She refinanced the house.
Sherefinancedthe house.
The old clock ticks loudly in the back room and I stay perfectly still.
If I don’t move, I won’t throw up.
Deep breaths don’t help.
I need answers.
My hands tremble as I pick up the phone.
She answers on the third ring. “Jennifer! Are you back?”
“Mom?” I pull the phone away from my ear when someone cheers too loudly. “Where are you?”
“Hawaii!”
“What?”
She sounds a little drunk and the music in the background makes she think she’s in a bar.
“What are you doing in Hawaii?” A dreadful understanding starts to creep across my skin.
“We deserve a little treat.”
The silence of the house makes more sense. Anne and Jeremy are with her.
“You went to Hawaii without me?”
She huffs, instantly defensive. “You go on all your trips without us.”
“Businesstrips, mom. I go to work, not to party.” I bite my tongue and close my eyes, and cling to the foolishhopeit was just an error from the bank. “How are you paying for the trip?”
“I’m trying to have a good time. I don’t want to talk about money.”
“Mom!”
Huffing again, she says, “Why do you sound upset. I just refinanced the house again. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine. We were almost free and clear.”
“And then we would have had to pay taxes and insurance,” she makes an ugly noise. “Now we don’t have to.”
“Yes, we do, it’s just wrapped up in the mortgage payment.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and remember Coral’s comment about not being able to get her horse ranch because she didn’t have a way to prove her money was actual earnings. “How did you even get the bank to do it?”
“They saw our payment history and they knew we’d be able to pay it back.”
“No, mom. They sawmypayment history. I can’t…”
“Nonsense.” She cuts me off, her words suddenly sharply sober. “You’ve been doing it. You can keep doing it.”
Exhaustion makes me lean back against the wall and I ask a question I don’t really want the answer to. “Besides the trip, what else is the money going to?”
How is she going to spend her seven-hundred thousand dollars? And how much of it is left that I can possibly dump back into that loan?
“Anne had her school bills,” she says, and before I can ask what happened to her scholarships, she continues, “and you know Jeremy has always wanted that car.”
