“There must be something else you can do, Bea. Honey, there’s got to be something better than that.”
“The only other thing I can think of involves sleeping on a park bench and pushing my belongings around in a shopping cart. Look. Opal. People live with less. All over the world people are living with less. I’ll have a roof of sorts over my head. I’ll have curtains. I’ll have my easy chair, and some books. And my cat.”
“And a litter box right in the middle of the whole deal.”
“That can go on the passenger floor and be out of my way.”
“And there’s no bathroom for you. You can’t use a litter box.”
“I can park by a gas station. Or by a public restroom.”
“And how will you get your monthly check?”
“I won’t have to. It’ll go straight into my account every month and all I’ll have to do is bring my debit card for gas and food.”
But a thought struck Bea, quite suddenly. Before the next check landed in her account she’d better stop by the bank and change that compromised PIN. In fact, she might do better to close the account and open a new one, just to be safe. And notify the Social Security Administration of the change. It made her feel vulnerable and ashamed, and less than sharp-minded, that she had just now thought of it. What else was she forgetting?
Oh yes. Get a new debit card for the new account.
“And you’ll spend all your savings in gas,” she heard Opal say, knocking her back into the moment.
“No. No, I won’t. It doesn’t have to be that way at all. I don’t have to keep moving constantly. I could stay in one place for months if the weather holds. I thought about it a long time. I just need one other thing from you and that’s to put a few of my things in your garage. I can only take just so much along. Just what I need to live. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I really need. About what makes a home a home. I don’t care about my couch or my bed. I can sleep in my easy chair. That’s all the furniture I need. Without my easy chair, life wouldn’t be comfortable enough to bear. But with it . . . I sleep in it all the time, when I have acid reflux, or when my sinuses won’t drain. It’s just as comfortable as my bed, if not more so. So long as I can draw the curtains and turn on a little battery-powered light and read a book with my cat on my lap, it won’t be so bad. I’ll be okay.”
“You’ll be homeless,” Opal said.
Bea would have liked to keep that ugly word out of things. But there it was. Sooner or later it was going to be said. By someone. It was inevitable.
“I didn’t say it was a great plan. I said it was a plan.”
“You’ve got till the end of the month, right? Everything’s paid up for now?”
“Yes. For now.”
“Then we have time to think of something better.”
“Sure,” Bea said. “We’ll think of something better.”
But she knew it wasn’t true. If there were a nice, easy solution to homelessness, she thought, a million homeless people would have found it by now.
Chapter Four
The World May Not Owe Me a Living, but It Owes Me $741.12
Three days later, in what should have been a quiet month of transition, Bea was startled out of sleep by a knock on the trailer door.
This almost never happened.
No one came to Bea’s door except Opal once in a blue moon. It was embarrassing to have Opal over, as she lived in such opulence—even though none of the opulence was technically hers. So Bea’s sole friend visited seldom. And no one else visited at all.
Bea couldn’t help feeling, as she struggled into her robe and combed her hair with her fingers, that this was unlikely to be good news. She glanced at the little clock on the stove as she hurried by the nook of the trailer’s kitchen. It was barely seven a.m.
“Who is it at this hour?” she called through the door. “Awfully early to come knocking.”
“It’s Arthur,” Arthur said.
That might not be so bad. Maybe Mrs. Betteson had told him about Lettie Pace’s rudeness and he had come around to hear her side of the thing.
Bea swung the door wide, wincing into the morning light.
“We’ve got a problem,” Arthur said.
“What problem is that?” she asked, trying to sound casual. But her heart took to pounding and her stomach turned to concrete.
“It’s your rent check.”
“What about it?”
“It bounced.”
Bea opened her mouth to say that was silly. There was no reason it should have. Then it all came pouring down on her at once.
She closed her mouth.
She took two steps backward to her easy chair and lowered herself down.
That was the something else she’d been forgetting. Another aspect of the situation her brain could not be trusted to grasp. The day she’d gotten that awful call from the scammer pretending to be the IRS, she had just written all her checks for the month. As she’d deducted them from her checkbook, she had considered them paid. In her mind they were paid. But they were not paid. The utility checks had been sitting in the mailbox when her account was raided, and the rent check had been lying on the floor of the mobile home park office, having only recently been slipped through the mail slot.
So the scammer did not get $740 and change. He got the nice, reassuring total she’d seen in her checkbook when she added in that month’s Social Security. He’d made off with over $1,600. And all of her monthly checks would now bounce.
“Mrs. Kraczinsky? You okay?”
She looked up at Arthur, backlit by morning in her doorway.
It was an additional problem that she hadn’t seen all this coming—that her brain had not made the jump. She knew that now. Anyone with a reasonable mind would know that checks written are not checks cashed. Why, when she’d gone to the bank to close that compromised account and open a new one, they’d even asked her if she had checks outstanding. And she’d said no.
She’d spent the better part of three days fixing her banking problems. Talking the bank into waiving its rules by establishing an account with no opening balance. Changing the direct deposit arrangement with the Social Security Administration to the new account. Getting a new debit card to take on the road. She’d felt such a sense of satisfaction, knowing she’d handled things so well.
Meanwhile all her checks were bouncing.
And the account on which she’d written them had been voluntarily closed.
And she hadn’t told anyone about the scammer, because she was ashamed. And because there was no way to catch him anyway, and everybody knew it. And because she didn’t want their pity. And now it would appear that she had written checks on a zero balance and then closed the account before they could come in.
“Mrs. Kraczinsky?”
“Yes, Arthur. I’m fine. It’s just a mistake. I know what went wrong and I can fix it. I just need a few days. Give me three days, okay?”
Because that’s how long she figured it would take to load up the van and clear out.