making payments? Until I can pay off the mortgage to a point where the house can be sold?” This is worse than a nightmare.
I can’t even step foot in the house, and I’m supposed to keep owning the goddamn thing until I can get it off my hands? That could take years. That could take a huge chunk of my salary once I start working. Instead of building a future and a retirement for myself, it’s going to go to cleaning up one of her messes, even while she’s no longer on this earth.
Mom always did have the last laugh.
“We can try to set something up, see if there is any movement on the housing market. But for right now, I’d advise continuing the payments with the life insurance policy.” Marty nods and seems genuinely sad to be putting me in this predicament.
Where the hell am I going to come up with fifty thousand extra dollars in the near future? The answer is nowhere. Per usual, I have me and only me to depend on. So it looks like I’ll be the underdog once more for the foreseeable future.
After going over a few more details, Marty bids me farewell with another sad smile and apologizes for not being able to do more.
When it comes to my mother, I’m always being apologized to for something she’s done. I’m practically an expert in it now.
Walking out onto Newton Street, the main drag in Hope Crest, feels like I’m meandering through a haze. What felt like an optimistic start to the day has ended in disaster, and it isn’t even noon. I thought I was walking into the end of my relationship with my mother, but no. She’s just put another burden on my shoulders.
My heart almost cracks under the weight of the sadness because I thought I’d long outrun her vicious claws. I thought I retracted them, that they couldn’t sink into me again. But of course, she found a way, whether she meant to or not.
What was meant as a last trip home, a closing of a door, has just become a problem with no end in sight. I returned to my hometown for a short amount of time, or so I thought, and now that isn’t what I have in store at all. Do I stay here and figure this out? Get a job not in my hospitality field? Do I move, but who will manage the property if it needs it? How do I know when it will be safe to sell?
So many questions flutter around my brain as I walk back to my car in a daze, my eyes flitting to the end of the block where Hope Pizza sits.
Where my roommate is probably cooking up tonight’s dinner menu.
Setting up rules with Evan made the butterflies in my stomach go wild. Which they always tend to do when I’m around him, but this is different. He sees me, really sees me, for the first time in, well, ever. To have his undivided attention, to have him cook for me, was almost like the dates I always dreamed about him taking me on when I was a teenager. In my fantasies, we’d go out to the local diner, where he’d hold my hand in front of everyone, and we’d share a milkshake or something.
Now, none of that matters. In comparison to what I’m dealing with, I have no time to entertain fantasies from my childhood or flirt with my roommate.
My roommate. What the hell will we do now that my stay isn’t a temporary few weeks? Maybe Evan doesn’t want a broke roommate for what is a long road ahead that seems to have no end.
Fuck, I’m exhausted already, and I haven’t even begun to seriously tackle this.
Not for the first time in my life, I let myself wallow in self-pity. Just when it seems I’ve gained some good luck or things are looking up for me, something comes to crush it right back down. My entire life, I’ve swung between these two pendulums, never settled, even, or in balance.
Is this what I’m destined for forever? Will I always be chasing down something that is unattainable?
Today, it surely feels like it.