of do-nothing think-nothing mind-wiped blissful teenage oblivion. Hell. Yes.
It’s then she hears something downstairs.
A gentle sobbing. As if into a pillow. Or a couch cushion.
Her mother.
“Aw, shit,” Atlanta says. Then buries her own head under the pillow. Minutes pass. Once more she emerges—peekaboo!—and still hears the woman’s weeping. “Dangit.”
She’s going to have to check on her mother, isn’t she? The two of them have been getting along. Better. If not great. It’s not like it used to be where she looked up to her mother and wanted to be like her; that ship has long-sailed. It sailed and hit an iceberg and broke apart like a stepped-on cookie soon as her mother invited a bad man into their house, a bad boyfriend whose eyes were wider for Atlanta than they were for Arlene.
The sudden stink of gunpowder screw-spirals up her nose. Another ghost. Not present. Not real. She pushes it back, then makes her way downstairs, finds her mother sitting on the couch, her lap a clumsy cairn of crumpled-up tissues.
Next to her, a torn envelope, and some kind of letter.
“We’re screwed,” her mother says. Another honk as she blows her nose.
“Jeezum Crow,” Atlanta says, rubbing sleep boogers from the corners of her eyes. “What are you going on about?”
“I got the mail.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Here.” Arlene Burns crawls up over the back of the couch and hangs there like a baby stuck on a crib rail, unable to escape her prison. She waves the letter in front of her daughter’s face. “Acceleration clause, they say.”
Atlanta grabs the letter, sent from the local bank. Montour County First National. Sounds like adult problems, she thinks, not really sure what to make of all this.
Most of it is stuff she can’t decipher. It’s about the house. That much is clear. And something about the the mortgage payments. She sees phrases like risk-adjusted rates and forbearance and loan modification terms. Oh, and that one her mother just said:
Acceleration clause.
A lot of the details escape her. But she starts to get the gist. They want her to pay out the mortgage. Like, the whole thing. But if she pays ahead a little bit, they’ll “reinstate” the loan.
Reinstatement comes with higher rates. Or something.
Failure to do any of that means foreclosure. Atlanta’s not entirely sure all the details that orbit a foreclosure, but she sure knows the end result: sheriff comes and takes your house away, kicks your ass to the curb.
“Why?” It’s a one-word question, but one Atlanta feels she has to ask. Seems this is coming out of nowhere.
“I’m behind,” is her mother’s answer. Atlanta feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up straight.
“What do you mean, ‘behind?’”
“Behind on payments. By three months.”
“Well, how the hell did that happen?” Atlanta can’t help but raise her voice. A mini-movie of them being locked out of their home and drop-kicked into a drainage ditch starts playing through her head on an endless loop. “I mean, you do know you’re supposed to pay the bills, right? Not let ‘em pile up on the counter like you’re competing in the Poor People Olympics.”
Her mother’s face goes red. “I tried to pay the damn bills, girl. But we also need to eat! And keep the electricity running! And last month the well-pump shit the bed and I had to pay to get that replaced.” By now the woman’s nose is plugged with snot and her morning makeup is really running down her face like the mud streaking down a dirty car door after it crashed through a puddle. “You do like water, dontcha? Showers? Drinking?”
“Yeah but none of that matters if we don’t have a house with a shower, does it? I mean, dang, I thought that would be the priority, Mama. What the hell?”
“The Internet said I wouldn’t be punished until I let it go six months or more. It’s only been three!” Her mother slides back to the sofa. Crosses her arms. “You don’t understand. We’re screwed. That’s all there is to it.”
And then the woman descends into the kind of crying from whence cogent communication cannot return. It’s all hitching sobs and shaking shoulders and murmured words of shame through blubbering spit-slick lips.
Atlanta doesn’t know what to say. Part of her wants to hug her mother, another part of her wants to cuff her upside the head with the heel of her hand.
Instead, she just goes and makes a call.
* * *
Atlanta sits across from the girl with the thousand-yard stare. Neither says much